Automatic lead qualification saves your company time and resources by moving leads seamlessly through the sales cycle and distributing them when appropriate to your marketing and sales team. In addition, when you strategically use your lead qualification tools in your marketing process, you will see a boost in the quality of the leads in your pipeline and the number of conversions.
Explore five tips for how to use qualification tools in your marketing processes.
Key Takeaways:
- Lead qualification weeds out the poor quality lead so your sales team can focus on the highest quality leads
- Create an ideal customer profile to help you target the highest quality leads in your marketing and scoring
- Aligning your marketing and sales teams ensures you use a lead-scoring model that matches both teams’ goals
Why Are Lead Qualification Tools Important?
About 73% of leads aren’t sales-ready. For example, the lead might be a good fit but isn’t ready to buy because they still have concerns. Your lead may also never be ready because they aren’t a good fit for your company’s products.
Lead qualification tools save you time and resources, so your sales agents are investing in leads that aren’t ready to buy. Instead, you only send the highest quality leads to your sales department. Then they can focus on those prospects with a high chance of conversion.
Source: Salespanel
5 Tips for Using Your Lead Qualification Tools
Use these five tips for maximizing the return from your lead qualification software.
1. Build an Ideal Customer Profile
What does a qualified lead look like?
Before diving into your lead qualification process, you must use your tools to create a buyer’s persona. This is an ideal customer profile, along with their wants, needs, and behaviors.
Your profile should cover four main areas:
- Budget: How much does your ideal customer need to have available to afford your products?
- Authority: Who can make purchase decisions?
- Need: What specific customer problems do your products solve, or needs do they fulfill?
- Timing: What behaviors show that the time is right to purchase your products?
This ideal customer profile will guide you in identifying who is ready and able to purchase your products. It will also guide your qualification tools in identifying similar personas.
The best tools for creating a buyer persona are data collection tools that provide customer insights and show patterns of past buyers so you can target customers with similar behaviors.
2. Generate Quality Leads
Lead qualification can start before you even attract leads. When marketing, more isn’t always better. For example, generating ten new leads and converting seven of them is far better than generating 100 new leads but only converting five of those leads.
However, generating quality leads isn’t easy, as 37% of marketers say it’s one of their biggest challenges.
To improve your qualification process, begin with your lead generation tactics and find ways to weed out low-value leads before you add them to your database. Then, use your buyer personas and marketing automation to target those quality leads by creating content and filtering leads based on those personas.
For example, when you have downloadable assets on your website, you can customize the fields on the download form to ask qualification questions such as their profession or use for your products. Adding two or three qualification questions will help you identify the most interested leads as you capture their information in your system.
3. Track Your Customers
Tracking customers is how you will collect the data you need for qualifying your customers. Automated lead tracking enables you to identify each touchpoint, action, and interaction.
For example, your system will record when a lead reaches out to customer support for an answer, when they visit your website, and even when they stop by a physical franchise location.
However, for the most accurate lead tracking, you must use omnichannel strategies to collect data across different channels. For example, 52% of marketers use at least three different channels in their strategies. Therefore, your tracking should be able to monitor your customers across each digital channel in addition to in-person visits to your franchise location.
4. Use Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is assigning a value to customer behavior and characteristics. When leads reach a specified point value, your lead routing system automatically sends them to your sales team to close.
There are two scoring areas your tools look at: explicit and implicit scoring.
Explicit scoring assigns value to demographic information like location, budget, and profession. Then, implicit scoring gives value to behavior such as visiting your website, opening emails, and attending webinars.
In addition to the positive points your leads receive, you can also assign negative points. For example, a lead that visits your website may seem like a potential buyer. However, if they click on your career page, you will want to assign a negative point, showing they aren’t interested in purchasing products but rather in employment opportunities.
Source: TotalProductMarketing
Automatically performing lead scoring is more precise and faster than sorting through leads. Automatic tools keep you consistent and can identify behaviors and patterns you might have otherwise missed. To further improve your lead scoring system, align your sales and marketing teams to ensure you’re assigning scores to behaviors consistent with your sales team’s data.
5. Nurture Your Leads
You can generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% less cost when you implement lead nurturing strategies in your qualification process. Lead nurturing collects those leads that didn’t score high enough yet to move to sales but still have potential and slowly builds a relationship with them. It’s also where you can remove any roadblocks that might keep those leads from buying.
For example, entering leads into an email drip campaign that slowly builds trust and creates demand for your product warms up your leads and makes them more willing to listen to your sales team’s offers. In addition, when they convert, they make 47% larger purchases than regular leads.
Use automatic lead tracking software to track your leads and send them relevant offers along their journey to improve your lead nurturing and qualification process.
Your All-in-One Lead Qualification Tool
MXTR offers an all-in-one lead qualification solution for franchises that allows you to automate lead qualification and collect insights on your customers to improve your targeting and scoring. You can also track them along their journey to boost your personalized marketing efforts.
Schedule a demo to see how marketing automation improves your lead qualification and conversion rate.
Featured Image: istockphoto
