How to automate your lead generation using sales triggers

Lead generation is crucial for the success of any business. Without sufficient outreach, a company is reliant purely on reputation and luck to draw in new users... not something many companies can count on in these difficult economic times. As a business expands, a growing need will become apparent to continuously develop and enhance lead generation methods and channels to support the company’s growth trajectory. Failing to automate these processes can impede optimisation and growth, which in turn can lead to a subpar return on ad spend (ROAS).

Using lead generation automation in marketing is now well documented in proving return on investment (ROI). It’s critical to identify the most effective tools for automating lead generation and understand why investing in them is essential for your team. But for those who want to step beyond the average automated system, integrating sales triggers into their processes will elevate your lead generation strategy to a fully rounded, warm outreach methodology.

What is lead generation automation?

Automated lead generation is a system of using AI and machine learning-driven tools to build lead generation systems across both inbound and outbound channels. This allows you to remove manual and timely processes from your workload and automate lead generation throughout the whole customer journey.

Manual lead generation processes can be lengthy and eat into a lot of admin time across a week. Sales or marketing professionals would normally source leads through methods such as cold calling, email outreach, or by chasing down referrals. While all of these have their own merits, an automated lead generation process removes the time-intensive element of this task and generates these leads for your sales team automatically.

By clawing back valuable time into the diary, salespeople and marketers can focus more on building relationships and closing deals. With 82% of US customers (and 74% of non-US customers) believing human interaction is key in the buying process (and they want more of it, not less), hands-on time with prospects needs to become central to developing prospects before they’ll consider signing contracts.

Why automate lead generation with sales triggers?

The main benefit of automating lead generation using sales triggers, is that you can streamline your sales process and ensure that you are engaging with potential customers at the right time and with the right messaging.

Sales triggers offer the first point of relevance in the customer journey – offering pre-intent intelligence. This means any sales team can get months ahead of the competition. With an automated process backing them up, they’ll also be cutting down their prospecting time and gaining that time back to spend building relationships with serious prospects. They’ll be using business intelligence to make smarter choices in their outreach, which will result in better conversion ratios and, ultimately, increased revenue.

Automating lead generation

Automating lead generation using sales triggers involves using technology to identify and engage with potential customers based on certain triggers or behaviours that indicate they may be interested in, or in need of, your product or service.

Of course, there are multiple ways to automate lead generation. But whether you’re wanting to set up an automated cold email campaign, or use lead automation tools to identify prospects, using sales triggers in this process will warm those emails up, and make sure it’s only your ICPs that you’re chasing after.

Here are some steps you can take to get the most out of combining automated lead generation and sales triggers:

• Identify sales triggers you want to track – you will need to identify a number of market triggers or behaviours that show a potential customer may be interested in your product or service. This could include things like the company receiving a warning letter, being investigated by a regulator, or carrying out a cost-cutting and restructuring exercise. Each trigger you watch can suggest something different about the position of a company and their need to fulfil certain duties. By monitoring a range of the top sales event triggers, you will be able to track companies at the first point of potential, beating your competition to the line with relevant outreach.
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• Set up your alerts – once you’ve decided which sales triggers will be of most value to you, you’ll need to set up some tracking or monitoring systems to capture this data. To set up alerts and saved searches for your sales triggers, you will need to invest some time in tools such as Google Analytics, Crunchbase, or some market intelligence automation software solutions like Selligence.
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• Organise your leads – you'll need to sort your leads based on the company behaviour they indicate and your tracked sales triggers. This will allow you to target each prospect with a personalised message and show what you can offer, specific to that prospect’s interests and needs. With the understanding of which prospects are interested in what, you’ll be able to use targeted emails, social media ads, and other content pieces to help move your leads through the sales funnel that little bit quicker.
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• Analyse and optimise – by taking the time to review your lead generation alerts and saved search results, you’ll be able to identify areas of improvement and adjust your strategies accordingly to maximise your results. With an automated system in place, you’ll have a constant stream of market intelligence that will help you curate most relevant buying signals to ensure that even if you’ve had a no before, next time it can be a yes.

What are the benefits of automated lead generation?

The end goal for any business is increased revenue and sustainable growth. Automating your lead generation process will help you develop a more streamlined sales funnel, which in turn will result in a steady flow of potential leads into your pipeline. With consistent and reliable sales leads streaming into your funnel, you’ll not only be saving time, optimising work efforts, and focusing your outreach, but combined, these will help boost your sales productivity and ultimately enable more opportunity for increased revenue.

With an automated lead generation process, you’ll see immediate impact in three key areas:

• Time in your diary – with an automated process in place, you’ll gain back time in which you can focus on the important stuff. We all know people buy from people, so use these hours wisely and make human connections. It’s customers that generate revenue, so making them central to your strategy is important to ensure you’re smashing your targets.
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• More leads, more conversions – without the stress of manual processes, an automated system will continually gather leads for you. With a system that never clocks off, you’ll be gathering more leads than you could ever achieve manually. And with more leads, it’s inevitable that means more deals to close too!
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• Better user experience – automated processes can help here in several ways: if you’re not having to manage each prospect manually, none will slip through a crack and get lost or left behind. Pairing your new automated lead gen with sales triggers also means you’ll only be reaching out to the right prospects at the right time. First impressions count, so by only reaching out when it’s relevant, you’ll be sure to hit the right note and impress from first contact.

How to automate lead generation using sales triggers

Depending on how deep your pockets are, there are a huge number of tools out there that can help you automate different parts of the process. Again, whether you are content to stick with intent data, or want to go one step further and get ahead with sales triggers’ pre-intent data, these choices will impact which platforms you’ll want to integrate with. At the most basic level, Google Alerts will collate event trigger data for you and notify you of an event at a company you’re interested in tracking. However, the options are endless for varying automation levels.

Need content simply to grow your email signups? Then using chatbots might be enough of a leg-up for you. However, when it comes to maximising potential from automated lead generation, it really does boil down to the more the merrier. Skimping on your lead generation is false economy - if only done by half, you won't really be saving your sales or marketing teams’ time anyway, and they’ll soon end up resorting back to their old manual ways. Time is money, and in this instance, a sales team needs to be generating more money, not wasting it on processes that can be automated.

For those looking to optimise and simplify their tech stack (or reduce spend on multiple solutions), you’ll need to focus on the market intelligence platforms that can cover multiple bases for you. An all-round solution like Selligence will be your best bet here. Warm outreach (and outreach at the right time) is what sets salespeople apart. By combining Selligence’s sales trigger intelligence and automated lead generation, clients such as The Nudge Group has achieved 12.5 x ROI in just 12 days, supporting its expansion into two new markets.

Don't forget

Sales lead automation and marketing lead automation are becoming increasingly important for businesses to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive world. With prospects citing the human-touch as more important in their decision-making process, reaching out with relevance and personalisation is key to success today. By implementing a system that allows you to generate leads without manually sourcing them, sales and marketing teams can better spend their time on the personal side of relationships and building trust with prospective customers.

Streamlining lead generation processes allows sales teams to work quicker and more efficiently. Low-value manual processes can be replaced by intelligent automation. This means that not only will there be an increase in the number of leads in your funnel, but by using sales triggers, they’ll also be pre-qualified as ICP prospects at the right point in their buying journey for warm outreach.

Want to see how Selligence can streamline your lead generation and outreach? Get in touch for a demo of the Selligence platform and start closing more deals today.