OVERVIEW
● Lead qualification aligns sales and marketing for better results.
● It helps Indian businesses prioritize high-quality leads.
● Improves sales efficiency and conversion rates.
Introduction
Marketing teams spend a lot of time, effort, and money to create compelling campaigns, optimize them to generate leads, set auto-responders and alerts to connect with them promptly, before finally passing the leads to the sales team. Salespeople do not even know marketing terms, but they very well know their targets, and in case they don’t meet them, they often complain about the quality of leads. The leads never seem to close, and most of the time, the argument is – Leads quality was not GOOD.
There seems to be a gap between the two functions. The sales team complains about lead quality, and the marketing team is usually upset with missed follow-ups for their hard-earned leads. That gap is the absence of lead qualification, which, if filled, can ensure a better alliance between the two powerhouses of your business – sales and marketing.
What is Lead Qualification?
Lead qualification is the process of evaluating whether potential customers (leads) are genuinely interested in your product or services before passing them on to the sales team. This process ensures that the sales team focuses its efforts on leads with a higher chance of converting into paying customers. Qualified leads are often referred to as Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) because they meet specific criteria that indicate they are ready for further engagement.
For businesses, especially those in industries like Call Center, Lead Management System helps save time and resources by identifying leads who are most likely to make a purchase. It also improves customer satisfaction by ensuring that the right prospects receive timely and relevant communication.
In simpler terms, lead qualification ensures you’re not wasting time chasing uninterested people, allowing you to focus on the ones who genuinely need and value your services.
Different Kinds of Leads Generated and How They Should Be Treated
a. Invalid leads to be directly dumped by the Lead Qualification team.
b. Not interested leads should be given back to the marketing team for nurturing.
c. Partly interesting leads should be given to the pre-sales team.
d. Interested leads should be forwarded to the sales team (In case the pre-sales team is missing, Partly Interested Leads should be forwarded to the Sales team).
How Does it Impact Revenue?
a. The pre-sales team has more time for outbound Lead Generation.
b. Leads to better allocation of resources as resources will do what they are best at.
c. Gives more time to teams for better follow-ups.
How Marketing Team Can Also Contribute to Lead Qualification?
1. Targeting the right audience
If your marketing team is targeting the wrong audience, no matter how hard your qualification or pre-sales teams work, it just won’t cut it. There should be constant feedback on which kind of leads are turning into deals, and which industries they are from. What are their demographics? Etc. Your marketing team should always remember that if the targeting is tight, the lead volume will go down, and they should never be afraid of that. The correct metric to measure the marketing’s lead generation success should be qualified leads, not just the count of leads.
2. Tightening the lead generation process
Your marketing team shouldn’t put unnecessary fields on the form; instead, they should have only the important qualifying fields in their forms/landing pages to increase conversions.
3. Should Use Email/ Phone validators
These validators will keep a check on the authenticity of the phone numbers or email addresses and will not let the visitor fill out the form with incorrect entries. This is the first sign of a possible junk lead. Your Marketing team should have validators in their forms to get rid of the spam submissions.
4. Having a lead management system
Some CRM Software and Lead Management systems, like LeadSquared, give scores to each lead based on the chances of their closure. This scoring is called Quality Scoring. Quality score can be set by the business on the basis of its ideal buyer persona.
The quality score of a lead helps the lead qualification team in prioritizing their tasks and reaching out to the most serious leads at the right time. Although quality and lead scoring help a user understand the seriousness and the intent of the buyer to some extent, they can never fully replace human interaction. That being said, it saves a lot of time and energy if they are set properly.
How DialDesk Can Help in Lead Qualification?
DialDesk is a unique and one-of-a-kind “PAY AS YOU GO” customer support solution. It is a perfect amalgamation of IVR, Dialer, 24 7 Support, Omnichannel-enabled suite in an AI-enabled environment. The entire product is hosted on the cloud, which makes it a powerful customer service tool. DialDesk drives the complete “customer lifecycle management” for its clients with a thorough focus on delivering customer experience par excellence.
While you are using various sources to generate leads for your business, you need to have an adequate team size that is trained enough on your product and USP’s to reach out to customers at the first level to filter the leads.
DialDesk takes a lead in delivering this through our PPT methodology, i.e., People |Process | Technology. An amalgamation of all three ensures that your leads are reached out to, the first-level information is accurately provided, and the initial Need | Desire | Problem of the prospect is established
PROFESSIONAL PRE SALES SUPPORT: We employ a skilled and experienced Tele-Marketing team. Innovative training is provided to them to ensure the deployment of accurate information and customer experience.
ROUND THE CLOCK PRESENCE: Leads reached out after 10 minutes led to a reduction in Lead qualification criteria by 80%. Dialdesk agents are available to respond to your customers 24*7*365 days, as we understand the fact that a lead should be called within 10 minutes of its generation, as it is going to increase the chance of sales conversion by 9 times
AUTOMATED WORKFLOW: We create automatic workflows for your company taking into account your process requirements, that not only improve the process efficiency but also triggers notifications if any task is skipped or missed
CLOUD-BASED SERVICES: This will give you real-time access to get recordings, reports, and dashboards, etc., so that you don’t need to wait for anyone to send you reports, daily, weekly, or monthly
CALL RECORDINGS: You get access to online recordings at your fingertips
In The End
Sales as a Service and marketing teams are very different from each other, but they strive for a common goal, i.e., generating more revenue. A lead qualification process will help the sales team by giving them more time for follow-ups and outbound calls, and will help marketing teams with data-driven feedback to tweak their campaigns accordingly, and hence, the gap between the two departments will be filled.
What do you think? How are you currently qualifying your leads?
Let’s talk in the comments.