Sales Prospecting

5 min read

A Definitive Guide To Lead Automation for Boosting Sales Results

Narayani
19 Feb 2024

Every business wants to generate new leads and keep the pipeline full of opportunities.

But, the process of generating new leads entails cumbersome tasks like gathering information, data entry, follow-up tracking, and CRM updates, which can bog your sales team down.

Doing all these tasks manually leaves your reps with very little time for prospecting. Poor prospecting means fewer opportunities and even fewer closed-won deals.

The end result? Missed opportunities and potential revenue loss.

So, what’s the solution to free up reps from administrative tasks?

Implementing lead automation. This approach allows your reps to streamline and automate these essential but time-consuming processes, enabling them to focus more on what truly matters—engaging with prospects and driving sales.

Read on to know more about what lead automation is, its importance, and how to automate different processes of lead automation.

What Is Lead Automation?

Lead automation is a strategy in sales and marketing that leverages technology to automate the process of capturing and managing potential customers from the time they express interest in your solution to the completion of the purchase.

The goal of lead automation is to automate time-draining tasks— like generating, enriching, scoring, and routing leads—so that sales and marketing teams can concentrate on building relationships with customers and win more deals.

Why Is Lead Automation Important?

A report reveals sales reps spend only 2 hours per day selling. This means they spend only 10 hours per week on selling out of 40 hours.

Why? One of the reasons is manual lead management — collecting lead information through research, scheduling meetings, entering details in CRM, sending follow-up emails, and so much more. Reps are drained out and left with very little time on their hands for actual selling.

Automating these processes helps improve sales efficiency, ensures that reps engage with high-quality leads, and improves the overall customer experience.

Let’s delve deeper into why you should implement lead automation:

Improves Sales Efficiency

Instead of manually handling every step of the sales process, automation solutions can streamline routine tasks like organizing prospect data, scheduling appointments, sending reminders, and updating CRM records. This eliminates the need for sales representatives to spend time on administrative tasks, allowing sales teams to focus on more important aspects like building relationships with potential customers.

So, lead automation can accelerate your sales cycles and close more deals quickly and efficiently.

Generate High-Quality Leads

A study by ViB reveals the two biggest challenges marketers face are improving lead quality and conversion rates (54%) and generating more leads (41%). Why is this the case? In manual lead generation, the lack of standardized criteria causes inconsistency in reps interpreting how the leads are an ICP fit.

Each rep may have varying perspectives on what constitutes a high-quality lead. For example, one rep may prioritize certain demographic factors while another may focus on behavioral indicators. This hinders and affects the accuracy of leads generated and undermines the efforts of your team.

To overcome this, you can use lead automation to evaluate and score leads based on factors like buying interest, demographics, browsing habits, and engagement with your content. This targeted approach ensures that your rep’s time and effort spent on each lead doesn’t go in vain.

Improves Speed to Lead

78% of B2B customers purchase from the vendor that responds first. This means you need to improve your speed to lead before your competition swoops in to steal your leads.

How? By leveraging lead automation. These tools rapidly assign leads to sales reps based on their availability, experience, skills, and expertise. This not only results in faster response times but also ensures that your leads are handled by the most suited rep.

Streamlining Different Lead Automation Processes for Sales Growth

Lead automation mainly involves automating 4 stages: lead generation, lead enrichment, lead scoring, and lead routing.

Here, we're going to see how to automate each of these stages with tools:

Lead Generation

Lead generation is the collection of all activities executed by sales and marketing teams to attract, engage, and capture the interest of people.

Lead generation is mainly classified into 2 types: Inbound and outbound lead generation.

Inbound lead generation focuses on drawing in leads through content marketing, website forms, paid ads, chatbots, and more. Outbound lead generation, on the other hand, requires reaching out to potential customers through methods like cold calling, cold email campaigns, and multichannel outreach.

How To Automate B2B Lead Generation

There are lead generation tools available in the market that let you automate both inbound and outbound lead generation activities.

Here are a few ways by which you can automate inbound lead generation:

Installing chatbots: A lead generation automation tool helps you engage with leads the moment they submit a query via chatbots.
Lead Capture forms: These tools help you automatically create and add web forms to your home page and other landing pages to collect critical information such as names, email addresses, and contact information.

