What are the best ways to improve sales lead management for a business? Our guide outlines how to integrate marketing and sales for better lead management.
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Marketing and sales will have to work more closely together in the future in order to continue to be successful in winning customers. But how is that supposed to work? We outline the advantages of efficient and modern lead management and how you can use it profitably.
Marketing automation has become an indispensable tool for lead generation. The collaboration between sales and marketing is hereby redefined. The global roll-out is currently the focus of his work.
So much for the theory. In practice, some business owners feel a great deal of skepticism in sales. Marketing automation should create leads? The sales department should process these and give feedback? Is marketing taking the helm here?
How to improve sales lead management
Times will change and the work of the sales force will also be different in the future. Marketing and sales need to mesh more closely to improve sales lead management. There is no way around close cooperation. The days when marketing was only seen as a brochure producer or supplier of advertising materials are over.
With content marketing and marketing automation, companies can implement new lead management that not only makes marketing activities measurable, but also delivers concrete sales results.
Generation Y decision-makers tick differently. Here you don’t want to be called by the field staff. Most of the decision making is done online and before the man / woman picks up the phone.
Lead management in marketing and sales
But what does lead management actually mean? Roughly speaking, it is a summary of all measures to turn prospective customers into customers.
There are different phases in the digital world: Within the lead generation , we gain new contacts. This can be done through email marketing, Google AdWords, social media posts, SEO but also through traditional measures such as trade fairs or telephone marketing.
One tries to develop these contacts further by lead nurturing and to gain as much information about them as possible. This phase mainly works with content marketing. Good content enables us to gain information about the lead. If the leads have reached a certain quality, they will be passed on to sales as marketing qualified leads (MQL) ( lead routing ), which sales will then hopefully turn into a customer.
The lead is evaluated on the basis of lead scoring , which is jointly defined by sales and marketing, in which the activities of the contacts are evaluated and within which the personal information required by the lead is determined.
This lead scoring and generally the complete monitoring of lead development and the handling of most marketing campaigns take place with the help of marketing automation software.
The last point is web controlling . Here, the campaigns, but also the quality of the MQLs are evaluated and adjustments made if necessary.
So what does lead management do?
- It analyzes the online behavior of our users on all channels
- It helps us to identify relevant content for our target group
- It helps us to recognize the sales cycle in which the contact is within the customer journey
- It generates and qualifies better contacts for acquiring new customers and expanding existing customers
- It helps us to optimize marketing campaigns and make them measurable
What do you need to improve sales lead management?
- You have to know your target group (buyer persona / customer development)
- Well-coordinated processes between marketing and sales – who is responsible for what?
- A goal-oriented strategy as you want to turn a customer into just one email address.
- Content, content, content – user-relevant with the right added value
- Marketing automation software for measuring and evaluating all data and for handling marketing campaigns
Conclusion
Modern lead management provides them with the right penetration for marketing and sales. If you don’t know your customers in detail, you will fall by the wayside in the future. Modern lead management provides the key to success.
