Subscribe to the blog and receive recommendations to boost your CX
El lead management is a process of techniques and strategies for attract prospects, qualify them, nurture them and convert them into customers. This process is critical for marketing and sales teams, as companies lose up to 70% of their leads due to inadequate follow-up.
This makes it more than essential to use tools for the automation of lead management and sales opportunities. Fortunately, we are living a technological revolution with Artificial Intelligence which can provide an ideal ecosystem for sustainable growth and long-term profitability.
Below we will explain two very interesting cases in which we can combine AI and lead management and which results in the optimization of strategies and key indicators and an increase in sales.
Traditional lead prequalification vs. pre-qualification with Generative AI
The definition of lead qualification or Lead Scoring is the process of evaluating and determining the likelihood that a prospect can become a customer based on the criteria established by a company.
However, the problem with most lead scoring methods (such as the BANT methodology) is that they are used after the potential customer has already been handed over to the sales team, which is the opposite of the main objective, since they will probably focus their efforts and resources on unqualified leads or with a low probability of conversion. Qualify leads before they enter the sales process is ideal.
Traditionally, this can be achieved by evaluating leads when they submit a form, on a first-contact call, or with a simple lead capture bot. By doing so this way, you can ensure that only leads that meet the correct criteria are sent. For leads that don't yet meet all the criteria for now, you can nurture them until they're ready. And for those who aren't qualified, you can disqualify them before investing resources in them.
This process can be taken further with Generative AI: with the help of a bot powered by Artificial Intelligence, leads can interact in intuitive conversations and in natural language. Bots can ask basic or complex questions, relevant and based on the context that the potential customer provides thanks to Machine Learning and in the end they will be able to determine the real needs and pains of the lead.
The use of AI in lead qualification not only increases sales team productivity, but it also identifies opportunities for immediate follow-up, leading to faster sales cycles and revenue growth. For example, you could schedule an appointment or demo on the spot or transfer it to a sales representative depending on the answers the lead provided.
Combining AI and lead management for personalized lead nurturing
Once the lead has been qualified, it's time to guide him through the funnel and make him a customer. The traditional method of Lead nurturing involves manual or semi-automated processes for sending emails, making follow-up calls or having in-person meetings. The problem with this is that the approach is often generic and not very scalable.
For example, email campaigns created by human teams tend to be massively generated, focused more on business objectives and not on the customer, and do not resonate with the needs of all leads. Cold calls are intrusive and unwanted, creating a bad experience or contacting qualified and unqualified leads alike. In-person meetings can be valuable, but they consume a lot of resources and limit scalability in managing multiple leads simultaneously.
AI technology provides solutions to these problems. Intelligent algorithmsthey have the ability to analyze large amounts of data such as lead behaviors and preferences, allowing companies to generate targeted and personalized actions and interactions that truly connect with the lead.
A great example of this is the layer of personalization that Generative AI can provide for content creation. A bot can analyze data such as interactions with specific product advertisements, website activity such as abandoned carts, inventories and product alternatives, or demographic data, and use regionalisms and different languages. This way, emails, chats, SMS or WhatsApp messages are more likely to capture the lead's attention and lead to conversion.
While combining AI and lead management solves many of the marketing team's challenges, it's essential to have a technology partner that can offer expertise in the subject and offers a tool that's easy to use and implement. El InConcert bot can be fully integrated with a lead pre-qualifier or automated lead nurturing, providing multiple benefits such as increased conversion rates, cleaner and more useful automatic qualification, improved indicators such as CPL and CPA, fewer lost opportunities and much more.
