The one trend we have been following consistently in business to buiness marketing technology is how it’s moving towards being able to identify prospects for your business even before you have spoken to them. Right from lead data capturing, lead nurturing to lead qualification, technology has been evolving to help automate the demand generation process and help marketing and inside sales work smarter.

Website lead capturing for building marketing data has been right at the forefront of most marketers strategy to build in inbound leads this year. It’s scalable, the leads are more qualified and often already partly educated on your offering. Whether they come from form fills, landing pages, rss subscriptions, webinar registrations or downloads, these are now regarded as some of the most qualified and actionable kinds of leads that can be generated. But these are business visitors who have committed enough to give you their contact details and are ready to speak to you. How about the more casual visitors who are interested in reading about your offering or company but perhaps not warmed up enough to fill in any information. Do you have to let these slip through?

Not any more. There are a few very useful applications which not only allow you to track the volume of visitors and their content viewing patterns but also go a step further to help you identify which company those visitors came from which effectively capture potential leads from a simple visit and not necessarily a form fill.  Netfactor’s Visitor Track - Web Leads Technology is one forerunner in this field and helps capture visitors to your company website and also translate which company they are from. Some others include OpenTracker and LeadsExplorer which help identify companies who have been showing an active interest in your website. Although it may not always yield completed data such as the actual visitors name and title if coupled with a data append and lead qualification service, these can be great ways for sourcing more leads which can be nurtured and then developed into actionable business leads.

This is certainly a step in the right direction for marketing automation and online lead generation in making the process more intelligent.

The last 3-4 years have seen a lot of buzz around marketing automation tools and software as CRM technology also advance. Products such as Eloqua, Marketo, Soffront and Marketbright are just some of the names that come to mind when you talk about marketing automation software. I recently read a post which mentioned that most large enterprises over the last year have spent a significant portion of their budget and attention towards marketing automation and adding on marketing automation capabilities to their CRM to batch process activities like campaign management, lead scoring, nurturing, email campaigns and more. While many associate these wil larger marketing organizations and software for larger companies who handle larger volumes of data, this is not entirely an accurate view.

Here at ReadyContacts we have been using marketing automation tools simply because we are a smaller team of marketing and inside sales people and it just helps us do more with less. A combination of available software and internally developed automation tools helps us execute on everday tasks like assigning leads to the appropriate people, campaign setup and management, email campaigns, reports and follow ups a lot more efficiently. Running campaigns and lead nurturing for example become a lot more streamlined when you manage data using automation tools. Once you have identified which parts of your process you can use automation for and narrowed down on the best software for it you will find that you can do more with less. Isn’t that what its about?