The Art and Techniques of Qualifying Sales Leads

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Why do most lead management campaign fails? One of the foremost reasons is that they didn’t try to qualify their sales leads. They are still stuck with the generic script when they’re calling their prospects, even if they know that it’s still going to be “different strokes for different folks.”

To better illustrate the problem let’s come up with an example: you have a traditional script that is going to be used by all your sales agents to all kinds of leads. It will take around 10 minutes for a single sales agent to complete one call, and every day, he or she has to come up with around 25 appointments. Let’s just say that the script will not work with around 10 of your prospects. In the end, a sales agent is spending more than an hour getting nothing out of his job. It will also be very bad for business, as these sales agents are paid for every hour of work without getting the desired result. It will also be detrimental for the best sales agents who may feel very inefficient for not meeting the quota.

But how do you exactly qualify your leads and customize your marketing strategies to them? Let us count the ways:

1. Determine the people who will have the greatest need of your products. Not all leads will be interested in your products right away. There are also prospects who may not fit to the customer. Your challenge therefore is to identify which of them will have the greatest need of your product. Let’s pretend that you’re currently selling smart phones. You will have better chances of selling these gadgets to business owners who may see their features be very helpful in managing their businesses than to housewives, who really don’t need any of these functions unless they’re engaged in a home-based business.

2. Call them for appointment. When you’ve already identified the targeted prospects, you can now start corresponding with them. Now there are many ways on how you can communicate with them, and it depends on the kind of contact detail they can give you as well as other factors. For instance, it’s a lot easier for you to reach businesspersons through their mobile phone or e-mail since they are always on the move. Home-based businesspersons, on the other hand, can be reached through a phone call or fax. It’s very important that you don’t give the real reason of communication to them right away. As much as possible, they must be encouraged to set up an appointment with you. This way, you will have the chance to demonstrate or discuss the product to them more comprehensively. It will also remove the lead time that usually happens when they need to send in their question, and they still have to wait for your answer within 24 hours or even more.

3. Get their response. Depending on how you presented your product, not all will be interested in purchasing your product immediately. If this is the case, the best option is to ask for any feedback on the business or even in your manner of presentation. This will enable you to constantly modify your strategies and increase your conversion rate.

4. Call them again. Since they are still the priority of your business, they should be followed up. Give them some time to think and then call again. At least it would make them feel that they’re really important to your business. If nothing happens, it’s time to move on to the average-valued leads that you have.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

The Relationship between Lead Tracking and Lead Scoring

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Lead management is a very complex process. It involves four sets of activities that are all interrelated: lead tracking, lead scoring, lead distribution and lead nurturing. All of these start from lead tracking, and all of them have a relationship with that step. Let us discuss here how lead tracking is helpful for lead scoring.

How the Process of Lead Tracking Is Done

Lead tracking is the process of watching your prospects’ response to your marketing techniques. Are they responsive? Do they ignore your mails without even inquiring as to how it might interest them? All of these questions are answered during the lead tracking process.

Lead tracking takes place right away after the marketing mail is sent. Marketers then wait for responses from any of the people the mails were sent to. If someone responds with an inquiry or actually buys the product, he or she is placed on the list for people who are interested in the offer and people who are likely to make a positive reception of the next advertising mail.

Lead tracking can be done manually using an electronic spreadsheet, but most businesses nowadays prefer to use lead tracking software because it is very convenient and does not require any upgrades or changes if the business eventually grows in size.

The Information in Lead Tracking Leads to Scoring and Prioritization

We all know that lead scoring is the process of ranking leads according to their likeliness to purchase your product or service. The rank or score of a prospect determines what action the marketer will do next with respect to that lead. That’s where the information from lead tracking comes in. This is how sales leads are prioritized:

• If a lead responds with an inquiry to the advertisement, he or she can be considered as potential clients and will be assigned a score as such. Sales agents would be instructed to follow up quickly on this lead if he or she will be ultimately interested in buying the product.

• An unresponsive lead after a first-time mail would receive a score that will signify that he needs a bit more pushing until he buys the product. He or she is then assigned to sales agents tasked with follow-up advertising mails.

• A lead that purchases the product will then be placed on a list of potential buyers of upcoming products and offerings. Agents assigned to new products will have this lead on their list.

• A lead that has not responded to many mails is scored as “dead” and unlikely to be interested in further offerings. Depending on the company, this lead may be dropped from the list.

The bottom line here is, lead tracking is instrumental to the scoring. It provides lead scorers the information they need about the responsiveness or unresponsiveness of a certain prospect so that they can be assigned the appropriate priority and be accorded the needed action.

The Lead Tracking Software Does Wonders to Lead Scoring

Given their relationship, lead tracking programs are also useful to lead scoring. Benefits include:

• Information is processed faster and sent quickly to assigned personnel. Lead tracking programs automatically assigns a lead score to any prospect. All a marketer has to do is call up a list categorized according to lead ranking and proceed with lead distribution.

• Status information pertaining to the lead can be easily queried and updated. There’s no need anymore to look up individual files manually and assign them to the appropriate agent.

• Assessment of marketing and lead management efforts can be done expeditiously, efficiently and at less cost.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com