Landing Pages 101: Why You Should Integrate Your Landing Pages Into Your CRM System
Sales and marketing seems so random.
Sometimes it feels like it’s one big crapshoot (and it very often is). You wish you had more control over the whole process, but that seems impossible.
Or does it?
There is so much you can’t control: customer behavior, the economy, your sales people (you can cajole, threaten and bribe your sales people, but you can’t control them).
But there is one thing you can control: the sales process itself, from lead to closed sale and the post-sale.
Or rather, you can control what resources you dedicate to the sales process.
The modern Customer Relationship Management System (CRM system for short), lets you see what’s going on in your sales process, and gives you the data to decide how to spend your valuable sales and marketing resources.
How a CRM System Can Help You
A CRM system, such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Zoho CRM or BatchBlue, lets you track and view prospects, turn those prospects into opportunities, and view how contacts relate to companies and opportunities.
A CRM system records your communications with prospects and customers.
For example, each email you send to a prospect, each conversation you have with her, each contact with one of your service people or project managers, can be recorded to create a running history of your customer.
A CRM system enables you to cross-sell and up-sell because of the intelligence provided by historical information.
Finally, a CRM system provides you with built-in customizable dashboards where you can see your critical sales numbers.
If a CRM system gives you unparalleled control over the sales process, then why aren’t your landing pages connected to your CRM system?
Your Landing Page is your Online Lead Generation System
Your landing page is not a random web page the web marketing team creates to amuse themselves.
Landing pages are the critical entry points for leads entering your sales process.
But what typically happens when a valuable prospect fills out that form to download your white paper or to sign up for your newsletter?
They go directly to an email system that nobody in the company knows about.
Instead you should connect your landing page to your CRM system so leads can enter the sales process automatically and immediately.
Here are five reasons why you should integrate your landing pages to your CRM system
Speed Up The Sales Process
Getting your leads in to your CRM system used to be a manual process. This time-consuming process delayed lead follow-up, and was also subject to errors. If an administrator “forgot” to enter a lead, that potential sale was lost forever.
Now leads are automatically created in your CRM system when visitors to your landing page fill out a form or press the “download now” button. You can now take care of them immediately and speed up the sales process.
Take Better Care of Leads
When a landing page lead automatically becomes a lead in your CRM system, they can be automatically assigned to the appropriate sales rep according to criteria such as geographic information or which landing page he came from.
For B2B companies this is critical. If a sales representative is trying to penetrate a named account, they can be alerted if somebody from that company downloads a white paper. The sales rep can take extra care of the lead armed with the historical knowledge of the account from the CRM system.
Better Sales Intelligence
Most landing pages can collect can collect lots of data on your prospect: what form they filled out, what they downloaded, what ad they responded to, what keywords they used, what state they’re from, what was the source of the referral (social media, direct, Google, Bing), This can now be captured in your CRM System.
Campaign Improvement
You can also track and improve your marketing intelligence, enabling you to predict the future more accurately. Track your visit-to-customer rate and lead-to-customer rate, and determine which leads from which resources are more likely to turn into customers.
Prioritize Resources
When a visitor becomes a lead, you can track all their activity. When they download a white paper or case study, click on additional landing pages, then download some more reports, that usually means they’re in buying mode. You can then make the decision to dedicate resources to follow-up with the prospect and close the deal.
Your next steps
Connecting your landing pages to your CRM integration system increases your control of your sales process, because it fills in that critical information gap: where your leads come from.
But it’s easier said than done.
Our new Lander landing page platform makes this easy.
Click here to find out more about how easy it is to connect Lander to your CRM system, and gain more control of your sales process forever!