When a consumer reaches out to your business and expresses interest, they become a lead. In marketing, we call that, “hand raising.”

Unfortunately for small business owners, not all consumers raise their hands in the exact same way. So you’re probably pretty used to getting leads from any number of your marketing channels (lead sources) at any given time.

Common lead sources:
  • Website
  • Social media
  • Online listings and review sites
  • Search and display advertising
  • Email and direct marketing
  • Radio
  • Events
  • Referrals
  • And tons more

The Need for Lead Injection

With that many lead sources, managing leads you generate is cumbersome. Since they don’t all come from the same place, they probably don’t all end up in the same place. Some leads end up in your email inbox, others reach your mobile phone, and many stay housed within the tool you used to generate them.

That leaves you, an already busy business owner, stuck juggling leads just hoping you don’t drop any. Unless you come from the circus, you can’t keep up that juggling act for long.

If you’re tired of leads falling through the cracks, you may have looked into some sort of software, perhaps a customer relationship management (CRM) system, to help you consolidate and manage your leads. CRMs are great for doing just that.

But once you’ve got a CRM in place, how do you funnel leads from your various sources to that tool?

What is lead injection?

You might still be asking yourself, “What is lead injection?” Lead injection (or lead routing, for companies with large sales organizations) is the process of consolidating leads from various sources and funneling them into a single system.

What is lead injection’s biggest benefit? Having all your leads in a single system (and putting them there the moment they find your business) makes it easy for you to turn your leads into customers — paying, long-term customers. You do that by nurturing them with emails, phone calls, special offers and promotions, and more.

Current State of Lead Injection

Getting leads in your CRM (or any other nurture tool you’re using) can be a nightmare. That’s because most of the technology isn’t nearly as advanced as it should be.

Business automation has made great strides in recent years. There are tons of options when it comes to the tools available for marketing automation, text and email automation, social media automation, even online booking, payment processing, SEO, and content curation. (See: Thryv.)

Now think about your leads tools.

You likely use one or more one-off providers like Facebook Lead ads or Google Ads to generate leads. For most of these providers, you set a budget, you bid on terms or phrases your target customer would likely search, and you generate leads in the form of clicks to your website, phone calls, store visits, and more.

If you check out the websites for top search engine marketing (SEM) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers, they talk all about how they’ll get you leads you want. But for the most part, it stops there.

So where do these leads go? Will you get notifications when new leads come in? What do you need to do to access them? What do they know, and not know, about your business? *crickets*

Some advertisers offer integrations to help you get your leads where you need them. But currently, most of these one-off providers don’t work together. That’s a lot of integrations and lead sources to manage.

But when it comes to lead injection, there just aren’t many great options out there.

How to Use Lead Injection

Large corporations invest heavily in and have been using lead injection and lead routing tools for some time. With sales forces spread across geographic areas, they needed a simple way to send leads to different reps quickly. And since they typically have the resources to invest in robust technology, they got one.

Small businesses experience the same need but have yet to get easy access to the same solutions. At Thryv, we created a simple product, Thryv Leads, that takes the guesswork out of investing in advertising, and gives small businesses valuable leads you can turn into lifelong customers. Basically, instead of using multiple lead generation providers, Thryv Leads consolidates these sources with one tool. Then, we use analytics and artificial intelligence to determine which methods perform best for each specific business.

The best part? It plugs directly into Thryv’s small business software, so business owners can see leads the second they come in, and decide how and when to follow up. That’s lead injection, built for small business.

Pro tip: Thryv also integrates with Zapier. So it’s also possible to inject leads from other platforms small businesses just can’t live without. Talk about an end-to-end solution!