Ultimate Guide on Lead Qualification
How you open a sale is every bit as important as how you close it — arguably more important even I dare to say. Before you even get to employing the services of a sales intelligence company, you need to have a firm grasp on whether a certain prospect will turn into a customer in the near future.
A sales intelligence company basically helps you determine the exact right time to reach out to prospects.
The recipe to closing more sales is pursuing only the most viable prospects with the need, authority and budget to purchase your product. This is where lead qualification is important.
So, what is it really?
Sales Lead Qualification
Lead qualification is the process where marketing and sales teams work together to forecast the chances of a prospect turning into a purchase. It occurs at every single stage of the sales journey and ultimately decides if the prospect will be channeled down the sales pipeline.
Let’s dive deeper into lead qualification, shall we?
How It’s Done
Basically, lead qualification is done by lead scoring. Lead scoring is the process of assigning a point of value to a prospect at or near the beginning of the sales pipeline. It often happens before a sales rep even makes a discovery call. Matter of fact, it may firmly deduce whether or not the call is worth having.
Now, before getting on your prospecting software to calculate a lead score, you need to gather some information about the prospect in question. The data you need to collect includes:
Buyer Profile
Under buyer profile you need to ask yourself this: does this prospect fall into your target territory and do they fit your ideal customer profile?
To find this out, you need to include in your landing pages fields that gather the relevant information. Whoever is in charge of this particular step in the process needs to always keep in mind the ideal customer profile.
From this point, you will be able to award points to leads whose responses are in line with your ideal customer profile and take away points from those who don’t. I’ll let you in on a trade secret:
You can award points to prospects who fill in fields that were listed as optional. This seemingly mundane act demonstrates additional interest on behalf of the prospect.
Prospecting software automates and significantly eases the prospecting process.
Company Information
If you are a B2B organization, this one’s for you. You need to know the size of the prospect’s company and its contact information. You can take away or add points according to the size of the company and how it plays into your ideal customer profile.
Online Behavior
The more time a prospect spends on your site, the more likely they are genuinely interested in your product. You could start with tracking page views, length of visits, how frequently the customer visits your site, and downloads over periods of time.
Email Engagement
Another important aspect in sales lead qualification is email engagement. It goes without saying that the act of prospects signing up to your email list doesn’t necessarily mean they are interested in your product.
Open rates and click through rates are a more meaningful indication of genuine interest.
Spam Detection
Bots are becoming smarter and smarter to the point that they can now fill in website forms. As such, it is important to always be on the lookout for spam. One potential red flag is the use of all lowercase letters when filling in website forms.
Using a personal email address instead of a company address could be another indication that the prospects don’t fit your ideal customer profile. These red flags will lead to subtraction of points from the prospect’s lead score but they don’t disqualify them altogether.
Social Media Engagement
Tracking prospect engagement on your social media posts and platforms is another way to calculate a prospect’s lead score. Tracking likes, retweets, shares and clickthrough rates from your posts can determine how engaged a prospect is.
