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12 May Tips to Determine If Your Lead is Sales Qualified

Posted at 11:54h in Blog, Blog Post by
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The most crucial part of lead generation is lead qualification. Companies and businesses run various marketing campaigns and develop lead nurturing strategies to get high quality leads. But not all leads make it to the decisive part of a sales funnel, meaning not all leads become the consumers of the company’s product or service. 

Many marketers also confuse potential leads with actual customers, but they’re not until and unless they directly engage and invest in a company or business. So, the question arises how to find these qualified b2b sales leads? To help you find an answer to that, below, we have outlined a few interesting definitions and tips about lead qualification. Read on to find out yourself!

What is a Qualified Sales Lead? 

In simpler terms, sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a process that determines the conversion of prospects into actual customers who invest in the product or service of a business. These b2b sales leads are moved to the sales pipeline after being qualified as real buyers/consumers by the marketing department. 

You can understand this concept/process through the three stages of a buyer’s journey:

Stage 1: Awareness

Companies create awareness via a personalized marketing approach. They often use online and offline outreach campaigns, social media posts, and direct marketing to build brand awareness. 

Stage 2: Consideration

It is a stage where the lead engages with the content and show interest. Please note that the marketing department analyzes the lead’s behavior at this stage to qualify or reject it as an actual buyer. 

Stage 3: Decisive

After carefully considering all the available options, the lead decides to make a final purchase decision. Before making the final decision, leads also analyze how well the company or business understands and decodes their pain points, making the consideration stage critical in the consumer journey. 

The Importance of Qualifying Sales Leads

Qualifying sales leads help companies to stay focused on important things. It emphasizes spending time, money, and resources only on leads that can be a company’s genuine, committed, and loyal customer base. Qualified sales lead also help in improving and developing future lead acquisition strategies depending on the data capture. 

There are other valuable reasons as well that make lead qualification more significant for different businesses and companies:

  • Helps identify future opportunities and interests of the customers
  • Increases productivity because you only focus on leads that are important for the organization
  • Helps create personalized messages or promotion content to build strong business relationships with the customers 
  • Assists in sales acceleration and higher revenue rate
  • Develops better marketing strategies on less budget to target only those who matter to the company 
  • Makes lead nurturing an easy process

How to Qualify Your Sales Leads?

Lead qualification is a complex process that requires planning, research, and solid lead generation marketing strategies. Even if you’ve figured out your actual buyers, you need to pursue them carefully without being too aggressive. Making your leads uncomfortable through rigorous marketing or sales approaches may put them off.  

Here are a few things that you can try for successful lead qualification:

1. Use lead scoring metrics

This process carefully analyzes the pre-existing data about your b2b sales leads. It may include the initial phone call or the form they filled out for the first time at the awareness stage. It is a model that studies the data capture to understand the interest and interaction of your leads. 

2. Consider BANT 

BANT means Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe. You need to analyze all four things carefully and should find answers to the following questions: 

  • How much your qualified sales leads are willing to spend?
  • What is the purpose of their inquiry?
  • Does your product/service meet their expectations and needs?
  • Do you see a genuine opportunity to convert your leads into actual customers?
  • When do they need their demands to be fulfilled? 

You’ll perform better in qualifying sales leads if you find answers to the above questions. They broadly encourage you to save your time, money, and resources on non-beneficial leads for the company. 

3. Update your data profiles 

Companies need to manage their database from time to time to ensure they have all the updated information about their potential customers. You should have all the relevant and updated data related to buying behavior, demographical factors, BANT, and demands to tailor your lead acquisition market strategies accordingly. 

For a successful business, it is important to focus on acquiring high-quality b2b sales leads. Use effective marketing and lead generation strategies to decode the target market’s pain points to convert them into loyal customers. As marketers and business owners, you should not stick around with a group of late adopters or laggards too long, as this will hamper productivity and waste your resources. 

Need help in acquiring qualified sales leads? Contact Linked Strategies as we best-in-class services and guarantee results to our users. Don’t believe us? Read what our clients have to say about us.