Updated on November 1, 2021
Every sales deal starts with a lead. But not every lead will generate sales opportunities. Often this is the part where sales and marketing efforts do not align. The marketing representatives send more leads, and salespeople are frustrated because they can’t close them. In the business vocabulary, this is known as the “lead pile up”.
The business problem isn’t generating the leads. It is generating sales opportunities and people that have entered into your sales cycle committed to working with you. In a rush of achieving revenue and expanding as a business, we often forget that it is not all about generating leads. Instead, it is first about finding high quality sales leads. Quality over quantity, remember? Your marketing team can generate you many leads, but if the sales team doesn’t find them suitable for converting, there will be no revenue at the end of the day, right?
This means that…
You need a different strategy!
So…. How do you find high quality sales leads?
build a better-qualified lead?
Shift your focus from the top of the funnel to the mid-funnel.
Identify high quality leads using dimensions
Here are 3 dimensions that data-driven marketers can use to identify leads that are ready to create sales opportunities:
- Fit
- Intent
- Qualification
Dimension #1: Fit – Leads Matching Your Ideal Customer Profile
Your Ideal Customer Profile can precisely define what kind of data you need to qualify leads. So, in order to determine whether your lead matches your ICP, most data-driven marketers use data enrichment tools. This saves them precious time and resources by filling in the blanks in their profiles with data points like job titles, employee count, country, industry, and more.
By using data enrichment, your marketing team can segment and prioritize your leads based on data. This will help your sales team to qualify or disqualify leads.
Here’s an example on how we use Sales.Rocks’ B2B database to find high quality sales leads:
You don’t just have to limit your data enrichment to high-intent leads (e.g. like demo requests). Some marketing teams enrich all their leads to identify which are the best-fit leads even before they show intent. By segmenting out these leads, and creating hyper-personalized lead nurturing, you will increase their engagement and intent to buy over time.
Dimension #2: Intent – Request Signal
Signals, like the demo, free trial sign ups or Freemium requests, are a great way for marketers to tell that a lead is showing a buying intent. Moreover, they imply engagement. Try-before-you-buy-it has shown to be one of the most efficient business models that creates sales opportunities.
The trap here is that this doesn’t mean that leads will be the fit you are looking for. They may try your product for free, but this doesn’t imply that the free user will purchase it.
To maximize the chance of buying, at Sales.Rocks we nurture leads at every stage of their buyer’s journey, highlighting the value of our product. We created Lead nurturing campaigns where we send them relevant educational content as an effective way to keep our company top of mind as an individual progresses from prospect to customer.
Dimension #3: Qualifying Leads According to Their Engagement
If you perceive the challenge of lead generation as opportunity generation, then you can focus on maximizing engagement (towards intent to buy) among your contacts.
Leads will engage with your brand and product in one way or another. Some of them will just subscribe to your newsletter, many will request a demo, and only a few will purchase your solution.
When it comes to leads, the important thing is to segment them by distinguishing them based on the three most common forms of Lead generation – MQLs, SQLs & PQLs.
- MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) – they show intent to be nurtured and give chance to your free product testing
- SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) – they want to talk to your sales representatives
- PQLs (Product Qualified Leads) – they are using your product and show intent to purchase it
For example, for MQLs, our marketing reps focus on educating them about the value of our product via relevant content. We let our sales reps take over the SQLs and present them how our platform can help our prospects in maximizing their sales and marketing efforts. For our PQLs we provide a user testing environment where they can try our product before they buy it.
A combination of enriching the leads that fit your Ideal customer profile, and nurturing them according to the stage they are in, can leave a substantial amount of potential sales opportunities on the table that they are ready to buy.
Use this as your golden ticket 🙂
Guide your high quality leads through the sales funnel
Every marketer wants to find high quality sales leads. Salespeople need more deals to close. Companies need revenue. But the challenge here is making sure that the leads that are coming to your sales funnel, aren’t just here to waste your valuable time and resources, but that are here to stay!
