Engaged leads are the golden ticket for sales and marketing–leading to quicker time-to-close and increased revenue. Yet, it takes 42 hours on average for teams to follow up with leads. With 30-50% of sales going to the vendor who responds first, you could be losing out on potential customers if you continue at this pace. 

Often, the culprit of slow follow-up is inefficient, manual processes and disparate systems. To expedite follow up, cut costs, and reduce the risk of human error, you need to integrate your marketing and sales tools. 

Discover how integration solves common lead management challenges and enables automation throughout the entire lead lifecycle.

Overcoming lead management challenges

As the number of applications required to do business grows, so does the risk of data silos and lost leads. This is an all too common problem for sales and marketing teams. 

To transfer data between systems, teams must manually rekey it, resulting in errors and customer resource management (CRM) systems filled with duplicate, incomplete, or incorrect data. This, combined with an inability to associate activities with leads, can greatly inhibit your success.

Sales reps are tasked with researching and adding in missing lead information themselves–which typically takes up 20% of their time. Ultimately, these inefficiencies slow down processes and cause you to lose out to other, more responsive and attentive vendors. 

Achieving success at every stage

To streamline the lead lifecycle management process, start by connecting core systems like your lead sources, marketing automation platform (MAP), CRM, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

By integrating these tools, you’ll get the flexibility you need to control and scale your lead management process. Whether it’s syncing the correct contact information or getting notified as soon as a hot lead clicks on your ad, integration can make the difference between a deal and a drop out. 

Here’s a few other benefits you could see by integrating your tech stack:

• Reduced costs
• Improved lead visibility
• Better business decision making
• Increased innovation
• Better team collaboration and alignment

Automating your lead management processes

Once you’ve integrated your systems, you can build workflows to automate your lead management processes including:

Lead capture/enrichment

Before you can pass off your leads to sales, you first have to capture them from a variety of external sources such as website forms, landing pages, and social media platforms. This process must happen as quickly as possible, so you can get the leads to your sales teams. 

Occasionally, these leads will be incomplete and need to be enriched before you add them to a single source of truth like your CRM. 

By integrating your systems, you can ensure this process is smooth and automated. This allows you to:

• Create new contacts in your MAP from synced event data and chatbot leads
• Input job title, company, and company size data into your CRM from your lead enrichment tool 
• Update lead profiles in your CRM with email marketing campaign responses and enrichment data

Explore the nuances of automating your lead capture process with this blog, “Lead lifecycle management: How to automate lead capture.”

Lead syncing

Up-to-date, accurate lead data is vital regardless of the system it resides in. When a record changes in your source system, you should update the record in all of your other systems.

You can achieve this in real-time or time-based batches with integration. By doing so, you can:

• Update your MAP when contact data changes in your CRM and vice versa
• Update your CRM when customer data changes in your ERP
• Sync contacts in your CRM with prospects in your sales engagement solution

Dive deeper into how to automate lead syncing with this blog, “Optimizing lead lifecycle management: Automate lead syncing.”

Lead engagement

Your hottest leads should be routed immediately for follow up, so you can remain top of mind for prospects. But not all leads are ready to be passed off immediately. Segmentation is key to ensuring all of your leads are moving through the funnel whether it’s to sales or to nurture sequences. 

Utilize integration to automatically segment your leads. Here’s how:

• Send your reps an email when a new lead is added to your CRM that meets certain criteria
• Mark high intent in your lead alert messages with data from your intent data platform 
• Add lower priority leads from your MAP to nurture campaigns in your sales engagement solution

Get an in-depth look at automating lead engagement with this blog, “How to automate lead engagement for optimal revenue growth.”

Building your streamlined lead funnel

To successfully create a lead management process that is resilient to changes in the market, you should utilize a platform that is scalable and agile. With an advanced iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), like Celigo, you can integrate your applications and automate your processes all on a single platform. 

Celigo’s iPaaS uses AI-powered automation to help you connect your entire sales and marketing tech stack including lead sources, MAPs, CRMs, outbound apps, and databases. Plus, our user-friendly interface allows non-technical users to build, manage, and monitor integrations. This enables sales and marketing employees to drive automation–while ensuring security and governance with IT oversight.

Reach out to our integration experts to learn how Celigo’s iPaaS can help you automate your lead management processes.