The way to more leads

Lead management and lead management systems are the challenge of the future for marketers. Surprisingly however, is that they do not efficiently include conversational touchpoints in their strategies and thus lose many potential leads. But there is a solution: communication-based lead management platforms.

Digital transformation has long since arrived in marketing as well. Data is the new gold of marketers. They rely on online and digital marketing as well as tracking, CRM and analytics tools to gather as much information and insights about their users as possible – across all touchpoints of the customer journey. This allows them to keep refining their campaigns and strategies and make them more efficient in order to attract more potential customers.

However, many marketers have a serious gap in their concepts: the conversational communication channels such as mail, (video) call or chat. Yet it is precisely the information from these channels that offers significant advantages for the marketing strategy itself as well as for the entire lead management process, which must be leveraged with the help of specialized software solutions – so-called communication based lead management platforms. These bring together all contact inquiries via the direct interaction channels in a central solution and make generated insights usable across departments via seamless integration in CRM and analytics tools.

With these three specific use cases, marketers can see how communication based lead management systems can pay dividends to their strategies:

A recent study by the consulting firm Smart Concept shows that up to 30 percent of lead potential from direct communication channels is completely lost because inquiries are not answered – whether (video) calls, mails, contact forms or chats. Communication based lead management systems can help marketers win back this lost acquisition potential for themselves. This is made easy by the cloud-based, silo-free availability of the platforms and all communication processes running on them. All relevant employees have access to the centrally displayed incoming contacts via a queue, anytime, anywhere, and can seamlessly take them over when they are acute. Assignment to specific consultants or specialists who are currently available is also possible in this way.

No contact goes unanswered and no lead is lost. The continuous availability of contact persons in the company is ensured at all times – even in the form of subsequent callbacks or resumption of conversations. In this way, marketers not only benefit from the customer knowledge gained from the interactions, but at the same time strengthen customers’ trust and loyalty to their brand – a real gain in terms of customer experience.

One-size-fits-all concepts for dialog marketing do not exist. Every company is different, every customer journey individual. Communication-based lead management systems make customers’ preferred contact routes visible and show how interested parties arrived at a company website, what content they engaged with there, what is in their shopping cart and which channels they used to make direct contact. Paired with existing customer data from the CRM, this information is then used to develop efficient dialog marketing concepts for each individual lead, making communication even more individualized and personalized.

As always in marketing, data quality plays a crucial role in this aspect of communication-based lead management. Innovative platforms use the insights they provide to help analyze the right person-, transaction-, and profile-related data from active interactions with potential customers and make predictions about which communication channels they will use to be receptive to company and product messages at what time. This allows contact intervals and channels to be determined precisely and also significantly simplifies the customer-specific creation of content. Each prospective customer receives exactly the information via his preferred communication media that he needs at a specific time.

The prerequisite for this is seamless integration into the CRM. This means that all the insights and conversion data generated in the 1:1 conversations can be made directly usable via specific contacts and leads and are available across the board in the long term.

In the future, technologies of the future such as artificial intelligence and big data will also play an essential role in innovative lead management platforms – especially when it comes to the topic of “improving customer conversations”: In the future, intelligent data models and algorithms will make it possible to massively optimize consulting processes in eCommerce, for example. The result: more and stronger customer insights, more efficient sales and consulting processes, and significantly improved customer experiences.

For example, the AI of a platform will be able to analyze the ongoing conversation between a consultant and a (potential) customer in the background for variables such as tone of voice, volume, emotionality, speech rate or keywords. Based on the collected data, the system then shows the company specialist optimization potential in real time – including concrete suggestions to increase the quality of the exchange. In concrete terms: the AI suggests special branding messages or blacklists and whitelists with specific terms, or offers a selection of further information material (videos, product data sheets, technical articles, etc.), which is made available directly to the customer. At the same time, the algorithms evaluate the user behavior of the conversation partner (click behavior, sub/product pages visited, shopping cart, etc.) and then supplement customer data already available in the CRM. In this way, a lead can then be provided with further useful content in an automated and personalized manner.

Communication based lead management platforms help B2B and eCommerce companies in particular to profitably make their conversational communication channels part of their lead management processes and a driver of the customer experience. The three use cases shown are just the tip of the iceberg. Additional contact points (such as in the showroom or at the point of sale) can be used to collect additional data about buyer behavior, which can then also directly contribute to the marketing strategy and massively improve the customer experience – and thus also lead management.

This German article was published on February 16h 2023 in the print edition 1/23 of ecommerce Magazin.