How to level up your lead processing with automation

In the marketing world, the pursuit of results never stops. No matter how sophisticated their infrastructure or sharp their decision-making strategies, most marketers have a nagging feeling they are under-performing.

If you’re like them, you may wonder if your leads are slipping through the cracks or if your nurturing is working hard enough — plus, you want to be sure that you’re squeezing out as many insights from your wins as possible.

But modern marketing doesn't have to be so challenging. For a growing number of marketers, automation is becoming the alchemy that turns leads into gold.

Put the process in lead processing

Make can connect your existing marketing technology (mar-tech) stack together, taking your lead processing and management to new heights. Whether you’re looking to automate a common or highly customized marketing task, Make’s intuitive platform can help you get the most from every lead.

Make is a visual software integration platform with which you can drag and drop apps together to automate workflows. We refer to automations built in Make as "scenarios". Let's build a scenario that sets a virtuous circle in motion – a flywheel that can transform the effectiveness of your lead capture and processing. 

Imagine you’d like to build an automation to qualify, route and enrich leads, while streamlining the process of getting the right information to your sales team.

Capture: Make leads CRM-ready, fast

Almost every lead processing automation starts when you generate a new lead and want to move it into your CRM.

Once upon a time, to move their leads between platforms smoothly, marketers had to call on code and work with developers.

In Make, however, you can easily connect your lead generation platform and CRM together. For instance, when a new lead is captured in LinkedIn, this can trigger the addition of the record to HubSpot, instantly.

Make works with thousands of apps. While LinkedIn offers a variety of useful native lead-capturing capabilities of its own, you may use different or additional solutions. If you work across multiple lead-capture channels, Make can help integrate all of them.

By making a core task like lead harvesting straightforward, Make can then deliver added value by allowing your team to focus on more complex tasks.

Qualify: Prioritize leads automatically using AI

Integrating lead acquisition channels with your CRM is useful - but acting on leads demands more granularity than that.

Every marketer knows that qualifying and prioritizing the leads they have gathered is critical, ensuring that both marketing and sales teams are putting their time and energy into the right prospects.

By leveraging artificial intelligence within a Make scenario, you can auto-magically qualify your leads.

Your leads' LinkedIn profiles contain useful signals - like seniority, company type, size and headcount - that could inform the qualification that drives follow-up prioritization. But how do you make this data actionable?

You may have considered asking ChatGPT to determine the priority for you. But the text response from ChatGPT, an unconnected tool, could not be used to segment your actual CRM.

By plugging ChatGPT's underlying OpenAI technology into your workflow, however, you can output the response, a quality-scored lead, as data that can be added to CRM records as soon as your new contacts are created.

As well as direct access to OpenAI, Make offers a host of AI tools. Harnessing the power of AI in your workflows provides an instant boost to your lead management process. Rather than poring over data and making cognitively-taxing prioritization decisions for each lead, AI can make your leads richer in seconds.

This brings you closer to achieving impactful results for your business, as you gain a clearer understanding of your leads' potential and can focus your efforts where they matter most.

Nurture: Route leads to the right follow-up

Now that you have added qualified leads to your CRM, let's make use of them. Adding some extra modules to your scenario will make smart custom lead nurturing a breeze.

In the example below, the scenario will notify the sales team via Slack about only high-quality leads, so that sales execs can get straight to work on impactful follow-ups.

Handing off sales leads in this way, as soon as they are captured and segmented, ensures that you can seize the best opportunities in record time, maximize conversions and, ultimately, drive business growth.

But not every lead is created equal. To further boost your lead nurturing efforts, you could instead route your lower-quality leads to an email nurture campaign set up in a tool like Mailchimp.

This kind of lead routing and nurturing is a prime example of the tight-knit collaboration between marketing and sales teams that’s made possible through Make. 

Retarget: Use conversion data to hone-in on targets

You’ve now successfully built and expanded a scenario that not only captures and nurtures leads but also strengthens the relationship between your marketing and sales teams. 

However, the journey doesn't end with lead capture and outreach. Make empowers you to close the loop by collecting essential audience and conversion data, transforming it into actionable insights that further drive your targeted marketing efforts.

In this extra scenario, see how you can use the critical audience data that you’ve collected in  HubSpot to retarget leads on your channels, like LinkedIn, Apollo and Facebook.

This is data-driven marketing in action – and the virtuous circle that many marketers dream about.

By feeding conversion data back into your workflow, powering new, targeted campaigns, you can craft highly personalized and relevant content tailored to the specific needs and behaviors of your leads — something we all know can drive performance. 

Get your existing mar-tech working harder

As you can see, Make empowers visionary marketers by streamlining smart lead-capturing, decision-making and routing, as well as offering added flexibility in your workflows.

These workflows are just some examples of how you could use Make’s intuitive automation to seamlessly integrate your existing mar-tech stack and drive business growth. Make extends well beyond driving this virtuous circle in lead capture and processing — it can connect the dots across your entire mar-tech stack.

No matter which tools you use, Make's smart solutions will help you get the most out of your leads in record time. With access to over 1,800 apps, including over 200 popular CRMs out of the box, the platform can help results-driven marketers ensure no lead gets left behind.

Ready to supercharge your growth? Sign up now and begin your journey towards next-level lead management with Make.