It gives a great kick - generating a huge number of leads, doesn’t it?
You are into business to generate leads and the efforts that you are putting in, to generate the leads are paying off. What else do you need?
The truth is an entirely different world! You are generating a great number of leads, but those leads are not converting into sales, or only an insignificant number of them are moving to the end of the sales funnel.
This is the issue at hand.
Many leads are fine, but the quality of those leads is of utmost importance. Those customers should have a genuine intent to purchase your product/service. A few quality leads are great, as compared to having a huge number of weak leads.
The real challenge, therefore, is how to improve lead quality, which begins by qualifying the leads.
Source: Neil Patel
We have collated the 5 best incredible ways to increase the quality of your leads. Let’s get into it!
The marketing team plays a quintessential role by running a successful lead generation campaign to provide leads to the sales team, which the sales guys finally convert into revenue for the company. The marketing team should be clear with the idea of sharing only the Qualified leads - the leads which are ready for conversion.
It all begins with a lead being labeled as a Marketing Qualified Lead, which means that the lead is more engaged with the brand, as compared to the other prospects. When this lead is passed on to the sales team, they begin to analyze the intent level of the lead and label it as a Sales Qualified Lead, if they find the customer coming close to converting.
According to a study by Accenture, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) rate can lie between 9-15% depending on the industry. This ROI is honestly not that great but it’s better than having absolutely nothing coming in, by cold calling or random communication emailers.
To improve this rate, the marketing team needs to understand the importance of properly qualifying the lead and sharing it with the sales team only if they find it qualified enough to be converted into a potential business for the firm.
A lead comes in! What next?
Before going into the celebration mode, you need to first analyze and rank the lead. This can be done by analyzing the intent and the level of interest that the lead carries. Different companies employ different methods of classifying the leads. Some mark the lead as hot, warm, and cold, while others can just mark them as category A, B, or C. Just the way you like, you can proceed!
As a result, the leads can finally be dropped into three buckets - one that is fit for sales with a high level of interest, and the other which is fit for sales but with a low level of interest. The third category is to be discarded, which contains the leads which are unfit for sales.
Now comes the role of the marketing and sales teams. If the lead is fit and has low interest, the marketers need to nurture that lead by pushing out targeted marketing campaigns. If the lead is deemed fit with high interest, a quick follow-up is needed by the sales team to convert the lead into sales as soon as possible.
These buckets are created based on certain pointers that are collated through the analysis of implicit and explicit data. Implicit data talks about the online behaviour of the lead, typically the time spent on a particular web page, time spent on social media posts, etc. The explicit data is the information provided by the customer, like their name, company, designation, etc.
The quality of such leads is pretty high, leading to a substantial surge in revenue for the firm.
As per the research by Marketo, the companies that undertake effective lead nurturing campaigns can generate a whopping 50% higher number of Sales Qualified Leads, and at a cost that is 33% lower than those companies not employing lead nurturing.
Some of the leads that are generated are warm, which means they have a lesser interest in purchasing your product/service. Here comes the concept of lead nurturing, wherein you need to take these leads to the last stage of the sales funnel.
This can be achieved through lead nurturing, wherein you build relationships with potential customers and make them ready to buy from you.
Source: HelloBar
And thus, answers your question - how to improve lead quality!
As and when the marketing team receives a lead and completes the marketing qualification process, they must transfer the lead to the sales team. The sales team should immediately begin the sales qualification process by following up with the lead.
If there is a gap between both of these processes, that means that the marketing-sales team communication is improper. This might result in your quality lead generation process going for a toss!
We understand that maintaining a continuous feedback loop between both teams is quite a task, but is essential for improving your lead quality.
It might be possible that till the time the sales guys finish the entire lead qualification process and share the report with the marketing team, a lot of information pointers turn useless. Thus, it is necessary to create a feedback loop wherein the marketing team shares information with the sales team, and the sales team, in turn, shares the feedback as well as the sales report with the marketing department.
Also, the lead ranking database should be kept an eye on, by both teams and updated regularly, for both departments to be on the same page.
The current era belongs to modern marketing automation tools which assist the teams in generating quality leads. These tools can detail the analytics concerned with each lead, including the lead behaviour.
The result of this detailed analysis helps you analyze your marketing plan, whether is it going in the right direction, what your sales funnel looks like, and most importantly, answers important questions about whether your leads are generating revenue for your firm.
As a growing company, it is impossible to enlist every detail of all the leads, and some sort of automation is needed for greater efficiency.
Wondering how to improve lead quality? Inculcate marketing automation tools into your CRM and notice the difference.
The market is increasingly witnessing the concern of not being able to generate quality leads. A lot of organizations are not aware of the differences between a lead and a quality lead. And those companies which are aware do not know how to improve lead quality.
Follow the above ways that we have collated just for you. These tips would act as a goldmine and a guiding light in your journey towards segregating the new incoming leads from the quality leads and enhancing the quality of the leads already existing.
Being a full-stack marketing automation agency, we, at Fractional CMO focus on your lead generation to have a positive impact on your sales pipeline. We have generated more than 50,000 marketing-qualified leads to date for our esteemed clients. With a customer-first approach, our rockstars have the requisite marketing expertise to deliver the results promised for your business.