B2B Inbound Marketing – Lead Management
Inbound Marketing is ultimately about attracting and nurturing new warm leads, so sales always have fresh prospects to work with. Imagine a salesperson opens the CRM system and hits refresh – and voilà, four new warm leads appear. Ready to be called. Just like in the animation below.
The new leads are transferred from the Marketing Automation system to the CRM – in this case, Salesforce – once the lead score has become high enough.
High Lead Score = Warm Lead
A lead score is a measure of how much a person has engaged with your messages and content. You set up a number of criteria for what should generate points – and how high the score needs to be.
For example, signing up via a contact form could give 1 point, clicking an email another 1 point, clicking a banner 1 point, visiting a specific webpage 1 point, signing up for and watching a webinar all the way through might give 2 points, and requesting a price or an online demo 3 points.
You can choose to set an expiration period for the score, so the lead score decreases if too much time passes between actions – but on the other hand, a high lead score will then indicate a lot of activity within a short period of time.
Lead Nurturing
For a lead score to make sense – and if you want to deliver warm leads to the sales team – you need to build a lead nurturing program. After a lead has converted, for example by clicking one of your LinkedIn Lead Ads, they should enter an automated email flow designed to build awareness, nurture, educate, and measure interest.
This could, for example, be an autoresponder (sending an immediate reply, such as a link to the e-book the lead converted to receive), a welcome email followed by a case study, an invitation to a webinar, and finally an offer of a product demo. Very simple. And fully automated.
If your lead clicks on many of your emails – and participates in the webinar – the lead score increases, because that indicates strong interest and may even be a warm lead that’s currently in the market for what you’re selling.
And then it’s time for the sales team to take over.
Integration between Marketing Automation and CRM
For the Lead Management process to be effective, it needs to be automated. Your nurturing program should run in a Marketing Automation system that sends emails in a flow based on time, clicks, and possibly other types of behavior.
When a lead reaches the desired score, the data should automatically be sent to the CRM system, so the warm lead appears and the salesperson can follow up.
In other words, it’s a fully automated process that continuously feeds the sales process and pipeline with fresh, warmed-up leads.
Inbound Marketing campaigns
The entire Lead Management process naturally starts with a conversion. And if sales is to experience a steady stream of warm leads they can work with, you naturally need even more prospects entering the other end of the program.
That’s where Inbound Marketing comes in.
Inbound Marketing consists of campaigns that attract (inbound) potential leads, typically by offering high-quality content that inspires, educates, or entertains. To access the content, the prospect must convert by providing their contact details and preferably agreeing to further touchpoints through your nurturing program and advertising.
A typical Inbound Marketing campaign might look like this:
An animated banner offering an interesting e-book is shown to the target audience – and when they click, they’re sent to a landing page where they can download the e-book by filling out a form. And then the whole program kicks off. After some time, the warm lead may then end up in the CRM system, ready to be followed up by sales.
