How to Boost Your Agency’s Business with CRM Lead Generation

Today’s agencies face a more complex business ecosystem than ever, with vast data required to make decisions, find leads, close deals, and deliver high-quality services.

The tools of the past—spreadsheets, folders, inboxes—are no longer sufficient for ambitious, growth-minded agencies. Customer relationship management (CRM) software replaces many solutions and pulls their functionality into one convenient dashboard. CRM lead generation is the best way to find, nurture, and manage leads in a streamlined, user-friendly manner. The value for agencies is clear: more leads, more closes, and less time spent on cumbersome administrative tasks. 

In this blog post, we’ll empower you to grow your agency and improve your customer lead management with the power of CRM lead generation. You’ll learn why CRMs matter, how they can help your business thrive, how to use them, and challenges to be aware of as you set up your agency’s lead generation system.

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What Is CRM Lead Generation?

CRM lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting prospective customers by leveraging CRM tools.

It involves using your team’s CRM system to track prospect and client interactions, analyze behavior, and streamline communications to convert prospects into loyal customers faster and at a lower cost.

By consolidating customer information into one lead gen CRM, agencies can create more granular targeted marketing campaigns based on real-time data. The best CRMs for lead generation also simplify monitoring engagement through detailed analytics, providing valuable lead-ranking insights and fostering more personalized messaging. 

Since your agency’s sales pipeline likely includes many lead sources, storing them all in a single lead generation database dramatically reduces administrative burdens while letting you focus on getting more leads and effectively moving them through the funnel to conversion.  

Why Is CRM Lead Generation Important?

There’s no shortage of tools out there promising to simplify your business and help you make more money: CRM lead generation tools deliver in several critically important ways:

• Growing agency revenue: CRMs make it easy to visualize your lead generation funnel in one place, making it easy to prioritize high-value prospects and grow revenue faster. 
• Understanding customer needs: CRM data provides insights into customer behavior and preferences. Using data to refine your messaging helps you meet your customers where they are and provide value based on real needs.
• Improving customer relationships: Excellent customer relationship management sets average agencies apart from great ones. Through your lead gen CRM, your team can deliver more personalized engagement, which helps foster long-term client relationships. 
• Support more effective marketing strategies: Lead acquisition channels from email lead generation to content marketing lead generation and beyond deliver better results when agencies craft resonant, targeted campaigns. Lead generation and CRMs work hand in hand by providing the audience insights needed to take your campaigns to the next level.

Benefits of CRM Lead Generation

CRM lead generation offers a multitude of benefits for agencies—implementing this tool is a no-brainer if you want to grow your agency:

Improved Targeting and Lead Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are improved in two ways. Firstly, CRMs help prioritize high-quality leads, so you can focus your sales efforts on leads that are most likely to convert and deliver high value to your agency.

Secondly, by providing data that informs better-targeted SEO lead gen, ads, email, and other campaigns, your overall marketing strategy will see a conversion lift.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

Happy customers are long-term customers, and long-term customers are the foundation of a thriving agency with healthy recurring revenues. 

Personalized, timely interactions build trust and enhance satisfaction, fostering loyalty and promoting valuable repeat business.

Simplified Sales Processes

CRM lead generation takes the pressure off sales and marketing teams by helping them automate previously time-consuming tasks. Automated follow-ups and reminders ensure no opportunities are missed, and centralized data access improves team collaboration.

Challenges of CRM Lead Generation

Integrating your new CRM and lead generation can present some challenges, but being aware of them will help you choose the right solution for your agency. These challenges include: 

• Data quality issues: Inaccurate or outdated data can hinder targeting efforts. Regular data cleansing and validation practices help maintain the integrity of customer information, and the best CRMs for lead generation have this functionality built in.
• Lack of integration: Multiple lead sources are the norm today. Unintegrated systems get in the way of efficiency, so it’s essential to choose a CRM platform that connects seamlessly not just with your data source but also with your marketing tools, like your email marketing platform.
• Sales team resistance: Adoption resistance usually stems from a lack of familiarity or perceived extra workload. Be sure to schedule robust training to help your team understand that, to the contrary, CRM lead generation will decrease their workload while helping them reach goals faster. 

10 Steps for CRM Lead Generation

Build a lead generation plan that does the heavy lifting of lead capture and management for your agency by following these steps. 

