Leads, Leads, Leads! As a salesperson your marketing team never seems to give you enough quality leads, and as a marketer your sales team is never doing enough with the leads you give them. Sales and marketing are completely symbiotic relationships as both rely on each other to reach their goals. It would seem fitting that a CRM (customer relationship management) system would be the platform that helps unite both teams to communicate more effectively. The goal of implementing a CRM isn’t just to help your sales team become more effective with outbound calls and communications, but to also help marketers and sales teams improve the quality of leads. With the right CRM in place, you can better optimize your lead generation, quickly move leads through the funnel, and get a complete analysis of your customer acquisition cost.
How Can a CRM Improve Lead Quality?
Automated Lead Scoring
One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that most of the time when the sales department says they don’t have enough qualified leads it’s because of the lack of information. A simple way to improve lead quality is by implementing lead scoring. This helps you apply scores to leads based on their interest in your products or services. Leads can earn points based off of how many web pages they visited, did they request a demo, did they purchase a product, did they watch a video, did they send in a question, etc. By implementing automated lead scoring, sales teams will know exactly which leads should be prioritized based on actual interest, and reduce the amount of time wasted cold-calling the less qualified leads.
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Reduced Data Redundancy
Your CRM can improve lead quality not just through scoring leads, but by the simple fact that a CRM will consolidate all of your records, and reduce duplicate entries. Whenever you’re dealing with thousands or millions of records, you can expect to run into some that are missing data or that require updating. A CRM enables you to easily track which records are missing data, and even identify duplicate records, or automatically update based on certain criteria.
Lead Nurturing
While your sales team is making their outbound calls, you’ll naturally see them toss aside some leads that weren’t ready to buy, or not “high quality”. However, with your CRM you can actually take these “Not Ready” leads and build campaigns around them to nurture them. What is nurturing? Nurturing is the act of providing “not ready” or colder leads with information and data to keep your brand top of mind, while also guiding them back into the pipeline for when they’re ready to make a purchase. Using your CRM, you can identify these colder prospects, create segments, and build campaigns around the content they’ve shown interest in, their demographic information, job titles, industry and more to increase the performance of your messaging and the quality of those pre-existing leads.
Complete View of Customer and Prospect Journey
This is where your sales and marketing team put the whole picture together. By evaluating CRM reports, campaign performance, and purchasing behavior, you can dramatically improve the quality of your leads. You can learn where your marketing dollars are best spent, which campaigns resonate the most, which help convert cold leads into warm ones, and start building a story for your prospects to follow until they turn into paying customers.
Improving Lead Quality with a CRM Starts with a CRM
Businesses tend to purchase a CRM solution with sales processes in mind. Improving lead quality is the most common issue after you’ve implemented CRM to optimize your sales processes. Why? Because your sales team is able to make more calls, send more emails, and easily manage the entire contact history. This frees up hours of time per week for sales teams, which makes it easier to run through more and more contacts. But this doesn’t mean that you should wait on using your CRM to improve lead quality. Implementing lead scoring, lead hurting and analyzing campaign sources and performance is an absolute must for any growing company, and it should all start the second you implement your CRM. If you’re looking to test out how a CRM can improve your sales and lead quality, then check out the free CRM trial below.
