Strategy

The importance of lead qualification for sales

If you ask me what the most important part of a sales process is, I would choose the obvious answer: to close a deal. Even some of the most experienced salesmen will say so. Closing sales is great not only for the commercial area, but for the whole company. This means that you get closer to reaching [...]

November 25, 2021 · Gustavo Trentini · 9 min read

The importance of lead qualification for sales

If you ask me what the most important part of a sales process is, I would choose the obvious answer: to close a deal. Even some of the most experienced salesmen will say so. Closing sales is great not only for the commercial area, but for the whole company. That means you're closer to achieving your goals. What many generally forget are the early stages of the sales process, and an important part of this is lead qualification.

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What Lead Qualification Is

Activity in which marketing and sales perform tasks to determine whether a potential customer or prospect is or is not suitable as a customer for business. A lot of things can qualify a lead as a good option. Knowing that they fit the profile of your target audience and have a good chance of becoming a long-term customer are some of the most important.

Tasks that can be performed to qualify a lead include:

Search: Sellers can do their own research to determine whether a lead is qualified, but most of the time a conversation will be needed.
Connection: (cold call): By calling potential customers, you can have an important decision maker on the phone or video and ask qualifying questions.
E-mail: a popular channel of communication used to communicate with potential customers from the beginning, understand their pains and needs and ask qualifying questions.

After considering that a lead is qualified, you can drive it through the sales process. Hence the importance of qualifying your leads as soon as possible.

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The benefits of leading qualification

In addition to the fact that the lead qualification in advance saves time and money, the process is also important for a number of other reasons:

Focus on the opportunities that matter

If you're wasting time calling and sending emails to unskilled leads, you may also lose other opportunities.

Some of the best deals your sales team will close are those that require the most effort and incentive to be converted. If you can't give them the attention needed for closing, you may end up losing these high-value opportunities.

Close sales that bring recurrence

If you take the approach of working each lead on your pipeline, you can close some businesses, but not with total assertiveness. Cultivating an opportunity and developing a relationship with them, also known as “nutrition” is worth it in the long run. But if you have many leads on your pipeline, you will not be able to nourish efficiently. A closed deal will provide short-term value, but if the customer cancels a few months later, was it really worth it? Focusing on the promotion and qualification of leads will result in happy and lasting customers.

Customize more your messages

Lead qualification is important because it allows you to devote more time to other essential sales activities and move qualified leads further on the sales funnel. By determining which leads are qualified, you can focus on activities such as tracking, developing relationships with people in your pipeline, and adding value by sending marketing materials such as case studies.

The acquisition and nutrition of leads is an important part of a marketing/sales strategy and without the proper qualification, you will not be able to achieve results.

Building a good lead base is not a simple task: If you have hundreds of potential customers on your pipeline at any time, you will not be able to take care of everyone the way you would like. Suppose you're focusing only on cultivating opportunities with high likelihood of closure. In this case, you can send more personalized messages and chat with your contacts more often.

Increase closing rates and revenue numbers

This may seem obvious now, but the lead rating will also help you increase your revenue numbers and closing rates. The main lesson here is that your sales and marketing teams need to be on the same page. Its final sales representatives and sales development team members need to have a common goal and know what a qualified lead looks like.

From there, you can develop a process that not only helps you to qualify leads efficiently, but also maximizes the conversion of qualified leads into sales. The interdepartmental communication can help.

The three lead qualification stages:

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): leads that have been qualified by the marketing team as interested in the offer and appropriate, based on their online behavior and demographic data. This is usually done by scoring leads.
Accepted Sales Lead (SAL): Leads that were passed on and accepted by the sales team. Sales representatives now examine them in more detail, doing online surveys or responding directly to the lead to ask about their needs, usually by email.
Sales qualified lead (SQL): leads that passed in the stages of MQL and SAL, but still require further evaluation before a sales opportunity is opened. This evaluation is made by a seller on a longer discovery call (usually 30 minutes).

Do you want to qualify your leads?

Qualifying a lead can be more complicated in practice than it seems in writing. Sometimes a clue is enigmatic about your needs and circumstances. Sometimes an unqualified lead seems qualified or vice versa. To help you master the process, here are the main qualification tips widely used:

Study the lead site or profile

Before entering a call with a lead, examine the company's website or its profile on the networks. Sometimes you can find information that partially qualifies you and bring information to include you as prospect.

Watch out for the red flags

Red flags that signal a low qualification chance include:

Leads seem bored: if in a call of discovery the lead is giving you lazy answers of a word for urgent questions, it may simply not be interested in your product or service. Someone really interested wants a deep discussion about the solution to your problem.
Leads seem disoriented: if your lead is consistently contradicting itself by answering questions about your business or needs, it is quite possible that it has no authority or knowledge to evaluate your solution properly.
Leads provide incorrect information in forms: If you register 111-111-1111 as your phone number or a celebrity's name instead of your own, you probably won't have a serious desire to talk to you about the product or service.

Also think about whether you really want to spend twenty hours in the next few weeks talking and working with that person. If they're rude, abrupt or impossible to work with, consider discarding them. Even if they buy, they won't be good customers.

Track the lead source

Watch where your best leads come from. After spending some time qualifying leads, you will start to notice trends. You will realize that certain marketing channels produce more qualified leads than others. Some companies succeed with email trails, others with paid media. Try to invest more money in the channels that acquire better leads for your sales team.

Automate part of the qualification process

Using lead scoring software to automate part of the process is a great way to save time. This software, also known as Lead Scoring or Lead Score, will track and update a lead score in real time whenever it downloads content, visits a web page, responds to an email or performs another promising action. And when a lead reaches the desired score, the system will alert your sales team.

Using email automation tools marketing, CRMs or chat platforms should be part of your planning to get the most qualified leads with the possibility of becoming customers. Book some of your budget to invest in this.

Consider a lead distribution strategy

When marking leads, consider using the collected information and scores to distribute them to the seller with a higher probability of converting the client into potential. Try distributing the highest-score leads to the best-performing sellers due to their importance. On the other hand, maybe the highest-score leads go to novice sellers because they are easier to convert.

Result: efficient qualification

As we have seen so far, the qualificationofleads is the stage of the sales process that covers the generation and nutrition of leads, ensuring that a potential customer is able and willing to buy it before marking it as a selling opportunity.

O marketing and sales they should work together using strategies and methods such as lead and call scores to understand if a lead is qualified. When you start seriously evaluating leads before letting them enter your pipeline, you protect your time and your mental health.

Understand also why you must generate leads for sales!

Gustavo Trentini · Nacionalvox

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