How do I confirm what a qualified lead is?
What is a lead? We can all be given an identification of a person to get in contact with or an entity that has an interest but as marketers we want these leads to convert. A lead in B2C marketing can be much vaguer and can also be distinguished very differently from B2B marketing. How are marketers exploring there leads and what is the importance behind them? If we don’t get leads then we don’t get appointments, and therefore no sales!
How do I confirm what a qualified lead is?
Marketers need to start asking the question, ‘how do I confirm what a qualified lead is?’ We all want lots of leads but what we need is for them to convert to appointments. Monitoring our marketing activity and putting a process in place can help us distinguish a lead to actually a qualified lead.
Receiving lots of traffic to our websites and people making enquiries is great! Also our incoming lines ringing with potential new prospects is also fantastic, however these new leads aren’t suitable towards our products and services and therefore aren’t qualified. Ask yourself if they’re the right decision maker within your target market, have they got the right budget spend for your product and service? Industry is also a really important factor to take into account as it won’t help your sales if you’re wasting time on opportunities that won’t progress.
We can start to distinguish the difference between a qualified lead and a not so qualified lead. We can help to attract quality leads by the content we’re pushing out such as targeting the right persona with more tailored messages. Another way of achieving this effect is that many marketers are introducing targeted landing pages. We want to motivate through our inbound activity to ensure our traffic coming back is positive. Our digital strategies also can be important such as our keyword types and searches; we can have control over what traffic we’re drawing to our websites and landing pages.
Telemarketing activity and lead generation needs to ensure our diallers are also targeting the right demographic of people to receive the right type of leads. A lot of focus and pressure is put on our inbound marketing and marketing automation, however calling and engaging with prospects is a much more human to human approach. It also shouldn’t be misunderstood that leads still need to be converted to make sales. Sales training can also be a powerful tool to ensure our diallers are using the correct and relevant dialogue within their pitches to help bring in qualified leads.
Fundamentally you need to be honest with yourself and be able to answer what success looks like. Once you know this you can essentially work backwards to define the marketing channels to develop your lead generating strategies.
Tags: B2B, Lead Generation