What is a High Quality Sales Lead?

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While you probably already know what a sales lead is, it’s important to break down what high-quality leads mean to your team. Having a strong understanding of these prospects will allow your marketing and sales departments to align their goals. Knowing the different levels of quality for leads will also help your sales team focus on nurturing the right prospective customers.

A high-quality lead is more than just a name and contact information. In a data-driven world, the more you know about a prospect, the better your chances are at closing a sale. Contact information is important, but your team should be focused on leads with other data points as well.

Demographics are information about a prospect while filmographics refer to data about an organization. Both of these are important sets of data for determining the quality of a lead for a B2B company. Demographics will help your team determine what target audience best fits your product, which helps your marketing department create ideal client profiles.

Firmographic data helps your company gain a better understanding of who your target customers work for. This type of information includes overall annual revenue, market share, and company size. Knowing this information allows your marketing and sales department to focus on finding similar companies that could benefit from your products as well.

Next, your team should focus on accuracy when it comes to collecting contact information. The sales department can only do so much when emails bounce or phone numbers disconnect. Touch points are crucial for marketing as well, which means accurate contact information is a huge characteristic of high-quality leads.

Your departments should also be working within the same CRM, so profiles can be updated. Work done using accurate data ensures your team is reaching out to the correct contact at the right company. Sales and marketing should create processes that provide the framework for each team to correctly input data.

Lastly, your team should be focused on fitness for purpose when it comes to leads. Rather than filling your pipeline with as many prospects as possible, your marketing department should strive to send over leads who fit your product. This helps speed up the sales process, increases the likelihood of a purchase, and reduces time spent nurturing leads.

If your marketing department isn’t quite sure which leads to send and which to let go, your company should develop a process for lead scoring.

What is Lead Scoring?

Combined with lead characterization, lead scoring is a great tool to ensure your pipeline is filled with good fits. Start with customer journey mapping for your ideal customer profile. This creates a framework by helping your team recognize the different personas of customers who can benefit from your products.

Using data from previous customers and tracking engagement with your marketing content will help create an accurate profile. From here, your marketing team should identify which channels are the best to reach your targeted audience. This will help increase touchpoints and boost engagement.

Lead scoring comes next in the process, and it’s important to leverage buyer intent data to determine which leads should be prioritized. Creating this kind of process can be a big undertaking for your team. Rather than expecting it to all be done by your employees, utilize software to help with lead scoring and lead qualification.

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By integrating a program that can work with your existing tech stack, data can be leveraged from multiple points to accurately score and qualify your leads. Leadboxer uses your existing data to enrich profiles with firmographic data and other important information. It automatically takes identified leads and matches them with company databases to help create a robust profile.

This type of technology can alleviate the need for additional resources in your lead scoring processes. It will also help free up time for your employees to focus on generating high-quality leads.

Getting Started with Lead Qualification

Once you understand the key components of lead qualification, your team can get started on lead generation strategies that boost sales to high-quality prospects for the sales funnel. 

Using these tips will help your team get started:

• Align your sales and marketing departments. Avoiding silos will help the teams work together and produce better leads. It also reduces duplicate efforts. According to Hubspot, only 27% of sales leads are actually qualified, while 61% of markets send every single lead received to the sales team.

With that statistic in mind, it’s easy to see how much time your sales team is wasting on leads that aren’t a great fit for your company. 

• Create a process for adding and qualifying leads in your CRM. Make sure marketing and sales teams work off of the same information. Set attainable metrics for your marketing team and allow your salespeople to provide insight when needed.

• Invest in technology that helps your team qualify and score leads. When asked about their main challenge, 34% of salespeople said they struggled with lead qualification. Adding software like Leadboxer into your tech stack can help your sales team confidentially qualify leads. 

• Gain a deep understanding of your target audience. Data analytics is a huge asset for B2B companies who want to be competitors within their sector. Knowing your ideal client profiles and understanding the motivations of your current customers will help your company stand out.

• Along with mapping out ideal prospects, speak with your current customers to see what they like about your products. Discuss their pain points and understand how your services have alleviated these issues. Compile this information, along with firmographics about their company, and have your marketing team target similar leads.

• This information will also help fill your pipeline with quality leads and ensure they are being nurtured properly. Using data to segment your audiences allows your marketing team to strengthen relationships with leads and pass them off when they’re at a buying point. This means your sales team can spend less time qualifying and more time landing a deal.

Marketing Strategies to Generate High-Quality Sales Leads

Increasing your ROI from your marketing department is important for generating high-quality leads. It’s not always about the volume of prospects, but rather, how good of a fit these potential customers are for your company. Create a marketing strategy that encourages engagement from people who fit your ideal client profile.

Email marketing is still one of the easiest and most efficient ways to nurture leads, and it’s also an easy way to collect data. You’ll want to create email content that encourages engagement while also gathering the appropriate information. Try using an opt-in offer that requires website traffic to complete a contact form.

Provide something valuable that speaks directly to your target audience, like a webinar sign-up or a free downloadable e-book. From here, track engagement and add leads to your CRM to be scored and qualified. Using software to generate firmographic data while determining the quality of the lead, your marketing team will be able to decide whether the prospect should enter the sales funnel.

Create a content marketing strategy that showcases your product. In a world where many consumers conduct an internet search rather than going through a salesperson, quality content is key. It’s also easy for your audience to interact with and allows your team to collect valuable data.

It’s important to have a unique spin on your services that encourages engagement. Most B2B companies have a content marketing strategy, but you can use this as a way to stand out by highlighting the way your products are different from competitors. This is a great way to attract new leads, which allows your marketing team to segment them into other marketing campaigns.

Combining these strategies with automation and software will help gather data, qualify prospects, and score leads. By filling your sales funnel with leads that align with your products, your sales team will be able to increase the number of sales conversions.

Discover all a lead generation platform that helps you with online lead identification, qualification, and lead management accomplishes to help your business scale! Click here to get started with a free trial of Leadboxer.