Before we talk about conversion rates, it is important to understand the definition of a Lead. When Marketing and Sales work together to create a tightly integrated process, two kinds of lead emerge – Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Accepted Leads.

With shrinking marketing budgets you need processes to create more qualified opportunities without creating a burden on an already over-worked marketing staff.

Marketing automation can eliminate manual processes, automate demand generation and lead management, prioritize and qualify ‘sales-ready’ leads.

First step is for marketing and sales teams to collaborate to implement a sophisticated lead scoring methodology for various internal sales teams such as new sales and incremental sales to existing clients. Each requires a different lead scoring system. This will help move more leads through the demand generation process.

This results in more high quality leads that are readily accepted by sales teams.

Marketing automation significantly increases sales-ready leads and sales opportunities with the same budget.

Because of a significant reduction in manual processes that marketing automation enables, marketing team can focus on more strategic and creative initiatives including social media engagement campaigns that can be fairly time consuming.

Going from Sales Accepted leads to Sales qualified leads

Traditional CRM systems (including email automation systems) do not provide a viable way to rejuvenate a revenue cycle. You can run drip email campaigns manually, which can be time consuming, inefficient and not scalable.

Using marketing automation systems for email marketing and integrated lead nurturing campaigns help establish and maintain a trusted relationship between both existing and prospective customers.

Automated lead scoring mechanisms trigger qualified leads that are routed to sales teams for priority attention.

In another blog I will talk about converting sales qualified leads to customers.