B2B marketers spend an extraordinary amount of time, energy and resources creating demand for their products and services. But many fail at getting these precious leads to the right team member for timely follow up. In order to extract the full value of every lead, you need a best-in-class lead management strategy. Join our session to learn the recipe to successfully manage your leads by leveraging the right data, technology, and processes across the revenue engine.
Watch to discover:
1. How a solid data management strategy is the foundation for best-in-class lead management
2. The best systems and technology for lead management
3. Best practices from companies using Pardot and LeanData to power their lead management strategy
Successful Lead Management for Marketing and Sales
Today we’re talking about the recipe for successful lead management. I’ve seen a number of companies walk through this process to achieve amazing results for them in marketing and sales functions.
First, we’ll talk about the business cost of poor lead management and some of the telltale signs that you can look for in your organization to understand whether these problems are perpetuating the different functions of folks in your organization today. Second, we’ll establish that framework. What is an actionable set of next steps for you to take home to your organizations, to see improvements, both in marketing and sales, in terms of revenue growth? Finally, we’ll talk about some customer highlights of LeanData and the technology stacks they use to actually execute on these lead management frameworks.
Business Cost of Poor Lead Management
Business cost revolves around data, the tenant of marketing and sales organizations. Data manifests as leads, contacts, accounts in the marketing automation system and the CRM that ultimately, as a marketer, I need to send tailored content to, or as a seller, I need to give quality interactions to generate engagement, interest and business for my company.
Many of the problems that we see are caused by not establishing a lead management framework, whether you’re on the marketing side and experiencing suboptimal conversions because some of your contact data is inaccurate, or over on the sales side, where you might see some of the problems manifest more along the lines of productivity. Ultimately, this is costing companies revenue. Sellers are experiencing a suboptimal seller experience and calling up people who might not necessarily want to buy your products or be high fit, and marketers are marketing in different ways that might not be effective.
Here are some telltale signs that your data and lead management are bringing you down. In marketing, you might see inaccurate segmentation of campaigns, like sending a prospect campaign to an existing customer, treating them as if they’ve never heard of you before. In sales, due to lack of productivity, you are missing quotas and not achieving speed-to-lead as optimally as possible. When productivity is hampered, pipeline and revenue will suffer as a result.
How Can You Improve Your Lead Management Process?
Step one is data unification. We need to unify lead contact person and company data and ensure that we have the right data to market and sell to. Second, we’ll execute our programs against that data, using marketing automations such as Pardot to segment the customer base, send appropriate content, and generate prospects and engagement that will then route in step three. Once a prospect engages, you want a seller to follow up on that hard-earned marketing work to deliver a quality interaction as fast as possible. Finally, it’s important to analyze and iterate with data insights to make sure your lead management is an ongoing iterative feedback loop and not operating in a silo.
Whether it’s marketing or sales, everyone can gather around the core tenants of unifying data, executing effective programs against that data, orchestrating and routing that data to the appropriate person in the B2B revenue organization, and then accessing and iterating with insights to make sure that you’re constantly improving as a business across the different revenue teams.
Data is never going to be perfect when you’re collecting it from humans. That’s where fuzzy lead-to-account matching technology comes into play, such as LeadData’s fuzzy matching algorithm. It’s very important to account for the human variations of prospect data by linking people together to accounts in the CRM, and to then market to people and companies with high confidence. Once we do so, you’re going to see drastic improvements in the productivity of both your marketing organizations as well as your sales functions.
We use marketing automation in Pardot to actually segment the prospect and customer base separately so that we can now tailor our programs based on the specific information of the person. Once you generate those prospect engagements, the next step is delivering those to the Salesforce CRM. The next step of the process will be routing that data to actually orchestrate the prospect engagements to a seller.
How Can LeanData Help You Improve Your Lead Management Process?
As many of you might experience, go-to-market strategies are ever-changing and growing in complexity, and there’s a number of ways marketing and selling organizations go-to-market that make routing data to the right seller very difficult.
That’s where technology, such as the routing interface from LeanData is really going to help you shine amidst that complexity. Leads come into the system, prospect engagements, hot inbound hand-raisers, and you need to find the right seller based on your sales strategy, your go-to-market strategy, to follow-up with that prospect engagement. LeanData created a visual interface to do so where you can orchestrate data in a number of intelligent ways. Solutions like LeanData engagement and engagement technology makes sure that marketing understands who is engaging with marketing content and that sales understands which marketing engagements to follow-up withs on pipeline and revenue, as well, to ensure optimal performance over time.
What are the systems in place to actually enact some of these strategies? As many of you know, marketing automation and Salesforce CRM are some of the common technologies in the landscape today. We can pair those technologies with a solution like LeanData to ensure the lead management framework is robust enough to handle our business as we scale, as we go to market in more complex ways.You can sync over your hard earned marketing efforts and allow LeanData to pick up the baton and execute automation on your lead management framework and account for those different variations of go-to-market. Pardot and LeanData together will help you enact that full lead management journey, which mimics the customer journey. Pardot will help you generate prospect engagement before you hand it off to LeanData in Salesforce where the sellers actually work.
To learn more about LeanData, watch the video recording.
