Generating new leads is the core activity for marketing teams in B2B roles.

But the worst thing that can happen is for all that blood, sweat and tears go to go waste. Here’s how you can maximize those leads using a customer relationship management CRM tool.

1) Understanding your audience

CRM is critical to helping you understand your audience. Within a database, you can first collect and then export key data, not about the people who you think are buying your products or who you want to buy your products, but who are actually buying your products.

This can be fed back into your marketing initiatives in order to fuel more accurate campaigns, targeting and ultimately a better lead generation return.

2) Optimize the sales process

In sales, time is money. So it’s critical to a functional business operation for key data to be quickly captured, reproduced and disseminated to where it needs to go.

A CRM system creates a single portal that your sales, marketing and executive teams can use to have a single view of their process. This helps to understand what’s working and what isn’t in order to make recommendations and optimize results.

3) Lead nurturing

No matter how good your campaigns/tactics are, most of the leads you create are not going to buy.

That’s why lead nurturing, both before a sales rep picks up the phone and after a sale is classed as “lost”, is an essential practice:

• Nurturing leads before they get to sales will warm them up and deliver a more effective close rate
• Marketing qualified leads and lead scoring are proven ways to maximize sales teams’ time
• Funnel re-loops that pick up lost sales or disengaged prospects is a cost-effective way to keep leads semi-engaged until they’re ready to buy and give sales teams a second opportunity to close

4) Sales enablement

Sale enablement is about delivering sales teams the right tools they need to move sales along the process. This can be anything from email templates, to talk tracks, to fully-fledged selling scripts.

However, as sales processes become more complex, sales enablement quickly becomes impossible using things like post-it notes and Google Drive.

A CRM system is a simple and effective way to give your sales teams the tools they need to do their job.

Summary

A CRM system, along with a marketing automation platform and an email marketing tool, should form the core infrastructure for an effective sales and marketing team.

Not only does this mean the sales team can be faster and more efficient at closing deals, but CRM will also help turn warm leads into hot ones. This reduces funnel leakage and helps you improve your marketing over time. At the end of the day, it’s all about giving your sales team the best chance of success.