1. Define Your Target Audience

Identifying your ideal target customer is an essential first step for generating high-quality leads.  If you don’t know who you want to market to, you won’t have a North Star to guide the rest of your efforts, so don’t skip this phase.

Use demographic, geographic, and behavioral data to create detailed buyer personas that you’d love to work with

What does their company do? What are their values? How big is their business? What are their goals? Are you focusing on local lead generation or an international audience?

Answering these questions helps you craft marketing messages and campaigns that will resonate with decision-makers who most closely resemble your dream client.

2. Create Compelling Content

Content that addresses your audience’s needs and challenges and provides valuable solutions is key to capturing their attention.

Blog posts, white papers, webinars, and videos are all examples of content that can serve as powerful lead magnets for your CRM lead generation efforts.

Make sure your content is relevant to the audience, informative—that is, don’t recycle content they can already find in a million other places—and positions your business as an industry leader.

3. Optimize Landing Pages and Forms

Lead generation landing pages should be optimized for conversions, with concise and persuasive messaging that aligns with your brand, your value proposition, and the audience’s needs. Your content drives traffic to your landing pages and forms, but if these aren’t optimized, you risk losing leads at this stage.

It’s generally best to simplify your forms, collecting only essential information to encourage sign-ups. This might be just a name, company, and email address.

Once live, A/B test designs and copy to improve conversion rates on your lead generation website and landing pages.

4. Leverage Social Media

Social media platforms are valuable sources of leads for many agencies. 

You don’t have to be on every platform under the sun: identify the platforms where your audience is most active, and use these to create content and run ads. It’s equally important to engage with audiences on social media since this builds trust and community.

There’s a difference between lead generation vs. demand generation, and often, your activities on social media will support both goals. Be intentional with both types of content, providing a mix of buzz-generating posts and more targeted sales-oriented content.

Social media management can consume vast amounts of staff time, so this may be a good area for lead generation outsourcing. 

Tip: Partner with Vendasta to rebrand and resell AI-powered social media management software. This tool helps you manage thousands of client accounts, streamline workflows, and unlock revenue opportunities.

5. Use Email Marketing

Segmented, personalized email marketing campaigns help you target prospects at various stages of your lead generation funnel.

Automate follow-ups to save time and keep communication consistent—while you’ll spend some time refining and optimizing them, the beauty of email marketing is that a great deal of it is automated.

6. Use Lead Scoring

Use a CRM lead generation solution that has built-in lead scoring. This helps prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert, so your team can focus where they’ll likely have the greatest return based on lead generation metrics like engagement level and purchase intent.

7. Automate Workflows

Automating workflows within your CRM system reduces manual tasks. Set up triggers that automatically send follow-up emails, assign leads to appropriate team members, or notify your sales reps when leads reach certain engagement levels.

8. Monitor Engagement and Behavior

Keep an eye on how leads interact with your website, landing pages, social media platforms, and any other integrated channels.

This data helps you identify your most successful content and channels, so you can double down your budget and effort where you’re seeing the best results.

Check out this clip from Vendasta’s CRO Brendan King on the Conquer Local podcast providing some insights into the power of integration for marketing success:

9. Provide Personalized Communication

Personalization is the name of the game in digital marketing today. Using CRM lead generation makes it easy to capitalize on this reality For example, you can use CRM data to address leads by name and acknowledge their specific interests based on behavioral data.

10. Measure and Refine Your Strategy

Conversion rates are essential to getting the most out of your CRM. Review things like conversion rates, email open rates, and landing page engagement to identify areas for improvement. This helps you avoid spending too much time and effort on campaigns you may be emotionally attached to but that aren’t delivering results. 

Things to Avoid in CRM Lead Generation

Stick to lead generation best practices by avoiding these activities that can negatively impact your results: 

• Purchasing leads: Low-quality, purchased leads often result in poor conversion rates and harm your brand’s reputation. In some jurisdictions, contacting them may be in violation of the law.
• Neglecting data privacy: Failing to secure data or obtain consent can result in fines and lost trust.
• Generic or spammy communication: Impersonal messaging alienates prospects, damaging customer relationships and lowering engagement rates. People get a lot of marketing messaging, so respect your audience’s time by providing value.