Automating New Lead – Lead generation is a huge part of the marketing and sales process, and yet, based on lead response time studies, as many as 71% of these leads are wasted. The biggest reason these leads “spoil” is because they are not acted upon immediately. Even 30 minutes without contact can mean the leads are less likely to be useful. However, using marketing automation, it is possible to make your sales and marketing as useful and responsive as possible. Immediate responses are essential to the success of your sales efforts.
Automating Lead Response
A New Lead Arrives: How to respond immediately
Two things should be automatic when a new lead is generated. First, an 
automatic email should be sent to welcome and greet the new lead; they should immediately feel seen, heard, and supported by your company. Second, a sales rep should immediately be given the lead for a quick follow-up call. Having a central queue of leads is a great way to call hours or days later, when the lead has stopped being viable. Giving the lead to a specific sales rep ensures that they know to call immediately, with as much priority as possible. The system should be able to track when the call was made and send an alert to the sales team management if the call isn’t made within the first hour. A modern sales team is only as their immediate response time.
The Second Day: How to follow-up effectively
To grow the relationship, an automatic email should go to the lead the second day asking for a phone appointment. This places the ball into the lead’s court, per se, because their willingness to schedule a phone call makes them part of the process, growing their investment of time and energy in your company and thus your product. At the same time, the sales rep should receive a reminder to make this call, all through the automatic alerts of the CRM. Given that sales reps are managing leads at different places in the funnel at all times, this reminder helps them to build relationships and make first contacts simultaneously.
The Third Day: How to clinch the deal
By this point, your new lead is expecting to hear from you, so an automatic email showing your competitive advantage over other competing companies will be a valuable set of information for them. They may be trying to convince their company to switch suppliers, and this information puts them in a great position to do so. Whether they respond or not, sales should be following up and making sure all this information makes sense to them with a phone call. The CRM automatic reminder can help them to ask the personalized questions that will prompt them to submit their order.
The Fourth Day and Beyond: Demonstrate Value
At this point, the lead is fully established, but daily contact is a great way to shepherd them into becoming loyal long-time customers. Sending automatic emails with demo videos and other valuable material gives the sales representatives things to talk about when they receive call reminders and reach out. These elements allow the sales representatives to get to the crucial question of “What is still holding you back?,” at which point many customers are finally ready to proceed to checkout.
These many steps are much easier with automation, but they all proceed from the essential first contact for lead response: if someone is juggling a variety of leads in different levels of development, the willingness to drop everything and instantly call a brand-new lead is key. Without a coordinated, up-to-date CRM, it can be very difficult to truly achieve marketing automation.