Describe lead generation and qualification
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys helps you plan, automate, and monitor the full customer journey. Prospects travel from discovery, through nurturing, and onward to become marketing-qualified or sales-ready leads. As your organization engages with leads through different marketing initiatives, not all individuals are going to respond the same. Some leads naturally identify with your organization and are more likely to respond to communication they receive. Others aren't as invested and don't respond or engage as often. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys allows you to prioritize leads. You can achieve this using customizable lead scoring rules. These rules help identify the most engaged leads based on their interactions with your marketing campaigns.
With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys, you can:
Create a single view of prospects: You can unify data across contacts, leads, and customers with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys and Dynamics 365 Sales.
Target the right people: You can find, target, and close top accounts with personalized, account-based content and nurture activities.
Prioritize leads: You can create customized lead-scoring models and sales readiness grades that find leads across all touch points easily.
Increase productivity: You can use marketing automation features to give promising leads to the sales team and drive follow-ups automatically.
Boost productivity and simplify collaboration: You can use familiar Office 365 tools, shared calendars, and cross-team visibility to improve the handling of campaigns and leads.
As contacts interact with your marketing initiatives, you generate leads to represent expressions of interest made by those contacts. You might generate a lead manually after a meeting or phone conversation, or you might allow the system to generate the leads automatically.
You generate leads in one of the following ways:
Use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys to create a lead and link it to a new or existing contact manually.
Import leads from a file that you map to a new or existing contact or account manually.
Sync leads from LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and match them to a new or existing contact or create a new linked contact.
Create a lead with the create-lead tile in a customer journey. You can link the leads to either a new or existing contact or account, depending on the tile and customer journey settings.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys can also create a lead when a customer opts in from either a landing page or an event registration. It matches the lead to a new or existing contact or account. Once the leads are created, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys helps you to nurture and prioritize those leads. You can run targeted, multi-channel campaigns, and personalize each customer’s journey to generate more sales-ready leads. By personalizing the customer experience, you can predict the customer’s intent, get a holistic view of your customers, and orchestrate a connected, personalized journey. The following screenshot is a lead qualification screen.
For example, as Contoso Coffee runs it’s A1-100 campaigns, customers engage and interact with the marketing materials being sent. Contoso can assign point values for each interaction. An email open might be five points, registering for a webinar might be 15 points, and so on. Once the customer reaches 100 points, they would be deemed as a sales ready lead and sent to the sales staff.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys's lead management and lead scoring capabilities can be used in both the outbound and real-time marketing modules. The primary difference between them is that with real-time marketing you can use customer interactions to create customized sales activities, such as tasks and phone calls, directly from real-time journeys. Real-time marketing lets you reach out to leads with more individualized attention when they're most likely to engage and show interest in your product or service. This increases your chances of converting leads into customers and driving revenue for your business.
By generating customized sales activities, you can seamlessly integrate your marketing and sales efforts, providing a more cohesive and streamlined experience for your leads and customers. By creating sales activities directly from real-time journeys, you can better track and measure the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize your campaigns for maximum impact.
Another way you can market to individuals more effectively is with contact and lead insights. With lead and contact insights, you see a complete history of how selected leads and contacts have interacted with your marketing initiatives. This can help you to understand what this specific contact is interested in and which types of messages they respond to. Marketers can utilize this information to gain deeper insights into specific decision makers. This helps them target future initiatives more effectively. On the other hand, salespeople can use this information to determine the most effective way to communicate with the same person if they decide to reach out directly.