What are the characteristics of a sales-qualified lead?
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 6:28 am
How to recognize a junk lead and differentiate it from a cold prospect that can be nurtured with marketing actions.
Which sources and media usually attract better leads (LinkedIn, Google Ads, Webinars, E-books...) and require immediate attention from Sales.
2. Make lead qualification an essential part of your process
To do this, you need to know exactly what motivates your prospects to continue to the next stage of the pipeline. This will help you predict how their journey will go through the purchasing process, and it will be easier to measure the impact of each sales action at the different stages of the conversion funnel.
This undoubtedly represents a great benefit for the entire sales team, which will be mobile phone saudi arabia mobile number directory able to focus on closing more deals in less time and at a lower cost, discarding unhelpful leads from the start.
3. Ask the right questions
It is necessary to know which questions are the right ones that will allow us to take our leads to the next stage of the pipeline. Only then will you be able to determine how serious each prospect is, and how close they are to making a purchase decision.
Being specific and focused is key. To do this, following the BANT model (budget, authority, need, timeline) usually works very well, as it allows us to steer the conversation in the right direction to identify, qualify, prioritize and derive.
4. Automate some steps of lead qualification
There are CRM and Marketing Automation platforms that allow us to automate some of the many tasks that sales representatives perform. Once we have a clear idea of the steps in the entire purchasing process and what commercial and relationship actions are carried out at each stage, we can visualize those that can be automated, such as sending certain emails, nurturing leads with content (inbound marketing), scheduling meetings and even posting on social networks.
5. Share relevant data
It is necessary to monitor the metrics of each stage of the purchasing process, identifying conversion rates between one and another, as well as closing rates and sales timing.
Once again, CRM can provide us with these figures and even allow us to customize the reports. We need to analyze what the numbers tell us! And make the appropriate adjustments when something is not working well.
6. Identify which customers could become leads for other products
By having a well-managed CRM, all customer data will be concentrated there, making it easier for sales teams to identify new business opportunities with existing customers ( cross selling and up selling ).
To ensure that you have the necessary information to identify sales opportunities for other products or services, we cannot forget:
Upload all the information we obtain from interactions with customers to the CRM, including important data recorded in emails, calls and meetings.
Ask the right questions (as we saw in point 3) to obtain as much information as possible about the company's needs. Remember that if we are going to treat the customer as a cross-selling lead, we need to validate their BANT again regarding the new product.
Generate value for them. Only in this way will we earn their loyalty and recommendation.
In conclusion, we see that the way we structure the entire sales process has a direct effect on the results. Hence the importance of knowing each step that our valuable leads take before becoming clients, so that we can replicate the success stories from the moment they enter our databases (Marketing Qualified Leads – MQL) and qualify them according to those criteria that we identify generate value in the sales process.
In this way, we will only pass on good opportunities to the sales area (Sales Qualified Leads – SQL), we will be able to discard those without value and we will have time to nurture the prospects that are part of our target, but who are still cold in their purchasing decision.
Which sources and media usually attract better leads (LinkedIn, Google Ads, Webinars, E-books...) and require immediate attention from Sales.
2. Make lead qualification an essential part of your process
To do this, you need to know exactly what motivates your prospects to continue to the next stage of the pipeline. This will help you predict how their journey will go through the purchasing process, and it will be easier to measure the impact of each sales action at the different stages of the conversion funnel.
This undoubtedly represents a great benefit for the entire sales team, which will be mobile phone saudi arabia mobile number directory able to focus on closing more deals in less time and at a lower cost, discarding unhelpful leads from the start.
3. Ask the right questions
It is necessary to know which questions are the right ones that will allow us to take our leads to the next stage of the pipeline. Only then will you be able to determine how serious each prospect is, and how close they are to making a purchase decision.
Being specific and focused is key. To do this, following the BANT model (budget, authority, need, timeline) usually works very well, as it allows us to steer the conversation in the right direction to identify, qualify, prioritize and derive.
4. Automate some steps of lead qualification
There are CRM and Marketing Automation platforms that allow us to automate some of the many tasks that sales representatives perform. Once we have a clear idea of the steps in the entire purchasing process and what commercial and relationship actions are carried out at each stage, we can visualize those that can be automated, such as sending certain emails, nurturing leads with content (inbound marketing), scheduling meetings and even posting on social networks.
5. Share relevant data
It is necessary to monitor the metrics of each stage of the purchasing process, identifying conversion rates between one and another, as well as closing rates and sales timing.
Once again, CRM can provide us with these figures and even allow us to customize the reports. We need to analyze what the numbers tell us! And make the appropriate adjustments when something is not working well.
6. Identify which customers could become leads for other products
By having a well-managed CRM, all customer data will be concentrated there, making it easier for sales teams to identify new business opportunities with existing customers ( cross selling and up selling ).
To ensure that you have the necessary information to identify sales opportunities for other products or services, we cannot forget:
Upload all the information we obtain from interactions with customers to the CRM, including important data recorded in emails, calls and meetings.
Ask the right questions (as we saw in point 3) to obtain as much information as possible about the company's needs. Remember that if we are going to treat the customer as a cross-selling lead, we need to validate their BANT again regarding the new product.
Generate value for them. Only in this way will we earn their loyalty and recommendation.
In conclusion, we see that the way we structure the entire sales process has a direct effect on the results. Hence the importance of knowing each step that our valuable leads take before becoming clients, so that we can replicate the success stories from the moment they enter our databases (Marketing Qualified Leads – MQL) and qualify them according to those criteria that we identify generate value in the sales process.
In this way, we will only pass on good opportunities to the sales area (Sales Qualified Leads – SQL), we will be able to discard those without value and we will have time to nurture the prospects that are part of our target, but who are still cold in their purchasing decision.