Oracle Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management 2017

One of the most strategic technology investments made by marketing and sales teams today is a marketing automation platform that is sophisticated enough for their unique needs, but flexible enough to easily integrate with their customer relationship management (CRM) system. Marketing and Sales teams strive daily for tighter alignment, better lead quality, and customer experiences that engage their customers down a complete journey that ends in a sale. In Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management report, they evaluated 15 providers on CRM lead management criteria and have positioned Oracle in the Leaders quadrant.

Why use CRM Lead Management technologies?

Gartner states, “The fundamental goal of lead management applications is to deliver higher-value qualified opportunities to the sales team at exactly the right time.” Gartner goes on to explain, “Companies use lead management applications primarily to support the sale of "considered purchases" — any product or service that represents a significant investment for the customer and typically involves complexity that requires in-depth research. These sales are made primarily by companies selling in a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) capacity, but we're seeing increased usage of lead management applications in business-to-consumer (B2C) environments where individual products or services require careful customer consideration (for example, automobiles, insurance policies, investment accounts).”

Why Oracle?

The biggest barriers to implementing adaptive, personalized programs that engage customers throughout the whole customer life-cycle usually lie in the limitations of the technology or platforms being used. With the right depth and breadth of features and integration, marketing and sales teams can collaborate to touch every part of the customer experience, driving better leads and ROI. 

We believe Oracle Eloqua is continually evolving to solve even the most complex lead management and campaign challenges, at scale. Eloqua’s deep functionality and native integrations allow marketers to execute across channels, monitor behavior and intent, and score leads. Extensive 3rd party integrations with leading CRMs and workflow triggers continue to help sales and marketing stay in synch and succeed in their lead conversion goals from first touch, to close of sale, to customer advocacy.

How To Do Lead Management That Improves Conversion

In this post, I’m going to focus on how to do lead management that increases sales conversion.

Here’s why:

First, the average conversion rate of marketing qualified leads to actual revenue conversion is low. You may be wondering: how low?

According to Forrester, top performers convert 1.54% of marketing qualified leads to revenue. And average performers turn less than 0.75% of leads into closed deals.

Source: Forrester US and Europe B2B Marketing Tactics and Benchmarks Online Survey

Also, marketers see generating high-quality leads as their number one business challenge according to The 2017 State of Digital Marketing Report published by DemandWave.

What’s the bottom line? Increasing lead quality or quantity won’t help unless you can manage your leads well throughout their journey.

Finally, LeanData’s 2017 study on lead routing and management found 57% of respondents questioned if their lead management workflow creates a positive customer experience. In other words, respondents weren’t sure if people were happy with how they were being treated.

Clearly, there’s room for improvement.



In this interview between Carlos Hildalgo and Carla Johnson on Finding Inspiration to Design Customer Experience Johnson states, “To create better experiences, we have to understand better the experiences we’re trying to create and then think differently about how we design them.”

Have you thought about the experience you want to create for your potential customer so as to optimize your lead management approach?

To increase lead quality and quantity to convert more customers, ultimately, you need to optimize your lead management.