Companies often avoid the somewhat complex procedures and ignore many of the vital steps, leading to poor outcomes. A killer process to sustain growth, stability and profitability requires paying attention to each such step and that must start right from the early planning stages. It will require you dedicated resources and a budget but you’ll – in every way - perform better than the competition.
Attracting and handling leads, apparently, seems a simple task yet there are few definitive answers when you ask someone what they are doing about it. Mostly, you’ll find there are no worthwhile processes involved to generate and manage leads between first conversion and sales closing; even if there’s a process existing, it's commonly an eerie mix of manual sorting with inefficient communications. You risk losing leads that way; besides, you also lose out on the time between a bottom-funnel request and a sales-response. But you can always improve on the SEO Lead Generation and management procedures.
• Locking-in to a proper alignment
This involves making your teams (product development, marketing, sales and customer service) come up with an SLA (Service Level Agreement). It will commit them as well as the management to the business as much as you have. The Agreement should focus on certain definitions and criteria on the different types of leads (marketing-qualified, sales-qualified, sales-accepted) and opportunities (customer-, up-sell, retention etc.). The overall lead-management procedure should include KPIs, benchmarks and goals for the sales, Lead Generation Strategies and customer service teams on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis.
Also reporting! This is vital! For every team, there must be present dashboards and in-depth reports and also a plan regarding the way they will be circulated among the stakeholders.
• Technological integration of automated marketing and customer relation management:
Sales and marketing technology are important aspects to consider if you are to put your entire lead generation process to work. The alignment process required your teams to agree on using certain dedicated tools without fail every day to capture and manage leads and customers. For best solutions, make sure they are easy to use and incorporate every single aspect of inbound marketing, namely: Website content management system, Content creation and promotion (through blogs and social media); lead conversion (both landing pages and forms bring the calls-to-action) and lead nurturing (personalized content and drip campaigns). For marketing automation, you may consider email marketing and list segmentation; lead-scoring and lead-management workflows are also a part of it.
However, for CRM integration, you got to ensure that it’s seamless and bi-directional; the transfer of lead data must be both ways and it should be the same for the KPIs and other communications while for enterprise application integration, consider customer service apps along with the e-commerce and business intelligence systems.
Now we arrive to the final part – the actual, quality lead generation process! This can be captured through high quality content and targeting them towards:
a. Inbound marketing: It involves everything about blogging, including guest blogging and blogger outreach; syndication and social media engagements (updates); on-page SEO of premium content (info-graphics, eBooks, videos and webinars); calls-to-action and landing pages.
b. Lead generation on demand: Paid searches i.e. ppc; social media, banner and native ads; email marketing, direct mails, print-media ads, tradeshows and speaking engagements; personal networking – all come under this.
c. Gathering lead intelligence is next. Marketing and sales must work in sync to establish key lead segmentation and scoring criteria and once you create a comprehensive buyer list from the information obtained through landing pages and forms. A progressive profiling approach works the best and keeps conversion rates high. Business data sites (LinkedIn etc.) help to cross-reference leads and develop the profiles further.
d. Setting-up marketing automation workflows: It helps to categorize the leads and segment them into lists. Use the criteria for inbound marketing and nurture them through communications with relevant, updated content and personalized emails. You may also run targeted campaigns with these within a certain industry or market segment.
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