Improving Sales & Marketing Performance with Lead Management Systems
Julie Daniel, SVP Marketing & Ecommerce, Brown Jordan Inc
Julie Daniel, SVP Marketing & Ecommerce, Brown Jordan Inc
Successful sales and marketing have always been dependent upon effective lead management and this has never been truer than in today’s multi-channel digital world. Also known as prospect management or customer acquisition management, lead management simply refers to the tracking and managing of sales leads. But it is rarely simple and is often quite complex, especially for larger companies with multiple divisions, product lines, customer profiles, salespersons, and marketing programs to manage.
The most innovative and successful firms today, including both B2B and B2C marketers, use lead management systems to manage their sales funnels, reduce expenses, grow revenues, and improve ROI. Companies that excel at lead management and nurturing processes generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at 33 percent lower costs than businesses without such processes. Even many smaller businesses, for whom every lead is more critical, find powerful efficiency and business benefits in utilizing lead management systems.
Top lead management software solutions include such names as Salesforce, Pardot, Marketo, Act-On, Keap (Infusionsoft), and Hubspot. While such platforms vary in their features, functionality and strong suits, they all provide a combination of customer relationship management (CRM) capability that tracks interactions with both existing and new customers, along with pipeline management, and marketing automation, including email marketing. This convenient combination of CRM, pipeline management and marketing automation is what distinguishes CRM-only solutions from genuine lead management systems.
At Brown Jordan Inc., a 77-year-old global leader in the design, manufacturing and marketing of premium outdoor and indoor furniture for the residential, hospitality, and other commercial markets, we use Hubspot as our primary lead management system. Hubspot enables us to integrate marketing, sales and CRM efficiently and effectively. Due to the nature of our business serving the Trade, Commercial and Residential market segments and managing a significant portfolio of brands and collections, we must be diligent in properly segmenting our marketing and lead funnels, and workflows so that the right customers are receiving the right messages, at the right times, and being directed to the right salespeople for follow-up.
It is important to note that we do not rely on Hubspot exclusively for all of our sales and marketing. We also utilize tools in the Google Marketing Platform like Google Analytics and Search Ads 360 to run our PPC campaigns. SA360 allows us to streamline workflows and manage and track digital campaigns across a single platform, enabling cross-channel buying, reporting and attribution. We also lean on a digital marketing agency to help us improve SEO for our websites, increase organic traffic and enhance overall user experience.
But at some point, most customers, whether a product of inbound or outbound marketing efforts is integrated into our CRM, segmented, scored, and carefully nourished from that point forward to provide them with the optimal personalized journey.
Our goal is to delight them so that they continue to buy again and spread awareness of our brand. Along the way, we can track and manage our marketing and sales efforts. This includes the effectiveness of our marketing channel selections, messaging, customer behaviour and engagement, spending, revenue, and ultimately ROI.
In addition to segmenting our customers into Trade, Commercial and Residential categories, we also consider what stage of the sales funnel they are in (awareness, consideration, conversion, follow-up care and maintenance, repeat buyers/loyalty programming, etc.). This enables our team to automate content delivery in a frictionless manner, with relevant messaging.
Based on our customers’ behaviours, we can implement a scoring system that helps us identify and prioritize the highest-quality leads so that our sales team can focus their time and efforts on nurturing them. Our scoring system thus helps us with better segmentation targeting and delivering more “sales-ready” leads.
Our Goal Is To Delight Them So That They Continue To Buy Again And Spread Awareness Of Our Brand. Along The Way, We Can Track And Manage Our Marketing And Sales Efforts
Important lead management features that we use and which the best lead management system incorporates, include:
• Contact Management & History
• Workflows Set-up
• Define Form Fields
• Attribution Modeling
• Lead Scoring
• Customer/List Segmentation
• Integrated Email Marketing
• Content Creation
• Automated Scheduling
• Quote/Catalog Requests Management
• Task Management
• Sales Stage Tracking (Inquiry/Lead/Closed)
• Real-time Tracking Dashboards
• Analytics
• Billing/Invoicing
• Revenue & ROI
There are other capabilities within our lead management system such as landing page creation, although, at Brown Jordan, we like to create these utilizing different website software. Our platform and most others like it have also robust analytics capabilities with customizable dashboards to track and monitor critical KPIs, and other important data.
We track such lead management data as:
• New Contacts by Source
• New and Returning Contacts by Sessions
• Trade Account Submissions
• Top Forms
• Commercial, Residential & Trade Quote Requests
• Sample Requests
• Campaigns by Contacts Created
• Email Engagement (Open Rates, CTRs)
• Landing Page Views & Form Submissions
• Paths
While lead management systems like Hubspot and others are such powerful tools for improving the efficiency of workflows and processes and eliminating manual work, it is important to recognize that managing the systems and things like email, websites, content marketing, analytics, and other elements still requires the talents of smart and capable professional digital marketers.
Since their inception, lead management systems, like other web and digital technologies have become increasingly more intuitive, reliable and robust, but their effectiveness still depends on humans who know how to maximize their capabilities. At Brown Jordan, our marketing success has always been related to enjoying the best of both these worlds.
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