Automated Lead Management: What Is It and Why Should You Set it Up?

It's no secret that nurtured leads significantly increase sales opportunities. At the same time, in a recent study, 77% of respondents admitted that maintaining their lead generation programs was one of their top challenges.

So, could the solution lie in automation?

This article provides a comprehensive look at automated lead generation for decision-makers looking to invest in lead management software that will help them reach their marketing and sales goals.

What Is Lead Management? What Does Automation Involve?

Lead management involves tracking interactions and managing the progression of prospective customers along the sales funnel. It can also be called contact management.

The lead management process consists of several stages:

• Lead generation. The first step in customer acquisition when a business creates consumer interest in its product. You can do it through social media posts, consumer outreach, and different types of advertisements, traditional and digital.
• Customer inquiry and capture. Potential leads request more information concerning your products. Your team must be ready to convince them that it will meet their needs.
• Lead scoring. Differentiating between qualified and unqualified leads will help you determine which method to use to convert a potential customer. You can categorise and filter the lead database to direct your sales representatives to prioritise the more valuable leads.
• Lead nurturing. This process includes all the follow-ups marketers do to ensure the lead moves through the sales funnel. Most businesses will send emails, make calls, or carry out drip-marketing campaigns to encourage consumers to convert.

Which Parts of Lead Management Can You Automate?

Uploading Leads

Around 60% of sales professionals spend most of their time on manual data entry. In addition to human error, this approach takes time away from lead conversion. Automating lead contact uploads ensures there is enough data to do follow-ups in the future without losing valuable time.

Lead Segmentation Processes

Qualifying and scoring leads take up too much time when done manually. An automated filtering process can help marketers score leads faster and increase productivity.

Lead-to-Account Matching

Automation helps ensure quick and easy identification of leads with existing accounts to avoid duplicating effort.

How Does Automated Lead Management Work?

Automated lead management systems enable you to introduce speed and accuracy into the mentioned processes. Automated leads management platforms will enhance data quality, integrate your marketing and CRM apps, and reduce manual labour in critical processes.

4 Reasons to Consider Automating Your Lead Management Process

Efficient Lead Capturing

Businesses come in contact with tons of leads every day. That requires hundreds of hours of manual lead list uploads per month. Automation helps you capture as many leads as possible while avoiding costly errors.

Swift and Accurate Lead Scoring

Thanks to automation, sales lead management software helps you quickly narrow the search to high-quality leads. Out of many leads marketers amass, only a portion are likely to buy your products. Spotting the leads that require less effort to lead down the sales funnel will help improve your conversion rate.

You also avoid a clogged-up sales funnel, duplicated efforts, and overlooking leads that could be ready to buy your product.

Effective Lead Nurturing

Sales lead management software plays a crucial role in nurturing leads. You can automate targeted email campaigns, follow-ups, and other communications.

Smoother Cooperation Between Teams

Data sharing becomes smoother when software captures what happens with your leads automatically. You can provide access to statistics to multiple teams, making their collaboration more efficient.

"Automaly have really understood our needs as a business and delivered quality advice, support, and software training at every step to help support our ambitious growth goals."

• Thomas MacKenzie, CEO, RankedRight

Automated Lead Management With Pipedrive CRM

Lead management can be challenging without the right tools. We recommend the best CRM for lead management for savvy business leaders: Pipedrive.

What Pipedrive Allows You To Do

• Import lead list. Extract an existing contact database from a spreadsheet and integrate contact storage applications with the bulk importing feature.
• Assign labels. Organise your lead database with colour-coded labels to identify where they are in the sales pipeline.
• Deal with rotting notifications. Pipedrive automatically alerts you when a deal remains stagnant so you can follow up on leads immediately.
• Add web forms. Gather information from leads and directly record it into your contact database, eliminating the risk of errors or duplicates.
• Implement chats. Leverage Pipedrive's chatbot and live chat features for your website to handle customer inquiries with preprogrammed replies.
• Collect smart contact data. Import valuable information leads share online to personalise offers and boost conversions.
• Apply custom filters/grouping. Focus on leads that share specific criteria and share filters with your sales team.
• Track contact timeline. Get a detailed overview of interactions with each lead on the Pipedrive dashboard.
• Use lead tracking. Track every visitor on your website to cast a wider net for quality leads.

Available Pipedrive Add-ons and Integrations

Most marketers will quickly realise how Pipedrive helps them save time on multiple repetitive and mundane lead generation and contact management tasks.

In addition to the platform features mentioned above, Pipedrive has productivity-enhancing add-ons. The LeadBooster add-on is specifically designed to reduce the burden of lead generation. The Smart Contact Data feature compresses data collection tasks into a one-click action.

Pipedrive also allows integrations with critical applications for lead generation, marketing automation, data management, customer support, and more. The integrations include Leadfeeder, Zapier, Asana, and hundreds of other services.

Check out 8 Pipedrive Integrations For Sales Automation

How to Automate Lead Management in Pipedrive CRM

Pipedrive sales management and good lead management software can do wonders for your sales lifecycle. Introducing automation to help tackle common problems marketers face is quite simple.

You can automate the following areas by integrating lead management tools:

• Assigning team members to new contacts
• Qualifying out leads according to specific criteria
• Lead handover from marketing to sales
• Managing lead engagement to generate deals for new opportunities

Lead Management Automation Example

A SaaS company invests in lead management software to reduce the time spent on non-revenue generating tasks and improve the quality of leads sent to sales representatives.

It revamps the workflow to assign leads to marketing or sales teams automatically:

• If a lead already has an account, it is sent directly to the sales team.
• False leads (fake names, emails, phone numbers) don't move to the next stage of lead nurturing.
• Lead scoring based on actions leads take on the website automatically moves them up the sales funnel, reducing response time from the sales team.
• Lead routing and referrals to key decision-makers are available on each lead's profile to ensure the right action is taken.

The result of leveraging sales lead management software is time savings, reduced workload for the marketing team, and higher quality leads for the sales team - improving conversion rates and sales.

Automaly for Pipedrive CRM Consulting

If you have never automated lead management, you need a consulting partner. The process is not as easy as it might seem and has many pitfalls.

Automaly makes a huge difference in the Pipedrive sales management experience. As certified CRM experts and Automation & AI specialists, we help businesses craft the best workflow for their teams to automate lead management. Our sales lead management automation expertise is the main ingredient in evaluating our client's needs. We recommend the most effective Pipedrive features and integrations for each unique business case.

Request a free consultation to learn more about how we work.

Conclusion

The benefits of lead management systems are comprehensive, as they increase productivity for sales and marketing teams. Yet, automation in lead management software is critical for every business that wants growth.

Get in touch with our team to automate Pipedrive sales management correctly and meet your business goals.