December 2018
Keep It Hot: Prioritizing and Attracting Warm Leads
Lead generation is the bread and butter of sales, but things can get quite overwhelming when you’re bringing in high volumes of leads. Not all leads are warm, and a cold lead can be a waste of time and money for you and your sales team. So it’s important to not only prioritise those warm leads, but figure out how to attract fewer cold leads.
Whilst you bespoke CRM can offer marketing automation it’s important to develop a marketing strategy to inform that automation. Take your marketing efforts one step further with these tips.
1 – Pre-Qualify Your Leads
The first step in your marketing strategy should be automation. This is a process that can be informed and altered as you gather more data, so casting a wide net to begin with will help you collect that data. Automation will ensure that before your leads even reach the sales team they’re at least a little warm.
A good way to gather data, and gauge interest is to send out data collection forms. Collect information from leads such as where they found your product, what industry they work in, their company and more, on top of the traditional contact information. The more data you receive, the warmer the leads. You can always offer free bonuses to gather more data, such as a product demo or white paper.
2 – Keep the Score
Following you lead pre-qualification, you’ll want to further prioritise those leads. The scoring process can also be automated, based on criteria of your choosing (something else that can be informed as you collect more data).
The usual demographics apply, contact details, age range, industry. Even these simple details can be narrowed down as you do more market research – which business sector is most responsive to your product? Which age range do you generally get a more positive response from? The answers to these questions will help you inform your marketing efforts.
You should also consider engagement when prioritising your leads. Has your lead shown a keen interest in your product, clicked-through on e-mail links, been responsive? Additional priority factors can include whether they’ve requested a product demo or more information such as pricing. All of these factors can help in prioritising your leads, all of which can be automated by your bespoke CRM tool.
3 – Clean Up Your Data
We’ve had this conversation before – bad data makes for bad leads, which ultimately takes up the time of your sales team and costs you money. Cleaning up your data and keeping on top of that is going to be a vital part of your marketing strategy.
You want to regularly check that there are no duplicate entries in your leads, something which your CRM can check automatically for you. You’ll also be wanting to ensure your lead data is complete – name, contact number, e-mail, workplace, source of lead. All of this information can be used to fill in the gaps with a simple search, or automated process. Otherwise, incomplete leads can be lowered in priority, so you can focus on the warm leads.
4 – Track Your Lead Generation Efforts
As with all marketing efforts, you really want to identify what worked in your strategies. As we said earlier, you initially want to cast a wide net to gather data and then use the demographic information to narrow down and only target groups that are most likely to become warm leads.
By tracking your lead generation efforts through detailed reports, another handy automated bespoke CRM feature, you can tailor your marketing strategy and automation to work best for you. Tracking can help you figure out where your leads are coming from and focus your efforts in those areas (whether that’s different social media platforms, Google Ads or even networking events).
A combination of marketing automation and regular tweaking of your marketing strategy based on the data you gather through market research will ensure your sales team are only getting the warmest of leads. With the help of a bespoke CRM tool you can automate the pre-qualification of leads, scoring of leads, data clean up and then build detailed reports to inform your strategy.
Need a hand prioritising your warm leads? Get in touch and request a demo of Lunar CRM or visit our website to see how a bespoke solution could help you and your sales team.