Improving Lead Generation Efforts Using Marketing Automation Tools
It is important for B2B marketers to focus their lead generation efforts on sales-ready or marketing-qualified leads
. However, there is another important group that should not be ignored which is not-yet-sales-ready leads.Although most of the not-yet-sales ready leads are captured, they leak out of the Sales funnel during lead nurturing, because of which sales teams lose out on prospects that may have become leads in the long run. Also, sometimes no action is taken on such leads because there are not enough marketing campaigns targeted by Marketing teams, leading to Marketing and Sales disconnect as well.
It is important that continual communication programs are specifically designed for the this segment so that they are constantly kept informed, irrespective of whether they are responding or not. The following analytics can be drawn from lead generation efforts so that the not-yet-ready leads can also be addressed.
Some of the metrics that could be generated are:
Number of Indentified Leads vs. Total Visited
Number of Qualified Leads vs. Total Identified Leads
Number of Sale-ready vs. Number of Qualified Leads
Cost of campaign per lead
Success rate of Lead Conversion to Customer
Marketing automation can play a vital role in providing such metrics to marketers. Marketers can now capture qualified leads enriched with information that helps sales generate faster sales and develop a more targeted response to prospects browsing the website. Leads generated using marketing automation tools have a significantly higher conversion success rate than cold contacts, because the prospect is pre-qualified as a sales opportunity before they even receive the lead.
Some of the ways in which these tools help are:
Automation tools not only help to identify anonymous website visitors it helps to intelligently analyze their interests and intent to enable targeted sales response as well.
They help in identification of where prospects are in the buying process through sophisticated behavior analysis.
They empower Marketing and Sales teams with enriched prospect information so that they can focus on lead nurturing programs, close deals faster, shorten the sales cycle, and significantly improve overall marketing and sales productivity.
So, by using these tools, B2B marketers can convert even the not-yet-ready-sales leads into prospective customers effortlessly.
by: brianwarren