With the growing adoption of marketing automation technology, most marketers are focusing heavily on post-lead-gen processes such as nurturing leads and personalizing conversations with prospects. Advances in marketing technology have driven this newfound emphasis, and with good reason — buyers are navigating their own journey, and if they don’t receive the information they need when they need it, they’ll move on. Savvy marketers know this and have adapted their systems and processes according.
However, tech improvements around lead nurturing, scoring and prospect personalization have distracted marketers from the processes by which they acquire leads and prospect data in the first place. Many marketers perceive lead gen as simply the acquisition of raw prospect data — it doesn’t matter how they get it, as long as they get it, at the required volume. Consequently, the lead-gen process remains very manual. This neglect has repercussions that marketers can’t afford to ignore. Making the right impression with potential customers is more important than ever; as buyers do more purchasing research before ever contacting a company, marketers must ensure their initial messages are relevant and impactful. Neglecting the importance of the lead-gen process (think of it as the first audience touch point) is equivalent to making a bad first impression in a job interview. Some mistakes just can’t be undone, and this is a big one — customer acquisition is the growth engine of any business.
CMOs are rightfully investing aggressively in marketing technology, but marketers can no longer afford to rely on inefficient manual processes to acquire the prospect data they inject into these systems. Integrate’s new white paper, “Follow the Money: How to Generate Leads Effectively and Acquire More Customers,” lays out the most common chokepoints in marketers’ pipeline-building efforts and provides step-by-step guidance on ways marketing acceleration technology can help them overcome these challenges for greater return on overall marketing investment.
