If you increase automation in Marketing, you can generate more sales leads, make more sales and earn more money. You can achieve scale. In this post I look at Marketing Automation, and at one specific example of automation known as Lead Management.
Lead Management and sales funnel
Marketing units in business-to-business companies spend a lot of their time trying to identify and obtain the contact details of people who might be interested in their products or services – this is ‘lead generation’. They pass these contacts to Sales who pursue them and try to convert them to customers.
But the way Marketing units generate and handover contacts is often badly automated and inefficient, and these contacts are often not processed effectively. Business-to-business Marketing Automation is a broad term referring to the use of technology to improve the generation of demand for products and services and the subsequent management of that demand to increase sales and revenue. Lead Management refers to the specific processes around generating leads and managing them as effectively as possible to drive sales. (Other areas in Marketing Automation include Campaign Management, Marketing Resource Management and Customer Analytics).
But how can you automate marketing? Isn’t it all golf umbrellas, brochures, t-shirts, and tradeshows? Well, there is a creative and branding element, but a lot of business-to-business marketing can be made more structured. For example, to generate a contact, you can use traditional methods like tradeshows and telemarketing, but now we also have contacts coming in over company web-sites, through Google pay-per-click ads and from email marketing campaigns. Read More
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