CRM Software: The Ultimate Tool in Lead Generation

Lead generation used to be a completely manual process. Now, it is reaping the benefits of automation and digital technologies to treat and rank leads. Find out why CRM software is the best solution for generating leads the easy way.

To increase your revenue, you need to move leads down the sales funnel and convince them to act and make a purchase. But make this happen, you need to generate more leads to fuel your conversion engine in the first place. And if you’re anything like the 64% of marketers who claim that lead generation is their top challenge, you must be looking for strategies to do things better and more effectively.

Yet nonetheless, you power through. You want to attract and convert prospects that have shown interest in your product and service and get results. That’s why you try inbound marketing campaigns, you perfect your social media posts, and publish regularly on your blog. Yet very few visitors turn into leads and take the desired action — book a demo, a free trial, or a sales call.

So, what’s the missing link? A CRM software solution that can help you keep track of your visitor activity and provide all the insights you need to understand the lead’s buying journey. And considering that only 4% of website visitors are ready to make a purchase, you need all the tools you can get to turn things around. 

A Strategic Approach to Lead Generation

According to Microsoft Research, users spend around 10 seconds on a webpage. If you want to generate more leads, you need to understand why people are leaving and how you can improve the experience in order to keep them engaged. And it all starts with having a lead generation strategy. Here are four stages you can consider as you get started with your strategy:

The 'Capture' stage

You need to capture a prospect’s information early on in the sales cycle so that you have more opportunities to close the deal. And since prospects are easily distracted, you need to act fast. Once you have captured their information, the real work begins — you need to inform and educate them about your offering before they can be convinced to act. Here is how you can get started on the capture stage:

• Site chat
• Email capture forms
• Website visitor identification

Image credit: Pexels.

The ‘Educate’ Stage

Oftentimes, visitors that end up on your website are actually one-time visitors that may never return. But since your goal is to turn visitors into leads, you can do so by creating lead magnets in order to pique the interest of your audience and make sure they will hear from you again.

Lead magnets provide valuable information for your prospects in return for their contact information. This will grant you permission to follow up with them and also educate them on your product offering. Some of the most popular lead magnets include:

Training videos | Webinars | Guides | White Papers

The ‘Conversion’ Stage

At this stage, you need to create landing pages that are separate from your website solely for conversion purposes. These are normally used for a single marketing campaign that relies on advertisements or other marketing tactics. Through landing pages, you can capture leads but also warm up potential customers to your business.

To make them effective, landing pages have to be centered around a call-to-action. This means that you have to be concise and to-the-point. No need to add information about your business and your offering, just stay focused on your campaign goals and the action you want the visitors to perform.

The ‘Scoring’ Stage

Once you have your leads from different sources, it’s time to prioritize them based on their level of engagement and determine if they are ready to buy. At this stage, you can also identify potential areas of interest or goals in your prospects.

To score them, you can assign points for each type of engagement, from lead magnet downloads to filling out an opt-in form. This will help you save time and resources when reaching out to your prospects. Remember that the higher the score, the warmer they are to conversion. 

If you don’t have a scoring strategy yet, you are not alone. Other 79% of B2B marketers don’t have one either. But working with a strategy in mind will ensure that you invest your resources in the prospects that are more likely to convert. Better prospects, more sales. It’s a win-win situation!

Image credit: Unsplash.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Lead Generation

Now that we explored the stages that go into a solid lead generation strategy, it’s important to uncover the tools that will support this strategy. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is one of those tools. Although it is primarily used by the sales team to keep track of leads and deals, marketing professionals can also reap the benefits of a CRM tool and track the progress of their marketing efforts.

Even if your marketing department uses a different tool for lead generation, all the leads have to end up in the CRM system so that your salespeople can contact the prospects and determine if they are ready to buy.

Image credit: Unsplash.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Lead Generation

If you’re looking for a CRM platform that will respond to your business needs, look no further than Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft applications, such as Office and SharePoint, and thus it provides a consistent experience for users. 

Moreover, the Dynamics interface is easy to use and can be integrated with Microsoft Excel. And with Microsoft Dynamics, users get a 99.9% uptime, guaranteed under the service-level agreement (SLA). 

For the Marketing function, you can collect data for your lead generation efforts through the following functionalities:

• Create contacts manually
• Import a contact list from a local file
• Aggregate customer opt-ins from a landing page or event registration
• Sync with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

The Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Lead Generation

1. Clean Up Contact List with the Contact Matching Functionality

Nobody likes sifting through lists of duplicated leads or contacts. With the matching functionality in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can avoid this as the tool will only create a new record if no corresponding match is found. This also helps you associate new leads with existing contacts in your database and identify returning visitors.  

You can also diversify your matching strategies for different purposes and establish default ones for new marketing forms. As a result, you will have accurate and clean contact lists that your sales team can rely on when reaching out to prospective customers.

2. Simplify Lead Nurturing and Scoring

Not all leads are qualified, or sales-ready. And this is where the nurturing campaign helps, as you can pique the interest of your contacts with additional offers and information. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can use an automated scoring system to plan out your segments or customer journeys based on previous interactions. To determine the score, you can leverage demographic and firmographic details, as well as actions taken by the contact.

Once the leads have reached the sales-ready threshold, the CRM will let the salespeople know that they can reach out and move it down the sales funnel.

3. Support Business Processes

Microsoft Dynamics CRM lets you personalize your lead generation efforts according to internal business processes. You can start from a standard lead process provided by the CRM, or customize the workflow according to your needs. 

In all cases, you can create a timeline in order to assess the progress of your lead generation process. At each stage of the timeline, you have a menu of fields that add more context to the process and a button that records the status of each stage — complete or in progress.

Image credit: Unsplash.

Lead Generation Made Simple

Are you a Microsoft Partner looking to boost your lead generation efforts? We got you covered as we have an extensive database of leads looking for your services. You can choose from Plus or Premium leads, and you only have to pay for the leads you use. 

Get in touch and let us take your lead generation strategy to the next level. As a result, moving leads down the sales funnel will be an effortless feat.