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There is a fact: increasing sales is not only one of your main objectives, it is one of the most important goals for any business, regardless of its nature. And in this case, the steps are very clear: to generate sales, we must reach our customers, and the leads are those signals on the way that tell us which customers to focus on.
Now, could you answer with certainty what percentage of your leads are actually qualified and represent customers who are ready to buy? If you don't have a positive answer, don't worry, 61% of marketers say lead and traffic generation is their biggest challenge, according to Hubspot.
What is a qualified lead?
Let's start with the basics. According to Fiebre's marketing portal 40, a lead is generated every time a customer provides their data to obtain some benefit of their interest through landing pages. At that time, these contacts become, voluntarily, part of the company's database.
Now, when we refer to qualified leads, we focus on those potential customers who are ready to communicate with a sales representative and make their purchase, beyond a simple interest in the brand or its content. It seems very simple until we ask ourselves how to know exactly which of my leads are qualified or not.
Actually, we could have a large database with many cold leads, that is, those people who gave their data, but are not interested in (or ready to) make a purchase. Covering all of them can be exhausting in terms of time and resources, without obtaining the desired result.
Tell us what your leads are like and we'll tell you how qualified they are
The origin of your leads and the context in which you obtain them can give you many clues about their qualification, or on the contrary, if they are cold and occasional leads.
Contact information
A simple form in which your audience leaves their phone number or email to get a benefit is one of the most common methods of lead capture, and it's also possible that most of them are cold leads.
Buyer person
It is important that the leads they obtain fit the profile of your buyer person, to ensure that they are really interested in the products and services being offered. For example, a beauty salon that obtains personal data from its audience to compete in a hair care kit draw, may obtain very different profiles:
- A 30-year-old woman who's been a previous client.
- A 43-year-old man who wants to give his partner the gift.
- An 18-year-old girl who doesn't go to beauty parlors.
- A 50-year-old woman visiting the city.
Possibly, of these 4 profiles only one of them is qualified for a next sale, since contexts such as previous approach with the company, the level of interaction, age, sex and location are high influence factors in the sale of a service or product.
Digital Behavior
The previous digital steps your audience has taken may be very good indicators of how ready they are to make a purchase. According to Adobe Marketo Engage, approximately 96% of website visitors are not ready to make a purchase, but may be willing to provide contact information in exchange for valuable content.
Let's think about 2 types of leads you get from your website: one of them is a new visitor who spent 5 minutes browsing through the available items and offers. The second visitor added 3 items to the shopping cart and reviewed the information located on contact pages and payment methods. It is possible that this second visitor has a higher purchase intention than the first one, and this can be better verified through a lead qualification plan.
What is and how to create a Buyer Persona?
The Complete Guide
What can I do to qualify my leads?
There are several strategies to achieve a greater number of qualified leads that will be converted into sales more effectively. Among the 2 most frequent are lead nurturing and lead scoring. We'll tell you a little bit about them:
Lead scoring
According to Hubspot data, 74 % of companies have the priority of converting leads into customers, and they can get closer to this objective with lead scoring or 'lead classification'. This involves classifying the leads present in a database according to their approach or similarity to the established buyer, the phase of the purchasing process in which they are located and their type of interaction with the organization.
Lead nurturing
It can also be found as 'lead nutrition' and consists of employing automated interaction with users through email marketing, retargeting, chatbots, intelligent CTA, among others.
A report by Pardot reveals that 79% of the best performing companies have employed automated marketing strategies for 3 years or more. With this type of strategy, the sales team will have knowledge about the similarity of the user with the buyer person, the phase of the purchase process in which he is and your main interests.
These are different techniques that can be worked together in order to have more clarity about the state of each user and create strategies and messages that generate a better result in sales, while increasing the engagement with the audience.
We know that this work can seem a little overwhelming to be done from within each organization, and that is why 73% of them prefer to hire companies specialized in lead qualification to carry out the processes of automation in marketing, or combine these services with the internal work of the company, according to a survey by Three Deep.
Your company can be part of the statistics that show a rise in sales thanks to the powerful messages sent to the ideal customers, all with an appropriate lead qualification strategy. If you want more information about this and to start working with assertive techniques, you can contact us today, and our team will be happy to be your ally in this adventure.