One of the biggest hurdles that buyers encounter when implementing a marketing automation system - or any software for that matter - is learning the terminology. You know that in order to have effective lead management, you need a strong demand generation system that will drive leads into your funnel. From there you need to define a lead scoring methodology and then make a lead nurturing plan to support the various leads based on their scores and where are at in the buying cycle. Great! Now, what does all that actually mean?
In this video from the MASG team over at Software Advice, Carlos Hidalgo of the Annuitas Group describes these two terms to alleviate some of the confusion.
In part 2, Hidalgo discusses how to work within marketing automation to support the processes and strategy that you already have in place.
If you want to learn more about marketing automation, I did a presentation called "Death by Marketing Automation" that asks tough questions about the right and wrong ways to use the technology. Click here to watch Death by Marketing Automation!
Marketing Automation is the toolset used to enable or support delivery of the right content reaching the buyer at the right time in the sales cycle and includes dynamic content, lead nurturing, lead scoring and lead qualification.
Demand generation is about creating the right content to attract the proper contacts into the funnel in the first place as well as generating content to engage the buyer through the nurturing process and over the lifetime of the customer.
Lead management process is how you treat each lead to ensure every lead is managed most effectively. It's what you do with a lead through the nurturing cycle, based on the rules you apply to each lead, when its is passed to sales, how its handled in the CRM system.
Thanks Carlos