Streamlining Lead Management With the Right Integrations

Businesses must adapt to the ever-changing economic and technology landscapes in order to maintain a stable revenue stream. The efficient generation of high-quality leads is crucial for their success. Throughout history, sales and marketing organizations, as well as their respective companies, have relied on various systems and software to manage leads and gather valuable insights effectively. Ryan Johnson, the Chief Product Officer at CallRail, explains how this approach allows marketers to optimize strategies in real-time, but only with the support of a robust and integrated technological ecosystem.

When the various systems used to house valuable customer data don’t always communicate effectively with one another, it makes an already challenging process even more difficult. Disparate data sources and platforms that don’t enable the seamless transfer of information can create a lackluster and even frustrating experience for users. All of this can prove a detriment to the company’s bottom line and brand reputation via missed leads, lost revenue, inefficient spending and reporting inaccuracies.

Integrations between high-touch systems within the tech stack make data more accessible and actionable, ultimately leading to better business outcomes across the board. Let’s explore how integrations improve lead management and various tactics your company can use to identify the right integrations to serve your needs best.

Supercharging Lead Management

Today’s marketing and sales teams need the ability to capitalize on every lead that comes in the door. That’s just as true for leads that don’t convert as it is for those that do – inside every interaction with a potential customer (from phone calls to form submissions) lives valuable data that can help inform sales, marketing, and product strategy moving forward.

But when that data lives in systems that don’t talk to or integrate with one another, the lead management process becomes jumbled, tedious, and difficult to navigate, especially at scale. It forces employees to spend their precious time searching for the information they need to do their jobs rather than focusing on revenue-generating activities.

Think about the experience we provide our customers when up-to-date details aren’t readily available. If someone in the middle of the sales funnel is chatting with a rep, but their information isn’t in the system, they’ll walk away feeling like the company doesn’t care about them or solve their problems.

Personalization has shifted in recent years from a competitive differentiator to the standard way of doing business. Customers have come to expect that when they pick up the phone to chat with a potential vendor, whether it’s a publicly traded company or small to medium-sized business (SMB), they can resume the conversation they had during their last interaction.

In short, teams need to make every lead count. The way to accomplish this is by enriching the way their systems communicate with each other and eliminating any friction they experience.

How, then, do you determine which integrations to prioritize?

Choosing the Right Integration for Lead Management

At the end of the day, choosing the right integration boils down to how much value you’re able to deliver to your end customers. Their needs and expectations should be the primary lens through which you evaluate every potential integration.

There is a veritable ocean of possible partnerships your company can make, so it’s absolutely critical to have conversations with your customers, both broadly and in terms of their specific industry, about the tools they use on a daily basis and any points of friction between your platform and others on which they rely.

If your company caters to customers across several different industries, vertical-specific integrations will prove incredibly useful. First, identify which industries represent the largest proportions of your customer base: does your company cater overwhelmingly to folks in the home services space? The legal sector? What tools do these professionals use, and how compatible are they with your platform? What feedback and/or requests have you received from customers with regard to how your software interacts with the rest of their tech stack?

Leaning into vertical-specific integrations will demonstrate to your users that you are intimately familiar with their pain points and are committed to their individual success. Furthermore, by getting in touch with those customer workflows, you’ll be able to simplify the use and transfer of data between systems – making processes like lead management easier for your customers and your customers’ customers.

Technical Feasibility

The secondary lens through which you should evaluate new integrations hinges on technical capabilities. If integration isn’t technically feasible or performant, it may cause your customers and your business more harm than good. As such, it’s imperative not just to search for new integrations to implement but also to improve existing ones continuously.

This is where customer feedback becomes indispensable. Look for patterns of customers reporting hiccups with certain integrations. If something regularly breaks, doesn’t work, or doesn’t support the transfer of data as intended, it may do the exact opposite of what the integration aims to achieve and complicate things for your end users.

On the bright side, we’re currently seeing an explosion of tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline workflows across every industry. The improvements AI stands to make to lead management, in particular, are exciting, to say the least. AI has the ability to improve how systems communicate with one another and surface insights that would otherwise go unnoticed. Companies should examine how they’re currently using AI within their proprietary tools and explore how to make it available within existing integrations.

Furthermore, we’re currently only able to do one-by-one direct integrations with new systems. As AI continues to advance, will it simplify the process of hooking into other systems? Could it potentially make it easier for us to manage, deploy, and enhance integrations? Businesses should keep a close eye on the progression of AI and regularly evaluate how emergent capabilities can help them improve their lead management strategy, integrations, and broader operations.

Deliver More Value to Your Customers

As your customer base faces ongoing economic uncertainty, identifying any means possible to solve their immediate needs and challenges should become priority #1. With customer success as your north star, you’ll be able to make strategic decisions about growing your ecosystem that prove mutually beneficial to your customers and your organization.

Introducing new integrations can thus dramatically decrease your churn rates because you’re meeting customers in the platforms they already use to simplify their workflows.

Improving customers’ lead management process via smart integrations is a powerful strategy that will ultimately help everyone involved grow revenue. Intelligent and methodical integrations can, therefore, give your company a needed advantage in today’s crowded and uncertain marketplace.