Lead generation is a numbers game.
As a marketer or a salesperson, you know what it takes to generate as many leads as possible.
What you may be missing is how to qualify those leads best to make sure they're ready for your sales process.
Naturally, marketing and sales must work together on lead qualification to be more productive and drive better results.
After all, the less time you spend trying to qualify leads, the more time you can spend nurturing, converting, and generating revenue.
For that reason, I've put three easy steps to qualify leads better.
Research Your Leads
While marketing and sales tools are useful for nurturing and converting, there's a value and advantage with good old fashioned detective work.
In other words, you can research your leads and do a little investigation before contacting them.
Social media is your friend when it comes to learning more about your leads.
LinkedIn and Facebook are hallmark business tools in today's online climate, and you have no shortage of information about your lead, their company, or their personality.
Naturally, you'll want to focus on your lead's online presence: their company website, LinkedIn page, and Facebook Business Pages are great places to start.
From these starting points, you can begin to formulate a conversation about how you can help your potential buyer be better at what they do.
Having a direct, honest discussion with someone based on quality research will go a long way toward initiating conversations and converting.
Plus, if you show that you put in the work to learn about them, you'll do a great deal in helping them have confidence in what you offer.
Score them with your existing benchmarks
Lead scoring, in a nutshell, qualifies how you'll approach your lead and helps you personalize targeted messaging.
It includes data related to the person, their activities, and their organization.
It's more than just the title, role, industry, company size and region.
Knowing about their activities and what they like and are passionate about can help you qualify them better and talk with them in a more personalized way.
You can also track their behaviour as they browse your website, including your content and whether or not they enter into one of your sales funnels.
Intuitive lead generation software can assist you in tracking individual users as they peruse your online presence. As a prospective lead browses more and more of your content, gaining more and more information about your products and services, they accumulate a score.
The total score helps you quantify the quality of your lead.
From a marketing standpoint, you can see how compelling and captivating your Copywrite is while monitoring the flow of a visitor's movements throughout your online presence.
On the other side, sales can watch as leads matriculate through marketing and swoop in when the time is right.
The beauty of lead scoring is that once a lead hits a specific score, as determined by you, from your existing buyers, they are considered ready for sales.
They're qualified, prepared for the sales process, and to have a conversation about buying.
Boost the quality of your data
One thing that can help qualify your leads is to boost the quality of the leads' data.
When it comes to lead generation, each lead should have a data profile from which you'll be able to draw a wealth of information.
Sometimes, the quality of data can get messy, after all, since we're often dealing with some degree of computer automation, not everything always comes out perfect.
The quality of the data you have on your leads will directly correlate to how sales-ready a given lead is.
If possible, update these profiles in your CRM as you learn more about each of your leads.
If you perform detective work and find useful nuggets of information about a lead, then update their profile to reflect those findings.
The more information you can collect about your leads, the more effective your sales process can be when the time comes to make that initial call.
It's essential to be careful here, though, as you can spend unnecessary time filling out trivial details about your lead. While more details are better when it comes to sales, be sure to focus exclusively on the data that will make your sales team the most successful.
After all, your goal is to optimize the time you have and not let a qualified lead slip away.
