Often, businesses run campaigns and generate leads. However, they fail to identify prospects with a higher conversion potential. As a result, they lose several opportunities that remain unrealized for a long time. Thus, by the time they approach the lead, it would have lost interest or gone to someone else!
If you’ve realized you’ve been losing leads this way, you’ve come to the right place. As a lead generation agency India, we’ve created this short yet powerful guide that explains various crucial aspects of B2B lead qualification.
Comprehensive Guide to B2B Lead Qualification
From understanding what lead qualification is syncing your sales and marketing team with your lead qualification criteria, here’s how lead qualification works.
1. About Lead Qualification
Lead qualification involves determining if a prospect fits your ideal customer profile (ICP) and can become a valuable client. The process includes evaluating leads depending on specific parameters like budget, authority, need, and timeline. Abbreviated as BANT, the framework asks the following questions.
1. What is the lead’s budget?
2. Can the lead buy the offering?
3. Is the lead the actual decision-makers or key stakeholders?
4. Can our offering address the lead’s concerns?
5. How early can the lead integrate and use our offering?
Marketers should know if a particular lead fits the above lead qualification criteria. It can help them know if the prospect is genuinely willing to come on board as a customer and if they have the required financial muscle and authority.
2. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
One of the first steps in lead qualification is creating an ICP. It includes an in-depth description of the perfect customer of a company’s offering. The attributes include industry, organization size, location, challenges, and buyer persona.
- Industry: Industries or sectors that need the product, solution, or service.
- Company Size: The company’s business size and employee strength.
- Location: Geographies where your offerings are relevant.
- Challenges and Pain Points: Problems your offering would address.
- Buyer Persona: Decision-makers and their attributes or characteristics.
3. Effective Lead Scoring System
The lead scoring system is crucial as it helps identify leads with the highest potential. Fundamentally, it values leads depending on their characteristics and behaviors. These include demographic information (matching with ICP), behavioral data (brand interactions), firmographic data (including company attributes), the level of engagement, and sales preparedness. You can prioritize leads depending on the score they achieve through the leading scoring system.
4. Lead Contact and Information
Once you assign value to every lead, connect with the most valuable ones to gather more information and evaluate their qualifying factors. You can do it in various ways, including cold emails, cold calling, surveys, and discovery calls.
Connecting with several leads may prove laborious. Partnering with a lead generation agency in India can help you tap into each productively.
Read Full Article – Importance of Transparency and Quality in B2B Lead Generation
5. Qualification via Discovery Interactions
Discovery calls or conversations are fundamental to answering BANT questions mentioned above. A personalized interaction with the prospect will help you qualify your lead more effectively. It will further help you streamline your focus and let you work on leads that matter more to your business.
6. Prioritizing and Nurturing Quality Leads
Although a lead qualifies as a prospect, they may not buy your offering immediately. For example, if you are a SaaS company, a lead may assure you of a subscription only after a couple of months. On the other hand, you may have a lead who wants to set the ball rolling immediately. Accordingly, it would help you segment and nurture your leads into various categories per their preparedness.
- Hot Leads: These are immediate customers requiring aggressive follow-up.
- Warm Leads: These want to buy but not immediately. Hence, although not aggressive, these leads need regular follow-ups.
- Cold Leads: These leads may be interested but with a relatively meager possibility of converting into customers. Occasional follow-ups can help.
7. Constant Lead Qualification Monitoring
Lead qualification may not remain as it is throughout. For example, initially, a lead may not look for an immediate purchase. However, over a while, it may become more interested and want the product immediately. Thus, you should review and adjust your lead qualification criteria depending on results and feedback. Constant and regular monitoring ensures your process stays relevant, competent, and synchronized with your business goals. It ensures your process remains effective and aligned with your business goals.
8. Team Alignment
A company’s marketing and sales teams are equally important in nurturing leads and deriving optimal value from them. Hence, you must ensure close collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. Both should be aligned with lead qualification criteria, scoring systems, and handover processes.
Such linkages can help enhance the quality of leads the marketing team passes to the salespeople. It will help streamline the work of your sales team and enhance its efficiency as they focus more on the business’s hot leads.
Wrapping Up!
More than numbers, it is the quality of leads that matters. You may generate 100 leads in a day. However, what if you couldn’t identify those with a conversion potential? An effective B2B lead qualification strategy or process precisely fits here. It helps optimize sales efforts by enabling your salespeople to focus on leads with a higher conversion potential rather than those who don’t.
The above guide can serve as a base for a B2B lead qualification mechanism. However, we recommend partnering with lead generation companies in Pune like ours so that you can optimize the lead qualification process and focus on prospects that materialize.
Email us at hi@demandfluence.com to learn more about our expertise and how we can help you set and streamline your lead strategy and process.
