By in-house tool you mean one that I can't buy anywhere? 😉. I am currently looking for a good CRM that has awesome lead nurturing capabilities.
Haha, yes something like that. Pretty much like what Colan did.
Except ours used the BrightLocal APIs.
Regarding the CRM, it doesn't really have to be one till it becomes an engaged lead really. You can start off by using an automated sequence for the audit requests. I know we put each lead in a different bucket of emails depending on how good their audit turned out (or not).
So, say someone's audit returned very bad results and there's lots of optimization required, they go in a "High Chance" bucket that has a series of 7-10 emails (I forget the exact cadence)
If the audit returned great results, then they go in a "Low Chance" bucket that has a series of say 5 emails over the next 90 days. It's not aggressive by any means, and also doesn't piss off the lead. The CTAs are also not as prominent like the ones in "High Chance" buckets.
We used two tools during that period, Pardot and AutoPilotHQ (which I think has a CRM component) - anyway, when a lead hit prime status (always opens emails, clicks CTAs or reads blogs or asks to get an ebook), it would push the lead information into the CRM (which was/is SalesForce) along with auto-creating a task for a sales guy to reach out to the lead.
At one point we experimented with using SalesForce for the nurturing component but it was a big fail (cumbersome setup).
However, I recently realized you can automate this process (to run a tight ship) by using email tools like Yesware and once you get the hang of it, get the big tools in. There's another great tool that does great email cadence as well, it's called outreach.io
Hope this helps!