In previous articles, we have been talking about what a lead is, why we are interested in generating leads to grow our company, what strategies we can follow to generate leads and we have imagined a scenario in which we generate so many MCA leads per month that we have to prioritize them and In this sense, we are talking about techniques for qualifying leads ( lead scoring in English). At this point, we are going to imagine that you have put all this theory into practice, and you have a lot of leads that enter your company every month. You may wonder:
But how do these leads enter?
And how do I store them?
How can I manage all these leads?
What tools exist in the market for lead management?
Well, if your company is in this scenario is on the right track, being clear about the concepts of lead generation without having good tools is of little use, and vice versa, having the best lead management software without being clear about the concepts is also not helpful. Much, many companies surely have very powerful tools for lead management, tools for marketing automation and perhaps they take much less out of them than the tool allows (Does this sound familiar to you;)?).
If you are at this point, you may have to deal with selecting a lead management tool. Getting the right choice can be difficult, there are so many tools on the market, with so many features that it can be overwhelming. Here are some basic concepts that should be clear when selecting a lead management tool and I will give you some names of tools that work very well.
Lead management tool for marketing or sales?
The first thing you have to ask yourself is what is the main purpose of the lead management tool you are looking for. I'll be more specific, are you looking for a lead management tool to do better marketing and get more quality leads? Or are you looking for a lead management tool to improve sales results? Let me guess what you've thought: for both of us. Am I correct? Stated like this I would also say for both things, get more quality MCA leads and get more sales. The reality is that the market tends to specialize a lot and there are many tools that cover well the functionality of "marketing" but not the sales, and vice versa. In summary:
Lead management tools for Marketing: these are tools that are designed for all those marketing tasks to generate leads. These tools are also often referred to as automation tools marketing ( marketing automation ). Among other functions they allow.
Generate forms to download the content we create (ebooks, webinars, etc.)
Store leads, that is, have a list with all the contacts we have achieved.
View a specific lead (contact) and see all its attributes (name, surname, email, company, etc.) And we can create specific attributes for our business.
See what activity a specific lead has had on our website, for example, for a specific lead we could see that they have seen the home page, our product page, and the prices page.
We can create lists to organize leads according to various criteria (sorted by month, by behavior, etc.).
We can send emails from this software to leads to improve engagement, we can create "workflows" to automate certain actions (eg when a lead consults a key page we send him an email after a few hours proposing to see a demo of the product).
Lead management tools for Sales: these are tools that are designed to facilitate everything that involves the process of selling a product or service. These types of tools are often called CRM, and more specifically CRM for sales. Among other functions they allow:
Once a sales representative has a lead to deal with, they have to do several activities: typically, they send an email to the lead as a first approximation suggesting they have a call or a meeting. This email that is sent interests that it is registered in the sales management tool, and it is. Many of these tools also let you know if the lead (user) has opened this email or not so that the sales representative has more information to decide what is the best next step.
It is usual in a sales process to define several statuses for a lead and assign the status of the lead.
Another very important thing, they allow you to define companies and opportunities. Imagine that a lead asks for a quote, the sales representative sends him the offer, this creates an opportunity. And this opportunity can have several stages.
And the most important thing about this type of tool is the «Pipe» concept. The "Pipe" would be all the money from new business opportunities that is in the sales process. Imagine a pipe of 100,000 euros, this would mean that in the best of cases it could generate a business of 100,000 euros in the next days/months if all the opportunities were closed successfully (rare case). In this sense, states within the pipe and probabilities are also defined, so that an estimate is made of those that your company is likely to close in sales in the coming months. You see that all this is very different from the previous point, right?
This is why it is very important to be clear about what you mainly want the lead management tool. Depending on your needs, you have to go for a marketing automation tool or a CRM tool for sales. Next, I will focus only on marketing automation type tools.
Marketing automation tools for lead management
There are dozens of competitive tools for managing leads from a marketing point of view, that is, tools of the "marketing automation" type. These are some of them:
Hubspot: it is one of the world's leading automotive marketing software, which has triumphed from my point of view for being very complete, for being very well finished, for being very reliable, having a "reasonable" cost for what it offers and for the amount of information and training provided by the company so that you can learn and put into practice good lead management practices. And above all, because it is very easy and intuitive to use. Of everything explained in the previous point, Hubspot allows it to do more than that, it even goes further. Prices vary over time, so it is best to look at the current pricing model. The good thing is that it has a "free" CRM model, and a very "over-the-top" model of "marketing automation", which hardly allows doing anything substantial in marketing, But to see how it is, it may be good to register and try it.
The minimum pricing to start using the main functions is approximately around € 200 per month. For medium / large companies this cost is very reasonable. For smaller companies, this price is really a very beastly effort and many times prohibitive. Hubspot also has another module designed for sales functions (Hubspot Sales), it is not bad, but it is what I told you before, it is not its specialty and it cannot compete with other "Sales CRM" solutions such as Salesforce. If you are interested in seeing it, I'll leave you For smaller companies, this price is really a very beastly effort and often prohibitive.
