Tag Archive for: lead generation

3 Main Types of CRM Leads

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Leads are the lifeblood of a great CRM system. For most CRM systems, a CRM lead is a kind of customer who could already be in your sales pipeline but has not completed their lifecycle yet.

Unfortunately, not all leads are made equal. Focusing on the wrong ones can be detrimental to both your company’s budget and your teams’ time. So what are the types of leads in a CRM system?


3 Main Types of Leads

Information Qualified Lead (IQL) – Cold Lead

In the early stages of interacting with your customers, companies are often given contact information in exchange for freebies, promotional offers, or relevant information. With a stream of nurturing activities from marketing and sales teams, IQLs need to learn more about your company, your offerings, and how it answers to their particular needs.

IQLs can be considered cold leads. More often than not, it’s good to keep tabs and regularly maintain your relationship with them. However, they shouldn’t be a priority for your team’s follow-up strategies.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – Warm Lead

Marketing Qualified Leads are a kind of lead that is likely to convert into sales. While they’re not likely to buy right now, they are likely to respond better to being nurtured. MQLs are also called warm leads. After a combination of time and effort, they can become paying customers.

Different companies will have different ways of qualifying an MQL. It is often a combination of the prospective customers’ positive interactions with your marketing campaigns, their existing history, or how well they fit into your ideal customer persona.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Hot Lead

A Sales Qualified Leads is also what you call a hot lead. The main difference between MQL and SQL is their readiness to commit to purchasing your product or service. After being qualified by marketing, prospective customers are nurtured by sales teams to avail of your product or service.

Through careful vetting, sales qualified leads to feel that their needs are understood. The marketing department’s budgets are also better spent, and the sales teams maximize the effort they are putting in.

Nurturing Every Kind of Lead

The key to a great CRM system is knowing exactly where each lead is in their buyer’s journey. As a rule of thumb, it’s always best to prioritize the hottest leads first before going after the colder ones.

It’s not enough to have a lot of leads. You also have to find good quality leads. With limited time but a mountain of opportunity, sales teams need help to find the best prospective customers at the right stage and the right time.

One way to make sure that each lead is taken care of until they are ready to be closed by sales is by working with Voice to CRM enablement companies such as Hey DAN.

With their data management system, consulting services, and opportunity spotting technology, they can help you nurture each kind of lead at every stage of the sales pipeline.

Inbound versus Outbound

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With the rise of the internet, the way companies reach their ideal customers is changing practically overnight. Before companies can even begin to think about sales, they first need to generate leads.

Why is lead generation important?

Lead generation is useful because it allows companies to segment and prioritizes customers that need their products and services the most. There might be a million possible customers, but not all of them will have the need and capacity to purchase right away.

Sales teams need to know which customers are more likely to convert, so they can focus their efforts on giving them the information they need. Being a salesperson requires juggling multiple tasks such as nurturing relationships, closing deals, and admin work. These are all aside from searching for prospective customers. Lead generation creates the demand for the present and future offers of the business.


What are the two kinds of lead generation?

There are two main types of lead generation – inbound and outbound. Inbound and outbound lead generation are differentiated by who starts the relationship.

When the customer leaves their personal information in exchange for freebies, exclusive sales, or special rates, this is called inbound lead generation. Through campaigns such as SEO, informative blogs, how-to videos, and content marketing, companies built trust with their prospective customers. When customers see your brand throughout their buyer’s journey, they are more likely to trust the products and services that you offer. Content created for inbound lead generation is more generic to the industry and relevant  for extended periods.

On the other hand, outbound lead generation is sharing your company’s products and services towards customers who fit the ideal buyer profile. Unlike with inbound, outbound campaigns take the first step. Through the use of paid campaigns and media such as display advertising, outbound strategies are often more expensive to execute than inbound. The intent of outbound lead generation is more likely towards the latter half of the sales pipeline. Content created for inbound lead generation is more likely to be about specific benefits of the company’s current offers.

Inbound and outbound lead generation have different timelines, targets, and ways of executing. However, they still have the same goal – to find and convert quality customers.

How do you know what strategy is right for your company?

As with many things, there is no clear answer to what kind of strategy is right for everyone. Companies will be in various stages. Each will have different customers at different lifecycle stages, and products that will determine the right way to approach individual customers. However, having a mix of both inbound and outbound marketing throughout the sales pipeline is recommended.

If you’re not sure the best way to go about it, it’s good to work with people who do. Both strategies, particularly outbound, can become expensive very quickly when done the wrong way. Voice to CRM Solutions like Hey DAN can help you to fine-tune and maximize your inbound and outbound lead generation and be able to get accurate data into your sales team’s CRM.

