3 Reasons to Know the Ins & Outs of Your Leads

The most important part about getting a lead is making sure it can become an opportunity. But, how can you increase the quality and quantity of leads? Using a marketing automation solution and CRM helps you to know your leads and grow your business. Here are three reasons to follow.

1. Know who your customer is

The moment you know who your leads are, where they’re located, what industry they’re in, and what they’re interested in, you can make sure that lead passed from marketing to sales fit your ideal customer profile.

Before Terryberry started using a marketing automation solution, their business was still growing, so like many small businesses that are strapped for resources, they used a homegrown lead capture and a tracking tool with basic CRM integration.

Their marketing department would create newsletters, white papers, and ebooks, and was running quickly to keep up with business demands. Marketing efforts were creating a high volume of leads, where prospects would fill out forms to access the content. But Terryberry’s salespeople had to prioritize their leads themselves and manually track their prospect’s historic marketing interactions. As time went on, their team knew that they would eventually need to invest in a solution that would improve their marketing and sales alignment.

“Every time someone came through the system, downloaded a white paper, or submitted a contact form, we would create a new record,” Director of Marketing Jenny Watkins said. “For our salespeople, trying to sort through all that was difficult. They didn’t have much context.”

After Terryberry invested in Pardot — a marketing automation solution where their salespeople could more easily visualize how their leads were progressing through prospect journeys, they could understand an entire path of the lead rather than an individual interaction.

“Our salespeople didn’t have to rely on their memory anymore, it was all recorded in the tool,” Watkins said.

2. Find the right leads

Heard of lead grading? It allows you to literally “grade” your lead (A-F) so you can find out who’s the most qualified based on the characteristics of a lead’s profile, such as job title, industry, or company size. When used with lead scoring — a numerical value that lets you know how interested your leads are in your product/service based on activity(s) they take on your site (for example, downloading a brochure, or signing up for a trial) — you’ll become an expert in finding the most qualified leads to become opportunities.

For instance, PeaksLead helps businesses fuel growth by making it easy for them to identify and connect with their future customers. We offer high-quality B2B contact data that help you target the right leads. (And our built-in Lead Manager tool makes it easy to stay organized.)

When Terryberry was facing the many challenges of scaling a small business, it was tough for them to build a lead scoring and grading system in addition to their homegrown CRM. All marketing leads would go to their sales team, and their salespeople were responsible for sorting out which leads were worth pursuing.

As their company matured and started using a marketing automation solution, Terryberry was able to prioritize leads with a sophisticated grading system. Terryberry now sends half as many leads—but the right leads to the team.

“At first, half as many leads might seem scary, but the good news is that those are quality leads,” Watkins said.

3. Nurture more leads and track them

Are your salespeople spending time nurturing rather than selling? Terryberry’s sales team was in the same boat. Like many small sales teams who have to wear marketing hats as well, they also had to manually nurture leads, even when they weren’t sure it would turn into an opportunity.

“The hard part was that the salesperson didn’t know which lead to a chase,” Scott VanderLeek, National Sales Manager said.

With a systematic process within their marketing automation solution and continuous nurturing with CRM, Terryberry’s marketing team is able to nurture in a standardized way to help its sales counterpart. Now, they are able to nurture more leads and track each lead’s status.

Don’t play a guessing game with your leads or by making “gut-feeling” decisions. With the right data, you’ll be able to align sales and marketing and understand the ins and outs of your leads in no time.

PeaksLead can help you find customers, win their business, and keep them happy so you can grow your business faster than ever. Learn more about our Lead generation solutions or follow us on Twitter @peakslead

 

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Source: Salesforce.com

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