One of the most important parts of running a business is finding people to buy your product or service. There are different avenues to find leads for an online business that often requires great sales tactics, a functional team, and effective software.
Before exploring different options, it is important to understand what lead qualification is and how it helps boost website conversions for your business. Once you have an understanding, you can learn how to improve it.
What is Lead Qualification?
To put it simply, a lead is a potential customer and lead qualification is the process of getting that lead to become a customer.
This is called a sales funnel because the leads are funneled down the pipeline until they become a customer. At the beginning, there are many potential leads that pass by. Having a skilled marketing team to find the right ones will help boost business.
There are six general stages to the entire funneling process, but lead qualification is only the first two steps. This is where the leads are sorted and prioritized as qualified for pursuit of sale.
- Inbound Marketing. A potential customer visiting your website or social media page starts the journey. Just like having a great website is vital to business, so is the marketing efforts put into this stage. If your team can collect contact information, the data can help steer the process. Seeing who visits the site, interacts with posts, signs up for email subscriptions, etc. helps know who your ideal customer is and how they are coming to your sites. This helps determine the amount of effort and assets dedicated to that potential customer and how to proceed.
- Outreach. Once you have the initial information, sales reps can set up an initial call or reach out via email to the lead. Probing questions about needs and wants, budgets, timelines, and any other qualifying questions are asked to determine the likelihood of a sale. If the prospect is good, it moves along the pipeline. If a sales rep can tell it is not going to go anywhere, efforts are better spent pursuing other leads.
These efforts are arguably the most important steps to making a sale. Without a good plan in place, few leads would ever become customers. Lead qualification is also important because it saves valuable company resources.
Sales reps can optimize their efforts by pursuing the best leads. Making that initial contact helps prospects see the value in your product or service. If the conversation happens in person or over the phone, it is easier to assess a lead’s real intent.
If a sale does not qualify, companies do not have to dump them entirely. Maybe the timing just is not right, but they will come around in the future. If this is the case, add them to a mailing list or to your automated email marketing efforts.
How Lead Qualifications Boost Website Conversions
Capturing the lead qualification and converting it into a website sell is harder. Having the ability to target website traffic and keep them on your site comes down to basics.
These can be broken down into a few categories including website fundamentals, data collection, and marketing essentials.
Website Fundamentals
- Make your unique brand message obvious with what problems your company can solve
- Keep the entire site easy to navigate
- Monitor speeds frequently to make sure everything loads quickly
- Create all content to be relevant and helpful to qualified leads
- Get rid of 404 pages and links on your site
- Optimize the entire website
- Make a mobile-friendly version
- Keep design simple, clean, and easy to read
Data Collection
- Create a pop up offering an exclusive deal by putting in an email address
- Ask people to opt-in with a sidebar on every page, but more central on the home page
- Write content with specific calls to action
- Offer free quotes
- Advertise the benefits of opting into your emails or mailing list
- Run contests on social media with information forms to fill out
- On pricing sheets, encourage the customer to reach out for special circumstances or a more exact quote
- Offer free guides or exclusive content to subscribers
- Have a quiz available for prioritizing or customizing recommendations
- Ask general questions in a get-to-know-you format
Digital Marketing Efforts
- Use search engine optimization basics to rank higher on the search engine pages
- Put time into link building for more exposure
- Prioritize marketing strategies to ones bringing in the most leads
- Try different strategies to bring in visitors with ads, boosted posts, and sponsored efforts
- Focus on keywords and their proper placement
- Double check title tags and meta descriptions, making necessary adjustments
Focusing on the next steps will help turn lead qualifiers into conversions on the website. Take a step back and look at your overall strategy from a visitor’s point of view.
If you were the visitor, would you become a customer of your business? Is the benefit of the products or services obvious and solve a real problem?
Keeping these questions and perspective as the goal, design your marketing blueprint.
Using the Right Tools
Websites are becoming more optimized with improved technology. While nothing can ever completely replace the value of a live salesperson in the sales funnel, having the right tools can help bring in and help convert leads. By simply installing it on a website, it works in the background to make your website smarter without requiring your employees to work harder.
A benefit of effective tools is that they can collect information on visitors. With access to this business intelligence, your company benefits from the valuable information gleaned from visitors such as where they are coming from, if they are on a mobile phone or a desktop, how long they spend on the site and what they look at is all valuable information to a marketing team. Google can provide this information along with the following information:
- Referring sites
- Browser and computer information from visitors
- Number of users
- Length of time on site
- General geographic information
Google Analytics collects this data via code on visitors for your site already, but you need to monitor it for best results. Using an informational tool on top of it can help condense the data.
It also can analyze additional information such as how a specific product performs on the site, free products vs paid products, and how you are performing compared to other companies.
Once all this information is gathered, the reports are put in an easy to read documents and sent to the company for consideration, freeing up a lot of time for you.
Using a lead qualification solution on top of this is that it can take a lot of the qualifying workload on. From the analysis done, algorithms can determine which leads are most likely to convert. When the company website can help with the process of qualifying leads, it speeds up the efforts of your company.
Every visitor to the website goes through the process and steps are taken to encourage a conversion while also passing along vital information to the marketing team.
Cost and Effectiveness of Tools
Many companies do not realize the value in using the best tools. Weighing the costs with the benefits is a necessary step to determining what will work best. If the tools can save money, bring in more visitors and creating a conversion, it helps your business grow faster and stronger. Focusing too much on the cost can keep you from finding the tools that will benefit your company the most.
Moving leads to sales is a process that must be personalized. Creating a plan that is individualized to your business is an important part of making tools work for your company.
Knowing the basic information from Google Analytics or another tracking service can help identify pain points and turn them around. From there, ask specific questions about how tools fit into your overall business plan and strategy. Take advantage of free trials, demonstrations, and look into experiences from other customers.
Doing your research pays off with tools.
Conclusion: Focus on Lead Qualification
Growing a business always starts small. When businesses show a slowdown in sales, it helps to go back to basics. To bring a lead through the pipeline, the first step is always to bring in leads and find the best ones.
Using tools to capitalize on improvements and qualifying leads makes the entire sales funnel more effective. The more the process can be optimized and improved over time, the better off your business will be in the long run.
If your business could use some help qualifying leads and improving the overall website conversion process, try a supercharged tool to give your company new life.
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