How to Automate Your Lead Gen Activities in the B2B World

Lead generation is the lifeblood of a thriving business, not just allowing you to grow, but also ensuring you can predict revenue going forward. Like many marketing tasks, automating your lead generation will make your operation more efficient and free up skilled personnel to focus on other areas.

In order to do this, you need to employ the right tools and templates, as well as putting effective processes in place. This will result in a lead generation automation strategy that keeps your team productive and your organization moving in the right direction.

Benefits of automated lead generation

Before you start moving towards automated lead generation, you need to understand why it’s such an important step for your business to take. Among the benefits are:

Providing a clearer idea of which prospects to prioritize
Understanding the most appropriate techniques to nurture specific prospects
Enabling your team to better keep track of progress
Creating lead-based campaigns more efficiently
Freeing up time for staff to build relationships with qualified prospects

How to automate your lead generation

There are a number of different ways to automate your lead generation activities. While you can start with one of them, it makes sense to utilize a number of methods to help bring in leads from a variety of channels and ensure your sales team is never short of potential customers to convert.

1. Build lead magnets

Lead magnets are the incentives you offer to prospective customers in return for their contact information. They can come in various forms depending on your industry, but ebooks, checklists and free consultations all work well. Before setting a lead magnet live, be sure it addresses a pain point for potential clients, demonstrates your expertise and is appealing to your audience.

2. Connect landing page data to your CRM

You should be collecting data from the users that arrive on your landing pages with measures like online form and sign-up options. How quickly this data is put to good use will determine the success of your lead management efforts. Automate the process so this data is connected to the CRM to boost efficiency and allow your sales team to take the next step with a lead as soon as possible.

3. Set up notifications for chatbot questions

Chatbots have become incredibly popular in recent years, but their success is based primarily on timing. Setting up notifications linked to your chatbot will allow the sales team to know as soon as a lead is reaching out to connect with your company and can spring into action. Follow-up actions can ensure there’s less opportunity for your lead to go cold before you’ve converted them or moved them onto the next step.

Learn more: How to Train Your Chatbot to Deal With Customer Queries

4. Provide customer data on a central interface

Speaking on the phone with a potential lead has always been a fundamental part of the sales team’s role and, despite advances in technology, that hasn’t changed. Digital innovation can improve its success, however, by offering personnel all the information they need at their fingertips. An automated interface that brings together data from your CRM, information from customer support platforms and details of all previous interactions will provide a seamless experience for your lead.

5. Automate segmenting and targeting

Understanding your audience and providing the right content and forms to different groups of customers is vital for generating leads. Automate your segmentation processes to split potential customers into personas based on factors like traffic source and behavior. This way you’ll be able to offer better personalization and target leads in a way that’s more likely to convert as opposed to a one size fits all approach.

6. Set up a referral program

Referrals are a great way of automating your lead generation and can result in a 25% higher profit margin than other customers. A successful referral program is based on a clear understanding of your existing clients and the reasons why they might endorse your business. Once you’ve nailed that, you need to make them aware of your program and ensure it’s easy to participate in, otherwise they may drop out before completing the process.

To learn more about marketing automation best practices and how to implement it into your strategy, watch our interview with Daria Kravchenko on The Strategic Marketing Show: