Why Generate Qualified Leads?
Everybody wants more leads for their business but the number of leads isn’t always what’s important. You need high quality leads and that means leads that are likely to be interested in your product or service. You need qualified leads.
For most businesses the first question they ask about their lead generation program is how many leads did it generate? But you don’t make any money from generating leads; you make money from closing sales. The better qualified your leads are, the better chance you have of closing the sale.
What is a Qualified Lead?
A qualified lead is one who has the desire and ability to buy now. Both are important. Some customers will be more suited to what you have to offer than others – these customers will be easier for you to sell to. But if they are not in a position to buy, your efforts are wasted – they may not have the budget, they may not have an immediate need, they may be under contract with some other provider.
How Can You Pre-Qualify Your Leads?
A good qualified lead generating program will include a number of steps designed to separate the most likely potential customers (the qualified leads) from the unqualified ones.
1. Profile Your Target Market
The first step is to determine exactly who your target market is. A good way to do this is to identify the benefits (not features) of your product of service. This exercise will help you notice common characteristics of your target market and what messages appeal to them. Ask your salesteam, managers, and other employees how they’d define the ideal customer, and compile their answers into a cohesive definition of your target market.
You also need to define different levels of interest, such as “suspect”, “prospect”, “inquiry”, “qualified lead”, etc, and make sure all employees understand the various labels. As potential customers surface, they should be tagged with one of these labels in your CRM database.
Finally, you’ll need tools in place to determine and track WHEN your potential customer is ready to buy, whether they have the BUDGET to buy, and whether they have the DECISION-MAKING authority to buy. When these three aspects are in place, you know you have a qualified lead.
2. Create an Appealing Marketing Message
Once you know exactly who your target market is, you should create a marketing message that appeals to their needs, desires, or fear of loss. Your marketing message should be directed tightly at your most likely prospects – if your sell dog toys, for example, your target market is dog owners and your message should be ‘…fun, durable dog toys with XYZ safety credentials…’.
Simply targeting your message will turn off unqualified prospects, such as cat owners. This is crucial when you’re spending a lot of money advertising, such as with your pay per click campaign. You don’t want unqualified prospects clicking on your ad and costing you money. Learn more about this in my FREE ebook.
It also makes your message more relevant to the people that you are targeting – making them more likely to respond. On a similar point, you can target the methods you use to your well-defined ‘most likely customer’ group.
3. Manage and Nurture Leads
Do your marketing right and your leads should all match the basic criteria for your product or service. But you still don’t know whether they are really interested (or are just window shopping) or whether they are in a position to buy. Your lead management program can be used to introduce a number of sanity checks to further weed out the less qualified prospects. A sanity check is simply a point in the process where you ask for a small commitment. It may be signing up for your mailing list, agreeing to an initial phone call or being willing to set up a meeting. You can even try a ‘trial close’ where you ask them to make a small purchase or commit to a test project.
Each step asks for an increasing level of commitment and at each step a few people will decide that they are not ready to go to the next step. If that’s the case that prospect should simply be added back into the pool of future customers – and you’ll need a good lead management system in place to nurture them until they’re ready to buy.
By the time someone reaches the point where you close the sale, they’ve already shown their interest. And closing the sale is much easier when you have good qualified leads to work with.
What Next?
Do it yourself: For more lead generation ideas, Download My FREE eBook
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