What is Lead Generation

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Lead generation is the process of acquiring leads through marketing to convert them into paying customers. It’s when a prospective customer enters your sales pipeline for the first time and starts the journey towards learning more about each other.

There are many ways that companies start relationships with their customers. Starting with the awareness of your offer and sharing what makes you different, the relationship that upon nurturing well can last a lifetime.

Why do we need to generate leads?

Generating leads is important because it helps companies can better focus their efforts on the right kind of customers. Sales teams have a wide range of roles to fulfill – prospecting customers, nurturing relationships, and converting sales.

Being able to identify who will need their offers, and afford to make that decision will mean a huge difference. From knowing what is a good and bad lead, companies can save thousands of dollars in marketing expenses, sales team hours, and overall team morale.

How do we generate leads?

With the rise of the internet, online and social media has changed the landscape of lead generation. Prospective customers are more educated now than ever. From checking reviews from previous users, reading about your company’s status on industry reports to even reading direct comparisons with your competitors, customers need a lot of information before making a purchase.

A combination of on the ground activations, great content, and online campaigns can generate leads. From compelling blog posts, special events, or webinars to eBooks, once a customer has given a significant amount of time and shown enough interest to give their contact details, they become a lead.

What makes lead generation difficult?

While great leads exist, so do bad ones. Pursuing bad leads may even be worse than having no lead at all. One of the biggest reasons that lead generation is hard because it can be either very expensive or incredibly time-consuming.

For leads to be good, they must have accurate, relevant, and up-to-date data. They also need to be segmented into high and low priority and followed throughout their journey in the sales pipeline.

Improving the lead generation system

Lead generation is a tough business. Making sure the lead generation process is efficient and effective needs more than just a one-off set up process.

It’s a combination of marketing and sales working together to paint a clear picture of each customer. It requires continuous refinement of the buyer’s persona, understanding the customer lifecycle, and refining the nurturing process. All of this can be possible only with the right foundation of CRM data.

Your partner in lead generation

While the journey to generating leads may be difficult, companies don’t have to do it alone. By partnering with sales enablement platforms like Hey DAN, companies can utilize their consulting services to analyze opportunities throughout the sales pipeline.

Hey DAN also does data entry, clean up, and management services, which are essential to making sure that your company gets not just quantity but also quality leads.

 

Lead Generation Challenges and CRM Adoption

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Lead generation is key to the success of businesses across different industries. This core task is not only essential in the field of sales but also in marketing where increase of influence and gaining insights from new markets are often top priorities. Interactions with prospects need to be systematically recorded for ease of predictive assessments. . Such goal can be achieved with the use of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system,for ease of access and entry of information Such system also enables businesses to automate analysis of customer data that get into it. However, it comes with a number of challenges. Let’s go over the more daunting ones and how to overcome them.

Building Up The Courage

Gathering information is tricky — more so if you need to gather it from complete strangers. The good news is these days, it can be accomplished by simply commissioning third-party lead generation services. Some even offer a 100% money-back guarantee or you only pay for every successful lead.. If you wish to do direct engagements, it helps to offer something of value as an exchange for information. Product samples work best. Also, make sure to clearly state how their information will be stored and utilized. Social networking sites are also useful in expanding your reach as you perform this task.   .

Finding Leads

One  option that’s proven to generate the most number of leads is participating in trade shows and conferences. The reason is people in such events are already interested in your industry and most likely hunting for the kind of product or service you offer. As you interact with participants, it helps to have a voice to CRM Solution handy in to quickly  collect data from them. Timely capture of your interactions is essential for complete entry of the details into your system. Another approach is set up booths and installations in malls or other areas with high foot traffic. As mentioned above, pair this up with giveaways or anything of value and you’ll find it a lot easier to draw people in.

Quick Data Entry

When performing lead generation in the field, you want to spend most if not all of your time interacting with people. The more face-to-face contacts you do, the more chances of discovering opportunities. You then have to utilize a credible  voice to CRM solution so you won’t have to worry about the data entry part of the job.It has to be one that captures recorded speech and automatically assigns details into proper fields in your CRM. You don’t want to worry about sorting the data for entry later on — the voice solution has to do it for you.. It  allows you to be more productive and efficient in performing your main function.

Voice to CRM technology has come a long way and is proving to be an invaluable tool for sales and lead generation teams. When looking for a speech recognition solutions, professionals want one that is combined with the power of human intelligence to deal with nuances of speech and differences in pacing. . Hey DAN has a proven track record of success in providing such convenience to their customers.Businesses from varied industries have benefited from their tested voice to CRM system offerings. Their subscription to Hey DAN enabled their success in generating leads.