Businesses need to rethink lead management. Here's how technology can help you.

The opinions expressed by entrepreneurs contributors are their own.

A good prospecting strategy should allow your revenue operations teams to meet potential customers where they are while providing them with the tools and resources to encourage them to buy. However, the buying and selling landscape has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. and teams have moved from a guiding role to something more like a concierge, as buyer journeys have become increasingly self-sufficient. To manage prospects in this new role, teams must be able to anticipate buyer needs and organize personalized interactions. The right solutions can help you:

Qualify better with lead scoring

Timing is a crucial part of lead management. The right message must be delivered at the right time to be effective. But in today's nonlinear buyer journey, timing and messaging have become moving targets as potential buyers move back and forth from search to engagement and back again. Tools like lead scoring can take the guesswork out of qualifying leads.

Lead scoring software allows revenue operations to assign points to buyer behaviors. Top-of-funnel activities have the lowest values ​​and bottom-of-funnel activities have the highest. The higher a prospect's score, the further along they are in their buying journey. Scores can be categorized into different phases of the buyer's journey which are then correlated to specific awareness activities. With today's non-linear buyer's journey, organizations must use a lead-scoring program that subtracts points and adds them to ensure accuracy.

In addition to tracking lead positions in the sales pipeline, implementing lead scoring can also improve collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Both departments should discuss the sales funnel extensively to agree on the terms and clearly define the behaviors and stages of the buyer's journey. These discussions can lead to a better understanding of the other's point of view.

Related: Tips and Tools to Better Manage Lead Flow and Convert Sales

Continue engagement and avoid lost opportunities with automation

Most shoppers have extended their time to purchase since the pandemic, so companies have extended promotional campaigns in response. Marketing and sales automation software is ideal for keeping prospects engaged while reducing missed opportunities and optimizing marketing workloads.

The software allows employees to set up personalized campaigns that automatically trigger actions when specified conditions are met. can create complex sequences that involve different triggers like attending an event or submitting a form and assign corresponding actions like an email, text or notification for direct outreach. You can even embed efforts into sequences using decision nodes that will perform different actions when a prospect meets specific criteria.

Automation can be an extremely useful tool for retraining leads who aren't ready to sell. For example, let's say sales gets a prospect interested in buying, but they can't buy until later in the year. Instead of sales flagging the lead for further follow-up and having no contact for months, an automation sequence can be set up to send flagged leads back to a nurturing cycle until it's time to sales to come back. During this time, the prospect receives relevant content and information to keep your brand top of mind until they can make a purchase.

Related: Why Implementing Automation Is Key to Accelerating Sales Today

Personalize marketing efforts by enriching data...