You can automate outbound lead generation activities by using outbound-specific tools like:

Cold emailing software: With automation technology, you can send automated messages with personalization in response to specific trigger events, such as abandoned shopping carts, website visits, and user responses. You can also use the tool to implement drip campaigns.
Cold calling software: You can automate dialing, data entry, note-taking, and measure call metrics.
LinkedIn automation tools: These tools automate sending connection requests and InMails for follow-ups, introductions, profile visits and schedule content sharing.
Sales engagement platform: Using a single platform, you can automate multichannel outreach, including email, phone calls, social media platforms, and more, to increase touchpoints with potential leads.

Lead Enrichment

Lead enrichment is the process of enhancing the prospect data with additional information. This helps in filling the gaps in existing data with up-to-date and relevant information from external databases.

When you get leads through various sources such as website forms, email campaigns, and social media, the initial data collected often contains only basic information like name and email address. This data is sometimes incomplete, outdated, and not enough for effective outreach.

You need complete, up-to-date, and verifiable information to reach out to your prospective customers.

By complete information, we mean knowing your prospect's name, job, company, location, email, tech stack, and all the details that will help you find their goals and judge whether they’re an ICP fit.

Lead enrichment tools give you just that.

How to Automate Lead Enrichment?

Lead enrichment tools enhance existing contact details by comparing current data with their databases and updating contact lists with relevant and up-to-date information about leads. These tools automatically verify and update contact information, including email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, company details, and locations.

Through lead enrichment tools, you can gather additional information about your lead's company, such as its size, industry, revenue, tech stack, and location.

By automating these processes, lead enrichment tools not only save time but also improve data accuracy and ultimately improve your sales and marketing strategy.

Lead Scoring

After you’ve enriched your lead data, how do you decide on which lead to interact with first?

By scoring your sales leads.

A lead score can be thought of as a quality metric that tells you how good the leads are for your business. The score can be set by assigning value to characteristics or actions taken by your lead. This makes it simpler to decide which leads to pay more attention to and how to follow up with them.

When you start to have an influx of leads, it is crucial to implement a lead-scoring process. Without a legitimate process, your sales reps will continue to engage with low-quality leads, ignoring the promising opportunities.

With lead scoring automation, you can score your leads instantly to prioritize high value leads to start engaging with them and put others into the nurture sequence.

How To Automate Lead Scoring?

With the help of lead scoring tools, you can assign values to each lead automatically.

A lead scoring tool assigns positive or negative scores to your leads based on their level of engagement and suitability for your product or service. It monitors and analyzes the online behavior of leads, such as website visits, content downloads, and email interactions to gauge their level of interest. The tool considers several factors like the lead’s job title, company size, location and industry to determine whether the lead fits your Ideal Customer Profile.

For instance, if someone fills out a form or requests a demo, the tool will assign a higher score to them than someone who only views a few pages without taking any action.

Lead Routing

In this process, you strategically assign the right rep to the right lead.

As every lead has their unique needs and goals, so does every rep in your team come with specific skills and expertise. So, after sorting out the leads, you need to match them with a sales rep who is best suited to handle them in their buying journey.

Lead routing is of 2 types: Manual and Automated.

Manual lead routing is suited when there are only 2 or 3 reps in the team so they can take turns and handle each lead. One of the biggest challenges with manual lead routing is it doesn’t take into consideration the rep’s availability, experience, expertise, etc., which often results in mismanagement of sales leads like slower response times, overlap of meetings, bias, or even worse, leads left unattended.

Today, buyers are looking for instant gratification, a survey reveals that 88% of leads expect responses within 60 minutes of their initial request.

So, by automating lead routing, you can ensure faster response times, efficient lead distribution, and customer satisfaction.

How To Automate Lead Routing?

Using lead routing tools, you can automatically route leads to sales reps based on their availability, skill, experience, and expertise. If a lead is unavailable, the tool will automatically route the lead to the next available rep to ensure prompt response.

Leads can also be distributed based on their form answers. For example, if you have leads from the healthcare or manufacturing industry, you would want the leads to be assigned to more experienced reps. You can update this information in your lead routing system so that when a lead fills out the form, they will be automatically routed to the right rep.

4 Best Lead Automation Tools in 2024

In the previous section, we mentioned that there are tools available for each of the 4 processes. Now, we'll give you specific tools that you can include in your tech stack.

For Outbound Lead Generation: Klenty

Klenty is a sales engagement platform that helps sales teams strategically connect with potential customers through multiple channels. It helps teams take the right actions for each prospect and creates a solid pipeline of qualified leads.

Klenty sales engagement platform for outbound lead generation

Here’s how Klenty can help you generate more leads through 5 different channels:

Phone: Klenty’s powerful Sales Dialer enables parallel dialing, where you can place up to 5 calls simultaneously, all in one click to help you place 5x more calls. The dialer also logs all notes to your CRM, allows you to send voicemails in a click, and batch prospects according to their time zone.
Email: Klenty offers advanced email personalization and ensures high deliverability to ensure all your emails land on the prospect’s primary inbox and your campaigns see high open and response rates.
LinkedIn: The tool automates your daily tasks on LinkedIn, like sending InMails and connection requests with personalization in a single click.
SMS: Use text messaging to complement your cold calls and boost your chances of striking up a conversation.
WhatsApp: Schedule and send personalized WhatsApp messages in one click.

Here are the pricing details for the different plans that Klenty offers:

Startup plan: $50/user/month (billed annually) and $60/user/month (billed quarterly).
Growth plan: $70/user/month (billed annually) and $85/user/month (billed quarterly).
Pro plan: $100/user/month (billed annually) and $125/user/month (billed quarterly).
Enterprise plan: Customized plans available.

For Lead Enrichment: Prospect IQ

Prospect IQ from Klenty is a prospecting data platform with over 440 million email addresses and phone numbers across the globe. The platform helps sales and marketing teams find top accounts and reach out to the right people with up-to-date and reliable contact details.

The platform uses a unique waterfall model for lead enrichment. It aggregates data from multiple vendors instead of just one to ensure your database is filled with accurate phone and email data.

Here’s how Prospect IQ helps enrich your leads:

With Prospect IQ, you get 700% more email and phone data. The platform collects data from multiple vendors and carries out multiple enrichments on top of each other to provide verified and up-to-date email addresses.
Prospect IQ gives you complete account insights for every profile. You just need to add the domain name to get a comprehensive contact profile for each account with all relevant information.
The platform’s Email Finder feature lets you access the email addresses of your ideal buyers in just a single click. You just need to add the prospect’s name and domain to get their email address.
The LinkedIn Prospector feature helps you acquire email, phone, technographic, and title information in just a click—by using only your prospect’s LinkedIn profile URL.
With 26+ data filters, the platform helps you find the best fit for your ICP and build an airtight list of prospects.

Pricing:

Prospect IQ comes with flexible pricing plans to fit your specific prospecting efforts. Whether you need both email and phone credits or just one of these, you can customize the pricing to pay for only what you need.

Email: Starts at $40/month (billed annually) for 1000 email credits/month
Phone: Starts at $40/month (billed annually) for 200 phone credits/month

For Lead Scoring: Leadsquared

LeadSquared is a customer acquisition and marketing automation platform designed to help businesses manage their leads, automate marketing processes, and drive sales.

Here’s how Leadsquared lets you score your leads:

Leadsquared automatically tracks and assigns high or low scores to leads based on their activities on your website. This helps in understanding their level of interest in your solution.
It allows you to customize the lead scoring models to score leads based on custom activities.
The platform sends automated notifications when the lead score exceeds a certain point. This helps your reps reach out to potential customers when they have high purchase intent.

Pricing: Available upon request.

For Lead Routing: Schedule IQ

Schedule IQ by Klenty is an all-in-one solution to enhance the efficiency of your sales teams for efficiently managing leads and booking more meetings. With Schedule IQ, you can effortlessly arrange, strategize, and automatically route incoming leads, ensuring no potential opportunities slip through the cracks.

Here’s how Schedule IQ helps you effectively distribute your leads:

Schedule IQ offers 3 customizable and advanced routing methods:
- Flexible Routing allows you to distribute meetings randomly.
- Strict or Equal Routing allows you to allocate equal meeting slots.
- Weighted Routing lets you route meetings based on predefined weightage to assign the right rep to each lead.
With this software, you can further filter the leads by:
- Rule-based Scheduling: This function helps you distribute leads automatically based on the form answers given by the leads.
- Owner-based Scheduling: Schedule IQ checks your CRM to find the right owner for the prospect, showing only their calendar. This ensures that your prospect talks directly to their point of contact, making their experience seamless.
- IP-based Scheduling: Schedule IQ detects your prospect’s location based on their IP address and lets you distribute leads accordingly. This gives you insights into the region your leads are from and eliminates the need to add more fields to your form.
Users can create custom forms with Schedule IQ. This helps in gathering specific prospect information and refining sales strategy.
You can add the personalized meeting link to your website using the Website Embed feature, allowing visitors to book meetings directly from your site.