How Technology Can Improve Lead Generation

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Modern sales are no longer about wide nets and low conversion rates. It’s about listening to your customers, attending to their needs, and providing a personalized experience. Сonsumers want to know you’ve done your research to get a good grasp of their unique circumstances. And most of them can see right through attempts at personalization through templated communications. In this post, we’ll talk about some of the key contact center metrics you might want to measure. Let’s dive in! 

In present-day lead generation, quality beats quantity at every possible level. Rather than trying to increase the volume of prospects you attempt to connect with, you should focus on increasing the quality of the connections, and that’s when the latest technological advancements come in handy.

Let’s take a look at the technologies helping internal sales teams adapt to the modern consumer and increase sales revenue.

Targeted Prospecting

Reaching prospects at the right time is critical. You are ten times less likely to make contact with a lead within the first 5 minutes of their initial contact with your organization. It’s incredibly important to use tools that instantly inform you of when a potential prospect has engaged with your business.

Tools like HubSpot can allow you to track email opens, clicks, and site visits. Internal sales reps can use these notifications and reach out at the opportune time. Other tools, like Seventh Sense, use big data to determine a prospect's optimal engagement time. They can automatically deliver emails at the perfect moment or at least give sales reps an idea of the best window of time to reach out to a prospect. And with tools such as LinkedIn’s Lead Accelerator and Bizo, your sales team is able to find professionals in specific industries, companies, or with certain job titles.

Prospecting needs to be hyper-personalized and authentic. The more information you can provide to a sales rep before they reach out to a potential consumer, the better. You can use these tools to make sure your team has the best chance of making a connection and turning prospects into sales.

Call Tracking

Some of your company’s most important sales conversations are going to happen during a call or teleconference. It’s vital to have a CRM (customer relationship management) system that integrates with your VoIP or teleconferencing provider. By recording calls and translating the conversations into the system, you link all the context from the prospecting phase back to a deal.

For managers, this is essential. Being able to easily reference a sales call for a deal that was lost or won gives managers the insight they need to coach their team. From there, decisions can be made to pivot strategy and understand what's working and what's not.

Managers can also see who is making their calls or get a high-level overview of their team’s activity, with no manual data entry needed. Manual CRM data entry is a way of the past; not only is it outdated, but it’s prone to human error and often inaccurate.

Speech Analytics

Real-time analytics gives sales leaders a highly accurate understanding of their team’s performance. These tools also save agents the time they would be spending on manual data entry and allows them to redirect toward making more calls and generating revenue. For example, cloud software provider Oracle has seen a lot of success since they’ve started to implement AI and analytics into their CRM and other sales-related applications. Sales teams are investing more money in systems that allow their salespeople to spend more time selling and less time analyzing.

Advancements in speech analytics technology allow managers to monitor the conversational effectiveness of their agents from any phone, anywhere. To optimize agent performance, you need to first understand what’s working and what isn’t during their conversations with prospects. When you replicate behaviors of successful agents across your entire team, you can promote growth across the department. Speech analytics delivers missing context from conversations to provide a holistic picture of an agent’s activity and level of effectiveness.

On a final note

Internal sales teams, whether they are engaging in email marketing or cold calling, can still be incredibly effective at lead generation and closing deals. The only difference today is that your prospects have very different expectations.

Implementing the right technology within your sales processes, such as targeted prospecting, call tracking, and speech analytics can help in many different areas. However, new things tend to be met with some degree of resistance. When there is friction, there are dozens of missed opportunities and hundreds of frustrated consumers. To avoid potential difficulties, make sure that technology incorporates smoothly into all your processes.

Overall, authentic, personalized outreach is a crucial part of establishing the relationships required to move people along your sales journey. Use the different technologies listed above to alleviate pressure from your sales resources and allow them to focus on quality leads and closing deals.

 

About the Author:

Brian Thomas

Bio: Contributor to Enlightened Digital, long-distance cyclist, and lifelong advocate for women in business from Philadelphia. Tech and business are my lifeblood, but I’m also a fanatic of brewpubs and just about every sports team in Philadelphia.
 

Tanya Gonchar

Expert in call center process automation, Head of Marketing at Voiptime Cloud. Interested in customer service, B2B sales, marketing, business analysis.

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