Not all leads are created equal.
The relationship between sales and marketing teams can either be tense or symbiotic, and it all comes down to one factor: the quality of leads.
Sales teams rely on marketing teams to send them red-hot leads that they can close (or, at the very least, warm leads that they can heat up with sales tactics and intel from marketing teams). When this happens, both teams are on the right track to meeting their targets. But, in reality, it doesn’t always work out that way.
Quite often, there can be pressure from the sales team to close more leads. Salespeople commonly work on commission and marketers do not, so sales teams have more incentive to chase quantity and not quality. This strategy always backfires because one sales-qualified lead is worth significantly more than ten unqualified ones.
The best approach is to apply a range of filtering and qualification techniques to ensure that only sales-qualified leads make it to the sales team inbox. Let’s dive right in.
How to spot a bad fit
Not every click, download or form fill is necessarily a lead that will become a customer. The internet is full of bots, researchers and other marketers who are curious to know what you’re up to. So, once marketing and sales have agreed on the definition of what a qualified lead is, you can start scrutinising all your leads and rooting out the bad ones.
Here’s how you can identify them:
- They submit fake contact information. If a prospect submits an email address or phone number that’s obviously fake, they’re probably just trying to circumvent your form so they can get to your gated content.
- They live outside the region in which you do business. If you don’t ship to or service their region, there’s no way to close the deal.
- They don’t make buying decisions or have any influence on those who do. If your product requires the buy-in of a c-level executive or similar decision-making roles, a prospect who can’t influence their decisions might be a waste of time.
- They don’t have the necessary budget for your product or solution. Your product might be perfect for your prospect’s needs, but if they can’t afford it (and are unlikely to be able to any time soon), there’s no need to nurture the lead.
- Your product or solution doesn’t meet their needs. Sometimes your offer simply doesn’t solve a prospect’s pain points, and that’s ok. You have an ideal customer for a reason.
- They’re ignoring your lead nurturing content. If they haven’t opened any of your lead nurturing emails and even ignored your win-back email with a voucher, it’s time to cut your losses.
How to keep the quality of leads high
You can’t keep unqualified leads from finding you, but there are tried and tested tricks you can use to improve the quality of your leads. Here are some of our top tips:
- Be explicit about who your ideal customer is in your ads. Sometimes it’s better to just tell prospective customers that they’re not who you are looking for. You can reference the industry or company size you want to target, so mismatched prospects can disqualify themselves.
- Include price extensions in your Google search ads. Anyone who can’t afford your product or solution will not click on the ads.
- Add qualifying questions to your forms. No one likes filling in long forms, but anyone who is truly interested in your offer won’t mind answering a few more filtering questions.
- Use Google local service ads. These will ensure that your business pops up whenever someone searches for “24-hour plumber/dogsitter/haberdasher near me”.
Keep sales and marketing happy with League
Sales and marketing are a powerful duo when they work together. We make that happen by using the right lead generation, scoring and qualification tools and a trove of contextualised data to ensure the lead pipeline between marketing and sales is always full of high-quality leads. Learn more about our sales enablement solution and kick-start your leads engine.