Hubspot also has another module designed for sales functions (Hubspot Sales), it is not bad, but it is what I told you before, it is not its specialty and it cannot compete with other "Sales CRM" solutions such as Salesforce. If you are interested in seeing it, I'll leave you For smaller companies this price is really a very beastly effort and many times prohibitive. Hubspot also has another module designed for sales functions (Hubspot Sales), it is not bad, but it is what I told you before, it is not its specialty and it cannot compete with other "Sales CRM" solutions such as Salesforce. If you are interested in seeing it, I'll leave you the Hubspot Marketing Software link.
Marketo: Marketo would be like Hubspot but still with a more "enterprise" vision, more designed for very, very large companies. You have some more sophisticated functions (that many marketers don't need), it has an API that they say is very complete (if you don't know what an API is, it's a system that allows you to attack to load data, modify it, without people having to do it, You can program your system and update the marketing data through the API. The price? prohibitive, it is really designed for companies like IBM, Cisco, etc., very large. In terms of usability, from my point of view, it is quite less usable than Hubspot. The first time I had the opportunity to use an automation tool was Marketo. I used it and assimilated it as such. After a while following another client I had the opportunity to work with Hubspot and the change is like overnight in terms of usability and pricing step. If you are interested in seeing it, I'll leave you the Marketo link.
ActiveCampaign: active campaign for me would be an alternative to Hubspot with the following observations:
It offers "more or less" the functionality of Hubspot, at least the basic ones (creating forms, workflows, firing emails, etc.).
Did I finish them? It is not comparable to Hubspot, it is more "badly finished".
Pricing? Very affordable, with less than 50 euros a month you can use it and get a lot of juice out of it now.
If you are interested in seeing it, I will leave you the ActiveCampaign link.
More alternatives? As I was saying before, there are dozens of very competitive tools on the market, but the previous 3 are the ones I have worked with the most. Other tools that you may be interested in looking at are:
CampaignMonitor: I've always been curious, it looks a lot like an active campaign, but I haven't been able to use it yet. If you are interested in seeing it, I leave you the Campaign Monitor link.
InfusionSoft: I have seen companies that use it, although the pricing is also stinging, similar to Hubspot's or it will be there. If you are interested in seeing it, I leave you the link to InfusionSoft.
Pardot (it is the "marketing automation" part of Salesforce. Salesforce is the "Ferrari" of CRM for Sales, but their module for marketing automation has told me that it is not as good as Hubspot (it is what I was telling you about the specialization, which costs the same software to be the best in both parts.) If you are interested in seeing it, I will leave you the Pardot link.
If you are interested in knowing more tools of this class, I recommend that you look at Getapp, there is a list of tools ordered by categories with information on each one and the best, opinions of people who used them. Here is the Get app link for marketing automation tools.
Have you used any of these? What has been your experience? Have you used any other marketing automation tools? Go ahead and share it and leave a comment at the end of the article.
Marketo: Marketo would be like Hubspot but still with a more "enterprise" vision, more designed for very, very large companies. You have some more sophisticated functions (that many marketers don't need), it has an API that they say is very complete (if you don't know what an API is, it's a system that allows you to attack to load data, modify it, without people having to do it, You can program your system and update the marketing data through the API. The price? prohibitive, it is really designed for companies like IBM, Cisco, etc., very large. In terms of usability, from my point of view, it is quite less usable than Hubspot. The first time I had the opportunity to use an automation tool was Marketo. I used it and assimilated it as such. After a while following another client I had the opportunity to work with Hubspot and the change is like overnight in terms of usability and pricing step. If you are interested in seeing it, I'll leave you the Marketo link.
ActiveCampaign: active campaign for me would be an alternative to Hubspot with the following observations:
It offers "more or less" the functionality of Hubspot, at least the basic ones (creating forms, workflows, firing emails, etc.).
Did I finish them? It is not comparable to Hubspot, it is more "badly finished".
Pricing? Very affordable, with less than 50 euros a month you can use it and get a lot of juice out of it now.
If you are interested in seeing it, I will leave you the ActiveCampaign link.
More alternatives? As I was saying before, there are dozens of very competitive tools on the market, but the previous 3 are the ones I have worked with the most. Other tools that you may be interested in looking at are:
CampaignMonitor: I've always been curious, it looks a lot like an active campaign, but I haven't been able to use it yet. If you are interested in seeing it, I leave you the Campaign Monitor link.
InfusionSoft: I have seen companies that use it, although the pricing is also stinging, similar to Hubspot's or it will be there. If you are interested in seeing it, I leave you the link to InfusionSoft.
Pardot (it is the "marketing automation" part of Salesforce. Salesforce is the "Ferrari" of CRM for Sales, but their module for marketing automation has told me that it is not as good as Hubspot (it is what I was telling you about the specialization, which costs the same software to be the best in both parts.) If you are interested in seeing it, I will leave you the Pardot link.
If you are interested in knowing more tools of this class, I recommend that you look at Getapp, there is a list of tools ordered by categories with information on each one and the best, opinions of people who used them. Here is the Get app link for marketing automation tools.
Have you used any of these? What has been your experience? Have you used any other marketing automation tools? Go ahead and share it and leave a comment at the end of the article.
