The process of turning a potential buyer into a real one can be lengthy and tricky. Here, a marketing automation tool for leads comes to the aid of business owners and marketers. It ensures prompt and high-quality processing, assessment, qualification, and distribution of potential customer contacts.

A ResearchGate study has identified additional strengths of marketing automation. Among them are:

• Time savings of repetitive tasks (49%)
• Personalized communication (49%)
• Improved efficiency/ ROI (45%)

Source: ResearchGate

Automated tools aiming to streamline the lead management process also offer features like lead distribution. In this article, we will discuss it in more detail, along with strategies for organizing secure handling of personal data.

Lead Distribution – a Crucial Component of Successful Sales

What is lead distribution? It means redirecting a potential customer to a specific sales representative from your company. Each lead in your sales funnel has its distinctive features. Therefore, you and your team need to build a service to match its unique needs, problems, goals, and pains. This approach significantly increases the chances of turning a prospect into a loyal buyer.

By assigning specific groups of leads to corresponding sales agents, you increase the percentage of successfully closed deals. Thus, you can boost conversions, expand the pool of repeat customers, and maximize company profits. To achieve these goals more efficiently and quickly, it's crucial to leverage the capabilities of automation.

Automated Lead Distribution Strategies

Thanks to automation, there's no need for manual data entry and verification as data enrichment tools can automate this for you. Therefore, your customer databases will contain only accurate and up-to-date information. Moreover, the risk of errors due to human factors is reduced, ensuring data accuracy. That allows you to set up an effective lead distribution strategy among sales agents and increase conversion rates.

Let's delve into four popular potential customer routing strategies:

1. Round robin: This solution automatically distributes leads to each sales representative in a queue. This ensures an even workload for your team but complicates distribution based on the agents' skill levels. Nevertheless, it is the most straightforward marketing automation strategy, allowing quick setup of potential customer routing.
2. Cherry pick: This strategy gives sales representatives more freedom. They can independently choose leads from the common pool to guide them through the sales funnel to deal closure. It is essential to note that this method is designed for a pool of qualified leads.
3. Specialized region: This strategy divides potential customers into groups based on location. Leads are assigned to regional sales representatives who are more informed about location-specific client characteristics.
4. Shotgun approach: It allows grouping sales agents based on their strengths, experience, or skill sets. On top of that, it enables the most accurate matching of a sales agent to a lead and aids them in guiding the inbound leads down the sales funnel.

When implementing any marketing automation strategy in your business, it is also important to consider the technical features and characteristics of lead routing systems.

Lead Distribution System Opportunities for Your Business

Technologies that automate simple daily processes become a robust alternative to traditional ways of handling and routing leads. For instance, they guarantee lead distribution for efficient conversions through features such as:

• Lead capture: This feature allows you to gather leads from various sources and redirect them to the appropriate sales representatives.
• Lead tracking: The program records which type of leads come from which source in your system. Analyzing this data helps form an effective marketing campaign and improves conversion.
• Lead scoring: This function helps assess the readiness level of a potential customer to close a deal.
• Lead filtering: The solution enables your employees to receive only relevant leads ready for purchase, reducing the time to convert customers and increasing the productivity of your sales representatives.

How Marketing Automation Solutions Help Efficiently Distribute Leads

Lead management software comes in handy to establish lead routing so that they reach the right specialist. Such a solution helps:

• Automate document flow, freeing up employees' time for personal client communication.
• Store and instantly provide potential customer data to sales representatives.
• Automate and evenly distribute leads among the most promising sellers.
• Qualify and disqualify potential customers, automatically converting them into deals.
• Provide tools for business analytics to obtain more reliable lead data and attributions.
• Collect information about potential customers from various sources (website, social media, email, etc.).

Digital tools automate lead processing and distribution and with the knowledge of their benefits and drawbacks and a thoughtful implementation strategy, they enhance your company's protection against a cyber attack.

Why Is Cybersecurity Important in the Lead Distribution Process?

As a marketing automation tool, the software will contain a vast amount of data about your potential clients. Negligence in handling your leads' confidential information can lead to significant reputational and financial losses. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure the security of your systems and implement cyber-informed strategies in deploying marketing automation platforms.

Statista states that cybercrimes caused global business losses of $8.15 trillion in 2023. Experts believe this figure will continue to grow yearly, reaching a record $13.82 trillion by 2028. Hence, both small and large enterprises are currently concerned about protecting themselves from virtual criminals.

Source: Statista

Note that when using any marketing automation tool, it is important to ensure cybersecurity. The software connects to various sources over the network and may integrate with other corporate systems. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that it has reliable and up-to-date protection against unauthorized access or hacker attacks.

Let's explore the cybersecurity measures you need to take to protect data in marketing automation.

1. Regular Updates of Lead Management Software

Providers release updates for various reasons, including enhancing the protective features of their products. For example, they may add advanced capabilities to scan for malicious components in the system. Therefore, keeping your lead routing software up to date and conducting regular cybersecurity audits guarantees an adequate level of data protection.

2. Data Backup

Malicious programs used by hackers can encrypt or delete data. Therefore, it is important to have backups of your corporate information and customer databases. Secure backup must be regular.

This way, you will always have a clone containing the latest added or modified information. All of this will allow you to quickly restore the lead management process and avoid the loss of critically important information.

3. Use of Secure Data Storage

Information about potential customers may be stored locally with your sales agents. However, monitoring how up-to-date and reliable antivirus protection is for each of them is quite challenging, especially if you have remote employees. To ensure secure information storage, use special USB drives with encryption. They provide maximum data protection, including storage and transmission.

4. Implementation of Licensed Digital Products

You may find a free lead-generation marketing automation tool in the digital product market. However, the desire to save money can lead to problems related to information leakage or loss. That, in turn, can cost the company much more than purchasing licensed software. Public solutions may lack professional support and protection compared to commercial ones.

Also, free products often have standard features and low customization levels, causing issues with secure data storage and the tool's integration into your IT infrastructure.

5. Employee Training on Cybersecurity Rules

For comprehensive protection against malware, it is crucial to conduct awareness campaigns among sales agents, marketers, and other employees. Phishing attacks and requests from ransomware programs can be well-disguised as innocuous things, such as an email asking to visit a website. Therefore, training your company's staff is essential to a cyber-informed strategy and the ability to increase conversions.

Considering these recommendations will ensure a high level of protection for the personal data of leads. It will also help you reduce the risk of information leakage regarding your company's activities, marketing strategies, and other business plans.

Are You Ready for the Secure Implementation of Automated Marketing Tools?

When dealing with personal data, it is crucial to adhere to cybersecurity principles to prevent leakage or theft of information. For businesses, such a situation could mark the beginning of the end. Therefore, while implementing lead distribution methods, carefully consider a strategy for protecting corporate information.

Initiate the process with a cybersecurity risk assessment. Then, select appropriate tools and technologies. These may include regular updates, licensed antivirus software, backup systems, secure USB drives, and more. It is also essential to enhance cybersecurity awareness among your sales agents, especially if they work remotely and have access to potential customer data from personal computers.

This way, you can prevent hacker attacks and the infiltration of corporate software by malicious viruses.