Maximum eCommerce success: The 7 phases of successful lead management

• Challenge in eCommerce: Marketing & Sales, stronger together 
• Optimal lead management in eCommerce: The seven phases of success
• Phase 1 – Establishing contact: Democratization of communication channels
• Phase 2 – Bringing all leads together in one place
• Phase 3 – Making data clearly available to the consultant – before the conversation starts
• Phase 4 – Deciphering insights from the active conversation – AI-boosted
• Phase 5 – Putting conversations through their paces – lead scoring
• Phase 6 – Off to CRM for better sales strategies – only valuable leads make it past the hurdle
• Phase 7 – Feed Google and other marketing tools with valuable data
• Conclusion – summarizing the benefits

In the dynamic world of eCommerce, marketers and sales staff are faced with the essential task of effectively coordinating their marketing and sales activities. Only through seamless cooperation between the two departments can optimal results be achieved – true to the motto: Marketing & Sales, stronger together. 

This interaction is crucial for success in the eCommerce sector – and in all other companies whose main source of new customer acquisition is lead generation.

Here you can experience the whole process live in our video showcase:

Marketing faces two main challenges:

• Generate more leads with the same budget
• Continuously optimize the marketing ROI

However, this is usually lacking:

• Continuous communication with sales and stringent feedback from sales colleagues
• In-depth knowledge of the specific requirements of the target group and hard customer data from sales

Sales faces similar challenges:

The main task of sales employees is to sell better on the basis of high-quality leads.

But they are also missing something:

• Access to valuable marketing data 
• Integration into the marketing processes 

In eCommerce environments in particular, it is crucial to give customers the freedom to choose their preferred communication channel – a key to democratizing customer communication. This flexibility significantly improves the customer experience and puts the customer in their own comfort zone. The result is an increase in brand loyalty and retention, as well as customer experience, and pays direct dividends in terms of sales results.

It is equally important to make these communication channels accessible on all relevant platforms. This allows customers to be seamlessly picked up at the optimal point in their customer journey and effectively connected with the right departments such as sales, customer service or support. 

A practical example from eCommerce: 

In a bicycle store, this strategy enables the customer to contact the sales team directly after adding a product to their shopping cart to arrange a test ride. In this way, companies encourage direct interaction and – at the customer’s request – are given an additional opportunity to gather further information and sell additional products or services. 

This approach ensures that eCommerce companies maximize their customer loyalty and sales success through targeted and flexible communication.

The integration of a centralized and uniformly accessible queue enables seamless and efficient lead management. For example, when a customer initiates a call from a contact point offered in the shopping cart, this request (lead) is immediately visible in the queue. This enables all relevant employees to see and process the inquiry, with important information about existing customer relationships immediately available. This process means that no lead is lost, even if a particular employee is temporarily unavailable. In addition, inquiries can be forwarded to specialized colleagues if necessary. Particularly in the case of specific inquiries, such as the request for a test drive in our example, this approach offers an information advantage that leads to more effective sales discussions and thus optimizes the entire sales process.

If the salesperson then accepts the call to arrange a test drive, they have a lot of valuable data on the screen at a glance, giving them additional clues as to what the customer might actually want or need. And all this before the conversation is even accepted.

This valuable information – web data – includes many insights into the lead’s customer journey. For example:

• Which campaign brought the user to the website
• What content they viewed and actively used on the website
• Which language is set in the web browser (language preference)
• What the customer may still have in their shopping cart (including the current shopping cart value)
• What the customer may have already discussed with the company (contact history)
• and much more

With this information as a basis for the upcoming conversation, further cross-selling and upselling opportunities can be identified quickly and easily – the sales employee can sell even better and make targeted additional offers that are highly likely to match the customer’s interests and wishes.

The real magic begins in active conversations – powered by AI. With features such as a black/white list (good words/bad words), specific terms can be defined that improve the sales conversation and thus the success of the entire company in two ways:

The sales employee has control over the effectiveness of their conversation: they can see from the defined positive and negative terms for specific processes (such as “arrange a test drive” or “increase insurance cover”) in which direction they need to steer in order to achieve success as quickly as possible.

In addition, the salesperson can use the AI to quickly recognize the organic development of the conversation and actively identify what the customer might still need using further specific, preconfigured expressions in order to make even better use of the contact’s cross-selling and upselling potential.

After every sales or consultation meeting, the eCommerce company’s consultant has the opportunity to comprehensively evaluate the lead. This qualification (lead scoring) takes place on the basis of a variety of options. These include:

• Star ratings
• Classifications via tabs
• Drop-down menus with suitable attributes
• Assessment of the lead based on the available budget

This methodology makes it possible to effectively prepare leads for subsequent sales activities, whereby only the most promising ones are followed up. 

Marketing also benefits from this approach:

Based on lead scoring, marketing managers can initiate targeted measures in lead nurturing to bind potential customers more closely and transform them into qualified leads. 

This systematic approach leads to a clear overview of the value of each individual lead and ensures that no more inquiries are lost. 

No more “shit in, shit out”!

As soon as qualified leads are made available for sales, an efficient CRM integration, for example with Hubspot, enables their seamless tracking and processing in the sales process. All relevant customer data is centralized and clearly displayed in this system in order to initiate targeted measures for increased sales results. 

This customer data includes:

• Customer and purchase history 
• Communication logs 
• Lead evaluations 
• The latest contact details of companies and contact persons

This ensures an efficient sales process with high quality contacts and eliminates ineffective practices.

In the eCommerce space, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) revolutionizes lead management with advanced features that feed directly into the marketing process. With event and user-based tracking, GA4 captures detailed actions and events, provides a deep understanding of user behavior and improves privacy compliance. Integration with Google Ads and automatic event tracking makes it easy to track user interactions without the need for manual settings. 

By tracking across devices and aggregating data from multiple sources, GA4 provides comprehensive website performance analytics and marketing ROI, using machine learning and AI for more accurate forecasting and audience analysis. 

This allows marketers to respond more efficiently to dynamic market demands while providing improved opportunities to optimize online marketing activities.

Our multichannel communication & lead management solution – the matelso platform – offers all this and more.

The concrete benefits of the matelso platform at a glance – valuable for marketing & sales:

• All communication channels are available on the website in just 5 minutes
• All leads are now in one place – accessible for stakeholders
• Valuable data is now available to everyone who urgently needs it
• Only rated leads reach the CRM and marketing tools (Google Analytics 4 etc.)

Would you like to delve deeper into the topic of “Marketing & Sales, stronger together” and the showcase? No problem! Just watch the webinar: