Should I Consider Automated Lead Generation for my Business?

If you are feeling the pressure to generate a greater volume of
relevant sales leads and achieve more valuable, in-depth knowledge about
your prospects with less time and money, don’t worry because so are
most sales leaders and marketers. Luckily, new technology has been
developed to combat this issue – automated lead generation
software. This tool has the capacity to produce a greater number of
quality sales leads and convert them into customers without sales people
having to do the tedious research and work themselves. 78% of
successful marketers claim that this automation technology is the number
one reason for their increase in revenue (Source: The Lenskold Group,
2013). So if you are looking to maximise your results from lead
generation and lead nurturing programs, an automated system is one of
the most advanced and efficient tools you can choose.


You would be surprised how under-utilized this software is among B2B
companies right now. This is most likely because sales/marketing
strategies and tools are constantly changing and upgrading in the
current digital world. Businesses will slowly realise that automated
lead generation is where we are headed. The fact is – companies that are
outgrowing their competitors are using lead automation software. The
question you should be asking yourself is ‘why is are my sales teams
doing all this tedious, time-consuming manual work when there are
automated tools to do this for them?’


Here, you will learn what automated lead generation is, how it works,
and what benefits you will see when implemented into your business.

What is Automated Lead Generation?

Automated lead generation refers to the software that has been
developed to automate sales and marketing actions like prospect
identification to save marketers and sellers a lot of time and energy,
which allows them to focus their efforts on other selling tasks. Just as
in marketing where they need to automate repetitive tasks such as
social media engagement, sending emails and other website actions,
automated lead generation does the same for sales related activities.
This technology time consuming tasks a lot simpler. Ideally, customer
automation is software that allows companies to identify, score and
nurture prospects while also providing assets like email addresses,
telephone numbers and social media profiles. This has the effect of
speeding up customer engagement and generates new revenue for
businesses, and creates a significant return on investment.





The 21^st century saw the emergence of the information age.
This new economy has replaced the old outdated lead generation
techniques which continues to be widely used today.


Those generating sales leads without an automation system will have to manually:

• Find relevant new leads with contact information
• Segment these sales leads according to interest and needs
• Prioritise and nurture these leads
• Qualify leads
• Make a report to measure success and sales conversion rate

A sales automation tool eliminates much of the manual hassle of these
tasks and will help you achieve results in an easy and efficient
manner. Known automation tools and services can be provided by
Connectors Marketplace, Socedo, and Unomy, to name only a few.
Businesses that do not adapt to the changes and capabilities of the
information age will be left behind.


How does it work?

Finding and Engaging with Social Prospects

A sales person can spend the bulk of their time (over 67%) and energy
simply trying to find relevant sales leads and interact with them.
Manually sifting through social networking sites is a rough job and
requires patient and consistent monitoring over a long period of time.
Lead automation software allows you to adjust custom criteria for
qualifying social prospects and begins engaging them with follow-up
actions.


As an example, you might be looking to find your target Twitter
prospects based on some business information and start conversing with
them. Twitter prospects are analysed according to their profile summary
and daily activities. It then conjures up a list of relevant leads based
on your custom profile type, such as construction workers, IT
professionals, etc. If you want to be more specific, you can choose to
further narrow your search by adding certain things to your search. This
can include trigger words in personal profiles or in tweets.


Thus, what you get is a pool of relevant and qualified Twitter
prospects in your sales pipeline based on your own search criteria, that
too at almost no effort. Such tool acts as a completely automated and
intelligent lead generation machine saving a considerable amount of man
hours.


Perhaps you are a company who wants to make a good first impression
with prospective clients. An automated B2B prospecting service allows
you to research professionals and companies and learn more in-depth
information about them easily and effectively. Such platforms give
marketers and sellers a greater volume of information about the company
overall, such as revenue rates, competitors, investments and employees.
This gives you a slight upper-hand when it comes to meeting with
prospects and making a good impression.


Unlike other lead generation services, Connectors marketplace
combines automation technology with human data scientists to produce
even richer data research for each business they work with. Data
collection professionals complement and enhance the data that was
efficiently automated by finding more in-depth information like recent
news about a company or a prospect’s business email.





Nurturing your Prospects


As soon as you know exactly who your social prospects are, you must
now prioritise and nurture these people. Except that you don’t have to
do this entirely manually either, you can customise a highly developed
auto-response mechanism. A tool can create a customizable workflow of
standard operations that you want to run for an approved prospect. The
process is simple. Simple, but essential. I would even claim that lead
nurturing is the pin that holds your entire integrated lead generation
strategy in place. You help the tool know your selected list of Twitter
prospects on an incremental basis and the tool will do the routine jobs
on behalf of you. Growing competition and tighter budgets means that
today’s marketers and sellers are expected to make the most out of every
single lead they achieve.


Look at this stage as continually ‘warming up’ your potential
buyers/customers over a time period of months, even years. You don’t
need them to be ready to purchase straight away, but it’s advantageous
to have them in your pipeline until they feel ready. This strategy is
designed to warm up sales prospects who:

• Have bought from you before, but are not necessarily ‘active’ customers now
• Have showed some level of interest or curiosity – but are not yet ready to purchase
• You spoke to previously during your list building calls
• Left their personal details through your site, but again, are not yet ready to purchase

Lead nurturing makes such a difference to sales outcomes that it can
make the difference between having a bad sales year and an amazing one.
During this time, you simply want to collect useful information that you
can use within your lead nurturing system. Did you know that a business
can roughly lose between 40% and 80% of prospects as they progress
through the pipeline because companies did optimise each stage of the
selling process? (Yankee Group Study). That is why consistent engagement
and social selling over a lengthy period of time is an extremely
important step in the selling process.


For example, many of these systems automate certain small social
selling activities like favouring tweets, following them up soon after
or messaging them personally for the follow back. Have an end goal in
sight for these types of operations. Perhaps your aim is to bring people
back to your website. Maybe you want to engage with your sales
executives.


Keeping Track of Prospect Activity and Conversions


You not only need to find new prospects but also view prospect
engagement report real-time. These social networking tools for analysis
help you to track, benchmark and optimize social media performance with
time. With the advanced functionalities of an automation tool, you can
add critical business insights to custom prospect generation criteria
and your engagement with social leads.


For example, automation systems allow you to track the number of
Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook prospects that have been followed up on
and how many have been missed because of lack of action.


With this useful tool you can create a lifetime prospect criteria report which records:

• The different trigger words you selected for filtering sales leads.
  This includes location keywords, conversational keywords and personal
  profile keywords
• The number of leads that match your keyword criteria
• The amount of prospects that have been qualified and followed up on
• How many leads made you a LinkedIn connection and followed you back on Twitter.

This report aids you in pin-pointing what selling strategies work and
don’t work for your company. Thus, allowing you to make improvements.

Summary of Automation Lead Generation Benefits

Companies that upgraded their lead generation strategy by investing
in automated lead generation software claim that the biggest benefits
are:

• Allowing marketers to focus on other tasks while the automated system carries out repetitive tasks for them
• Generating more valuable and qualified leads
• Creates a better buying experience for your customers
• Better management and nurturing of prospects
• Improved email marketing
• Reduces the chance of mistakes
• Multichannel marketing

Have you changed your mind about automated lead generation?
Studies are proving that marketing automation will be the future of the
sales process. The better targeted your approach with your clients, the
better your results will be. And while it might not be widespread in
companies now, automation software for sales prospecting and social
selling will certainly catch on as more and more businesses prosper with
it in the ever growing information era.



Should I Consider Automated Lead Generation for my Business?