Steps to a High-Converting Lead Capture Strategy

Lead capture strategy is where you point your prospects in the right direction so as to get more information on what they are looking for. This is often referred to as your sales funnel.

You can measure most of the web activities carried out by your website visitors such as opting in, requesting info, signing up for newsletters or making product purchases, using web analytics.

Your lead management system will always come into play when an interested prospect wants to get more information.

Getting Started On Your Lead Capture Strategy

It is essential for B2B marketers to capture prospect information in order to drive sales and measure return on investment.

It is not enough to just add an email subscription form to your website; you have to consistently engage your prospects, collect vital data and use the data to nurture leads throughout the sales cycle which will require a well thought out lead capture strategy and a cross-functional team.

You can use the following steps to get started on your CRM lead capture strategy:

Lead Capture Strategy #1: Determine Roles and Responsibilities

It is essential to ensure that you come up with a cross-functional team that will represent all stages of the sales cycle.

You should make sure that you agree on the roles and responsibilities so as to maximize your team’s efficiency and making sure everyone is on the same page.

Identify who needs to make contact with the prospects and at what frequency. This will help to eliminate errors which sometimes include not enough contact or way too much contact.

Ensure that you document results so as to create accountability for all involved parties.

Lead Capture Strategy #2: Define Lead Stages

It is important to work with your team to define all types of leads in your funnel. Make sure that each of your team members has a clear understanding of the different lead attributes so as to ensure effective communication within our organization.

Lead - this is a contact that engaged with your business in any way viewing an add impression, visiting your website etc.

Market qualified lead (MQL) - this is a contact that has engaged with your company/business and is interested in learning more about your company’s services or products.

This type of contact may have downloaded a gated asset for example a link to blog, attended a webinar or even let you scan a trade show badge.

Sales qualified lead (SQL) - this type of lead is further down in the sales funnel. This type of lead has been nurtured by the marketing team and is actually ready to be turned into a sales account.

At this point of the funnel the lead has already been vetted by the salesperson and has qualified to be a good prospect.

Lead Capture Strategy #3: Evaluate Technology Options

As technological evolution continues; the number of options available to you for capturing prospects data also increases.

It is important that you identify your business needs before you decide on which form of technology you want to use. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What data do you intend to collect?

• How do you plan on using this data?

When you develop a need list it will help you to determine which solution best suits your business.

Lead Capture Strategy #4: Leverage Lead Scoring

You can opt to leverage the tools from your marketing automation software so as to score leads and also determine the interest levels of your prospects.

You can assign points to each engagement that a contact has with your brand so as to quantify their interactions with your business.

The total number of points that are allocated for each interaction will help you as the marketer to identify who are the potential buyers.

Lead Capture Strategy #5: Create a Lead Nurturing Process

It is important for you as a marketer to leverage nurturing tactics so as to move your prospects further in the buying process.

This will enable you to be able to send triggered emails to your prospects based on their previous user actions.

When you deliver the right content at the opportune time in the buying cycle will help convert your prospects into customers.

It is important that you come up with an effective lead capture strategy and ensure that you keep evolving it as needed. This will accelerate your business and ensure your sales funnel remains full.

Steps For Effective Lead Capture Strategy

The following steps can help you increase your pipeline, make sure that on the right leads for your business and also track what is working and what isn’t working.

Align Sales and Marketing

There are a lot of resources that go into developing leads and thus you should make sure that you utilize those efforts by ensuring that marketing and sales work together so that no lead is overlooked or dropped.

Most companies usually use a three-step process to process leads. These steps are marketing nurture the leads, inside sales team qualifies the leads and converts them into opportunities and finally then sales work the opportunities.

Other businesses use just two steps which are: the marketing team converts the leads into sales opportunities when they meet agreed-upon criteria and then the sales team works the opportunity.

• Ensure your sales process is mapped

• Define the hand-off criteria between marketing and sales clearly

In this step you should clearly define when a marketing lead is passed inside sales and then determine what point the sales lead should be converted into an opportunity, an account and even a contact.

Define Success Metrics Up Front

You can measure the success for both marketing and sales by defining your metrics upfront and ensure that you capture all the important information as your leads move through the funnel.

Capture More Leads

With more leads comes more potential business. You can capture the leads automatically through social media or through your website, import them from these platforms or manually enter them into your Salesforce CRM app.

Keep Your Data Clean

It is a common mistake where you may find a lead has been entered twice in the Salesforce CRM by both the manual and automatic process.

This necessitates the frequent use of the find duplicates button in your app so as to find and resolve the duplicate leads. It is important that you have very accurate data when it comes to lead capturing.

Work Leads Efficiency

Once you have many leads it is important to prioritize them in terms of their quality so as to ensure that sales reps deal with those leads that are ready to make a conversion as the marketing continues to work on the rest.

Track Your Lead Generating Efforts

It is important to know which marketing tools are working best for you if you want to improve your lead generation.

You can do this by identifying and tracking lead sources, using the lead history reports to analyze pipeline and revenue, using campaigns for deeper metrics and using dashboards and reports.

I hope that you found the information provided to be helpful to you and it was what you were looking for. Thank you for taking the time to read this article.