What is Lead Automation? - How to Get Started

If you want to give your business a turbocharge, Lead Automation is the answer. Whether you’re a large enterprise or a small startup, lead automation can help you generate more leads and increase your ROI. 

It works by automatically capturing, tracking, and nurturing leads through automated emails, landing pages, website forms, and more. It’s like having an army of virtual sales reps working together to get your business the best, most qualified leads!

Let’s discuss the lead automation process in detail to paint a clear picture. 

What Is Lead Automation?

Lead automation is an automated marketing solution that utilizes AI tools and machine learning to streamline the process of identifying and collecting qualified leads. It refines the traditional lead generation process by relying on data rather than humans to source potential customers, allowing you to focus more energy on the actual selling. Moreover, it shifts from being a reactive daily habit to a predictive system where leads can be gathered and nurtured ahead of time.

Rather than traditional approaches, lead automation uses software to implement tactics for marketing activities, such as:

• Driving leads
• Assessing their value
• Weighing them up
• Assigning them the proper direction, and
• Helping to drive the nurturing process.

Why Is Lead Automation Important?

All businesses strive to make it as easy as can be for potential customers to locate them, and creating a successful marketing funnel is key. Because of this, automating lead generation and related processes can be extremely beneficial for companies. Here are the ways in which it profits you and your business.

1. A Greater Number Of Qualified Leads

Utilizing lead automation for your organization can help to augment the number of qualified leads. Qualified leads are potential customers who meet your ideal customer profile and have taken visible steps toward becoming interested in what you offer. Research revealed that 80% of marketers had seen an uptick in accumulating more leads after using marketing automation software.

2. Automated Pairing Of The Right Leads With The Right Salesperson

Instead of manually combing through hundreds, the lead automation software allows the automated pairing of the right lead with the right salesperson based on the following:

• customer preferences
• past customer interaction
• industry knowledge. 

Research suggests that automated pairing of leads can lead to more efficient allocation and better customer engagement. Automated pairing enables companies to develop effective marketing strategies tailored to particular customer groups or individual profiles, allowing maximum customer satisfaction. This enables businesses to deplete resources most strategically while providing superior service.

3. Increase In the Number Of Conversions

A study reveals that the sensible use of marketing automation software yields positive outcomes. For example, 4 out of 5 users saw an upswing in their leads, and 77% experienced increased conversions. This information underlines the idea that if effective lead generation tactics are employed, they can directly affect conversion rates - making the software an incredibly powerful tool for any business looking to reach a larger audience.

Lead Automation Process

The lead automation process can be divided into four distinct phases. So, here we examine these most popular marketing activities and how they can be automated.

1. Lead Generation

Attracting prospects to your business and prompting them to take action is the basis of lead generation. It starts when visitors find your online materials, like the website, blog articles, or social posts. Usually, a call-to-action button accompanies these pieces, which points to a page where the potential customer's contact details can be filled out.

As outlined by HubSpot, the goal at this moment is to encourage readers to enter their information by providing an appealing offer. By completing this process with accuracy, you fast-track the automation of lead conversion.

There are multiple ways you can automate your lead generation process. Starting with:

A. Website Personalizing Experience

Businesses can automate lead generation by personalizing their website experiences. Some of the use cases to put in the review are:

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B. Social Media Campaigns

With tools like Facebook Lead Ads, you can easily create ads to generate more leads. And with the help of RevenueHero, you can automate your lead capture process; integrating it with either CRMs such as HubSpot, Zoho CRM, or Salesforce® or autoresponders like Aweber, MailChimp, and GetResponse provides a fast and convenient way to nurture your prospects.

C. Cold Emailing

Recent research demonstrates that 28% of consumers favor regular promotional emails over other avenues, and estimates suggest that usage is predicted to climb by another 3% annually. Therefore, it is clear why employing email marketing strategies is beneficial for a company's success, particularly when compared with the usage levels (in pre and mid-covid days of 2019) of 71%. 

2. Lead Qualification

Sellers need to determine which leads have the potential to become customers. Lead qualification is an effective way to do this, as it helps them determine which potential customers could lead to sales.

Marketo defines this process as "determining which potential customers are most likely to make an actual purchase." Through qualification, sellers can eliminate any leads that do not fit the criteria they set for their ideal customer profile.

Furthermore, this will give a seller insight into the position of a particular lead in one's sales funnel, so that appropriate content and messages can be crafted for them accordingly. The following ways can be used to break down the lead qualification automation process:

A. Lead Scoring

Lead scoring involves assigning numbers to leads to determine how likely they are to make a purchase. Essentially, there are 2 major ways to qualify automated leads:

• Lead scoring, and
• Lead grading

In lead scoring, numbers are assigned to leads to indicate their interest in your product. A set of conditions is created, and numbers are assigned to the leads who meet the conditions. Examples of the condition include:

• Demographics
• Contact Information
• Email engagement, and
• Online behavior

For example: Using lead scoring, you can assign a numerical score to each lead. The two methods typically employed are:

• Predictive: With predictive scoring, you evaluate objective data to discern which leads are right for your business.
• Point-based: Point-based lead scoring relies on assigning points to various activities, such as opening an email or engaging with content on social media.

By tallying each lead's points, you can ascertain which ones should receive maximum attention.

B. Lead Grading

Lead grading is an essential tool for identifying prospects well-suited to your target market. Thinking beyond the immediacy of contact, companies have developed systems that rate leads from A to F according to their profiles - incorporating attainable metrics such as location, industry, job title, and company size.

This helps refine the list of possible customers so that only the top contenders remain. It ensures that resources are spent on individuals or organizations most likely to be of value in the long run.

A worthy automation tool for lead scoring and lead grading is RevenueHero. The tool presents the number of leads generated from campaigns and goes a step further by providing lead scores and grades to make identifying high-performing leads easier. Alongside, those with lower scores become uncomplicated to track. With this data at your fingertips, you can set more informed goals and measure the overall success of your promotions.

C. Smart Forms

An innovative way to pre-qualify leads using automation is using smart forms. These forms on your website or landing page can adjust what fields are shown to a prospect according to their prior submission.

This feature is especially useful for B2B companies and can include a prompt such as 'are you an individual or business?' with 'business' prompting for a company name. For example, you can even employ questions about budget to gauge and narrow down potential leads quickly and efficiently. Notifications are sent straight to your sales team so they can keep tabs on incoming prospects while not needing to sift through all entries manually.

3. Lead Distribution

The lead qualification process allocates according to their readiness to engage with products/services. Such leads must be distributed effectively to the appropriate sales rep with the capacity and expertise related to the product. In other words, high-value leads should not be sent to employees new to the organization who may lack the required knowledge and experience.

Lead Distribution Automation Process

By assigning leads to sales reps using lead automation software, businesses can improve response time and ensure that leads get the help they need from the best sales rep. This can help improve conversion rates and overall customer satisfaction.

A. Round Robin Method

The round robin automation method involves sequentially allocating leads to sales reps. For example, if three sales reps exist within the environment, then leads are passed from one rep to the next in a cycle, with repetition occurring once the first rep is again reached. An illustration of how this system is put into practice can be seen in the example provided.

B. Rule-based Lead Routing Method

Rule-based lead routing presents an effective alternative to round-robin lead distribution. It involves assigning rules to define sales reps who receive leads to ensure valuable leads are directed toward those with the necessary knowledge and experience. To ensure these goals are achieved and that leads are assigned efficiently, it is important to prioritize having the right sales rep handle promising prospects while factoring availability into the equation.

C. Lead distribution automation software

RevenueHero is an effective CRM software that helps businesses to distribute their leads. Sources such as blog landing pages, calls, live chats, and emails can feed into the lead distribution system, where it will be assigned to specific sales reps according to a predefined rule-based routing strategy. This automation helps streamline workflows and ensures leads are managed efficiently.

3. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing automation can be valuable for engaging with prospects, enabling businesses to respond quickly to questions and provide personalized content. Such automated systems help ensure that prospects receive timely information and that the correct information is sent for their needs at any point in the customer journey.

However, it's important to understand that half of the qualified leads are not ready to be purchased. Automation allows you to rapidly, accurately, and consistently engage with leads over different channels so they can access the material they need until they are ready to purchase.

Below are ways automation makes lead nurturing very effective.

A. Email list segmentation

Segmenting a list into various groups enables you to provide more pertinent emails to each. Utilizing lead nurturing automation software can segment your list based on factors like:

• Demographics
• Website behavior, and
• Their stage in the sales cycle.

Taking part in email list segmentation provides major advantages; MailChimp reported that segmented campaigns received 14.37% more open rates and 64.78% higher clicks than their non-segmented counterparts. Additionally, those who deploy automated emails generally have much greater success when targeting customer interests and the journey stage.

B. Automate all your email marketing campaigns

Maximizing your email marketing campaigns means automating them to ensure they are delivered promptly and consistently. This can include:

• Welcome emails
• Thank you emails
• Onboarding messaging
• Newsletters and updates
• Exclusive offers and discounts
• Notification emails and more.

Lead Automation Best Practices

Lead conversion is integral to any business, particularly B2B. With the right tools and efforts, businesses can unlock high-quality lead conversions cheaply. To do this, means using the lead automation best practices available to support growth and success. 

Here’s how to go about it: 

1. Collect The Right Data

The acquisition of accurate information about potential customers is essential to the success of any business embarking on a sales mission. It enables an informed decision-making process. In addition, companies can increase efficiency by channeling their leads to the correct sales teams and territories by collecting and analyzing data such as lead scoring. This targeted approach streamlines the customer journey, leading to better conversion and reduced costs for sales organizations.

2. Set Up Lead Scoring

Lead scoring has quickly become a staple among marketing and sales professionals who strive to understand the likelihood that their leads will convert.

It's quite simple:

Each lead is assigned a score ((1-100, A+ - F, etc.). 

This representation indicates the individual's buying intention; the higher their score, the more likely they'll convert into customers.

Though each organization will use different information to assign scores to its leads, gathering key data points will prove invaluable for ensuring accurate scoring throughout your sales funnel.

3. Automate Internal Processes (Not Just Campaigns)

Automating internal processes for handling leads can optimize your sales funnel and give you an edge over competitors. Quicker and more precise lead assignment minimizes:

• response time,
• removes manual tasks for guesswork, and
• ensures that leads are never overlooked.

Automation makes the process faster and easier so your team can allocate more time to respond to leads or stay ahead with other projects.

Best Lead Automation Tools

Marketers can choose from various lead automation tools available, but the best three are listed below. 

1. RevenueHero

RevenueHero is a one-stop business solution to streamline its lead and meeting distribution processes. With RevenueHero's powerful features, users can instantly schedule meetings, create custom meeting distribution plans, generate conversion reports and account matching capabilities, analyze routing data with detailed distribution reports, personalize templates to fit their needs, and gain a full view of their meetings with a comprehensive dashboard. This makes RevenueHero the ultimate choice for any business seeking an efficient way to manage its customer relations and increase sales.

Key Features That Make RevenueHero The Best Lead Automation Tool

• Providing instant scheduling
• Custom meeting distribution
• Personalized templates
• Lead and meeting distribution
• Conversion reports
• Routing analysis
• Account matching
• distribution reports, and
• A meeting dashboard

Pricing

• Growth Plan - $99/m (upto 200 meetings)
• Pro Plan - $199/m (upto 500 meetings)
• Enterprise Plan - $499/m (unlimited meetings)

Integrations

• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• Google Calendar
• Zoom
• Google Meet
• Slack
• Intercom

2. Popupsmart

Attracting website visitors and convincing them to join your email list is key to building a collection of quality subscribers. That's where Popupsmart comes in handy. It's a no-code solution that makes it easy to display professional-looking popups with lead capture forms and send out email notifications or autoresponders with just a few simple clicks.

Key Features:

• Drag-and-drop popup builder
• No coding required
• Ready-to-use templates and design elements
• Real-time A/B testing capabilities
• Optimized performance on any device
• Integration with major autosporonders and CRMs

3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular tool for email marketing, but it also offers lead automation capabilities. With its extensive features, such as customizable templates, data segmentation, and analytics, you can easily create targeted campaigns to capture and nurture leads through the sales funnel. It also helps you keep track of your contacts' engagement with automated drip campaigns, so you can stay in touch with them and move them closer to making a sale.

Key Features:

• Analytics & Reporting
• Automated Drip Campaigns
• Integration with major CRMs
• Segmented Targeting & Personalization
• Data Security & Privacy Protection
• Multiple Email Campaigns
• Design Templates and Editor
• Signup Forms & Landing Pages
• Payment Processing Integration

Winding Up!

If you're looking for a comprehensive lead automation tool that can help you manage your customer relations, increase sales, and track the progress of each lead toward closure, RevenueHero is a perfect choice. Developed with powerful features, it enables you to schedule meetings easily, create custom meeting distribution plans, generate conversion reports and account matching capabilities, analyze routing data with detailed distribution reports, personalize templates to fit their needs, and gain a full view of their activities with a comprehensive dashboard. 

Get started today, Schedule a Demo, and streamline your lead and meeting distribution processes.