You’re probably interested in the power of marketing automation to heal what ails your marketing initiatives, create a flood of qualified leads and propel your organization into unprecedented sales growth.

Marketing automation is powerful. It is not, however, omnipotent.

Before you can automate a process, it has to exist. And many organizations do not have a well-defined lead management process. Because of that, these companies are constantly churning through leads--filling the top of the funnel and letting them leak out.

The Study Says…

SiriusDecisions recently conducted a study which calculated the return on marketing automation. And they did it in an interesting way. They didn’t simply group everyone who implemented marketing automation and calculate the return. They looked at three different groups that included those with:

• No marketing automation platform (MAP)—the ‘Process and Technology Poor’
• MAP but no lead management process or a weak process—the ‘Automated Process- Poor’
• MAP and an average lead management process—the ‘Technology and Process Rich’

The results tell the story. Given a starting point of 50,000 leads, the ‘Process and Technology Poor’ created an average of $150,000 in sales, and the ‘Automated Process-Poor’ generated an average of $180,000 in sales. The ‘Technology and Process Rich’ outshone the other two groups, producing an average of $750,000 in sales.

What did the ‘Technology and Process Rich’ group do differently?

• They created fewer marketing qualified leads, only passing 3.9% of leads on to sales compared to the ‘Automated Process Poor’ and ‘Process and Technology Poor,’ who passed on 75% and 85% of leads, respectively.
• A greater percentage of their leads eventually converted to sales. Six point four percent of their marketing qualified leads turned into sales compared to the ‘Automated Process-Poor’ and ‘Process and Technology Poor’ who converted 1% and 0.1% of their leads respectively.
• Revenue per sale was four to five times more than that of the other two groups. The average value for each sale was $250,000 vs. $60,000 for the ‘Automated Process-Poor’ and $50,000 for the ‘Process and Technology Poor.’

Based on this study, there is obviously a high value in marrying processes and systems that optimize lead qualification and nurturing with MAPs.

Creating a Lead Management Process

Your lead management process should include:

• How you plan to acquire leads
• How you will nurture and educate leads that are not yet ready to buy
• The content you need to create to nurture your leads through each of their buying phases
• Both sales and marketing teams share and agree to the definition of a qualified lead
• Lead filtering rules
• How you will score, prioritize and disqualify leads
• The data you will include with leads that are passed to sales
• How leads will be routed to salespeople, partners, and distributors

Once you have a lead management process, you can decide on how to use your marketing automation platform to: 

• Automate, test, and optimize campaigns
• Segment your database for increased personalization
• Program specific email messages based on prospect actions
• Measure and report results

So, start by designing a lead management process, and you’ll be sure to reap the full rewards of marketing automation.

About the Author:

Jeff Kalter is CEO of 3D2B, a global business-to-business telemarketing company that bridges the divide between marketing and sales. He leads customer acquisition programs for Fortune 500 companies, and is passionate about building strong business relationships through professional phone conversations. Follow him on Twitter: @jeffkalt

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