Business owners can sometimes feel like they are on a hamster wheel, asking themselves rhetorical questions like, “is it best to get established as the best in the field or push to expand our existing customer base?” While both are essential components to any business’s success, expanding the customer base through qualifying potential leads is more important since it can be detrimental to your business’s survival.
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What Does Qualifying Potential Leads Mean?
Lead qualifying is a company’s process of determining what potential customers are likely to convert or make a purchase versus those who are not. If overlooked, it can cause a company to waste a lot of time and resources. Good lead qualifying as part of sales and marketing is a multi-step process and strategically leads companies to understand potential leads.
Lead qualifying involves research, asking questions, scoring leads, and data analysis. Of course, there are strategies to qualify leads effectively, and below, you will find two of them.
Align Your Sales and Marketing Team
The sales and marketing teams in most companies are the heartbeat for generating sales that keep companies afloat. According to “The Art of Winning Sales & Marketing Coming Together to Create Indispensable Customer Experiences,” everything about a company operates more concisely when they work together. The strategy of aligning them to qualify potential leads can lead to a fantastic customer journey and profitability for your company.
In addition to the end goal of successfully qualifying leads, there are other benefits to your sales and marketing departments being in alignment and working in tandem to attract and entice potential customers. To align sales and marketing, you should:
1. Have an agreed-upon approach for how you develop leads.
You want the journey to be smooth for customers, and that involves both departments discussing plans to execute sales and revenue strategies effectively. To turn leads into dollars, establish a proven lead nurturing system, and marketing and sales need to do that together.
2. Use professional customer contact centers where experts in sales and marketing are trained on your brand. They work to create personalized conversations about your brand and do so convincingly and with credibility. They have a hands-on, human approach to qualify potential customers, set appointments, provide event support, professionally serve as inbound call centers, provide data analytics clean-up and nurture prospect relationships.
3. Lastly, schedule weekly meetings to keep both departments as cohesive as possible. Have open discussions that foster accountability and encourages working together in the cycle of conversion and sales.
Overall, alignment between sales and marketing facilitates a smoother engagement with customers and is a great strategy to qualify potential leads.
Know What Works and What Doesn’t Work
This is about data and metrics but be wary of letting your company get bogged down with information regarding quality leads that do not matter. The data you collect should tell you everything you need to know about your leads and their challenges; therefore, select metrics right for your company and use them. To help make quality leads that will result in sales, your company should check:
1. Your conversion or win rate will tell you the number of leads you need to get you to your revenue goals.
2. Your funnel leakage to know where and at what rate potential customers fall off in the buying cycle. It’s crucial to pinpoint the stage where customers drop-out throughout your funnel so that you can fix any leaks that you discover.
3. Your lead behavior scoring will identify when leads are heating as you go through the selling process. You want to be prepared to act based on what you observe to not waste time and resources on those who won’t convert or move.
Knowing what works and what doesn’t work is trial and error and will evolve as your business grows. It is an excellent strategy for qualifying potential leads.
Establishing strategies that work for your company will require research, asking questions, scoring leads, and data analysis but will lead to exponential growth. Having a system of strategies on hand to qualify potential leads is detrimental to your companies success. The two strategies listed above are an excellent place to start.