When you can efficiently and effectively qualify your leads across all your marketing and sales initiatives, you will give your team more time to focus their efforts on nurturing the best leads while improving and streamlining the sales cycle.
Are you sure you’re doing enough to qualify all your leads?
Some studies have suggested that nearly 70% of sales are lost simply because the reps did not take the time to qualify their prospects (or they simply didn’t have the tools and techniques to do so), which made it too easy to lose those potential sales somewhere in the pipeline.
As more and more companies come to understand the importance of a properly qualified lead, they have shifted priorities away from lead quantity to lead quality.
Of course, it’s hard to give up all those leads – especially when the higher-ups are demanding that every KPI continues to increase – but the simple fact is that it can be very hard to manually qualify your leads at scale.
So, what’s the answer?
If you can’t manually qualify your leads across so many marketing channels, you’re going to need some kind of automated tools to handle a lot of the work for you.
The best lead qualification tools should help:
- Minimize lost opportunities.
- Grow your sales pipeline.
- Make it easier to move prospects through the sales funnel.
- Reduce the amount of time wasted on leads that are not likely to convert.
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Adding AI to Automation
Marketing automation tools can be an extremely effective way for sales teams to qualify and nurture their leads at scale. The addition of AI and machine learning technologies, though, have made it possible to do even more while requiring less of your time.
For example, the traditional sales model required sales reps to spend a lot of their time just trying to figure out if a prospect is a qualified lead. Some companies will turn that responsibility over to the Sales Development Representative (SDR), but the results were the same. I.e. a lot of hours poured into the manual qualification process.
If you’re not in a position to hire more sales reps and SDRs (which may not even be the most effective answer anyway), it may be time to employ some automated tools that have been enhanced with AI and machine learning.
Our tools (and some of the ones we’re going to list here) make use of important, AI-driven learning algorithms to take care of a lot of the communication and qualification aspects of the sales funnel.
This could be as simple as a conversational AI-bot providing some initial responses to a prospect’s questions, or something a little more complicated like creating opportunities to convert on every page of your website.
Either way, more and more sales teams are turning to these automated tools to help them collect valuable insights into every prospect so they can decide whether or not they represent a qualified lead. This way, they can leave a lot of the detailed, grunt work to the AIs and focus their efforts on those prospects who are far more likely to convert.
There are a number of effective tools that could change the way you qualify your leads, including:
1. Pathmonk
This is us, so let’s put this out there right up front.
The Pathmonk lead qualification tool allows you to expand your capabilities to qualify leads without having to change anything on your website.
Pathmonk will identify important insights about your website visitors and match their behavior patters with those of previous visitors to start identifying and prioritizing the most promising leads.
The AI system is more than just a bot shooting out random questions, though. You can deploy your full qualification logic in seconds to your website, so leads can be immediately qualified our disqualified, making life much easier on your marketers and SDRs.
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2. ProProfs Survey Maker
Sometimes, the best way to understand what potential customers want is to simply ask them directly. And, of course, when you know what they want, you’ll know if they are worth pursuing as a lead.
ProProfs Survey Maker is a cloud-based solution that allows marketers to capture qualified leads and determine their individual concerns and pain points by asking the questions that will lead to the information your team needs to understand purchasing intent and ability.
This tool allows you to create surveys and forms, quizzes and assessments, polls and popups. You can use these types of tools to get a real feel for customer loyalty and satisfaction.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is a CRM platform that is designed to integrate marketing, sales, service, and content management.
It includes features for marketing automation, lead generation, meeting scheduling, quote generation, customer feedback, and much more.
This platform is designed to take you all the way from web design up to the closed deals, making it easy to manage your leads, reach out to new prospects, and continually update and optimize your content.
4. Unbounce
The first contact most of your prospects have with your company will likely be your landing pages – those webpages that are specifically designed to highlight certain offers or products. The more effective those pages are, the more effectively you can attract qualified leads.
Unbounce is a platform that allows you to create custom landing pages without any particular coding skills.
This system uses a built-in AI to help generate more conversions and make it easy to create A/B tests for each page so you can see what delivers more qualified leads.
The fact is, a lot of modern customers have already done so much research online before they even arrive on your site that they know exactly what they want or need. If your landing page can provide that last little bit of information that they’re looking for, you’ll take care of a lot of the qualification process before any contact is necessary.
5. Acquire
Sometimes, prospects just need to have one or two questions answered before they jump into the sales pipeline. You can provide this kind of simple interaction with Acquire’s web chat interface.
But, of course, most sales teams don’t have the time or ability to respond at a moment’s notice to every question that comes in this way, so Acquire also provides a chatbot that can handle the most common questions that prospects are likely to ask.
These chatbots can also help you gather more data on these prospects so that you can get the qualification process started.
6. Prospect.io
Lead qualification should start from the very earliest stages of the process.
In other words, if you’re looking for leads in places that just don’t fit with the products or services you’re offering, you’re going to spend a lot of time disqualifying leads and never closing any deals.
Prospect.io is a marketing automation tool that lets you build up effective email lists, automate much of the outbound sales process, and increase your team’s overall productivity. This tool can be integrated with several CRM solutions to help you drive more targeted traffic to your landing pages.
Why Lead Qualification Is So Important
Lead qualification should be an integral part of your sales process because it can save you time, money, and energy. When you employ the right tools, you can help your most qualified leads into and through the pipeline and qualify them faster and more successfully.
If you’re doing it right, you should be able to:
- Determine if the lead really has a need for your products or services
- Make sure they have the budget and timeframe that works for you
- Find out if the prospect is even in the right location to benefit from your services
- Connect with the people who have the authority to make purchasing decisions
- Help them understand why your services/products are a better fit than the competition’s
If the data you have gleaned from this process shows that you and the prospect are incompatible, you can disqualify them quickly and move on to the next potential lead.
It may sound harsh – and you may want to hold onto every lead as long as possible – but knowing when to cut them loose can make you the unsung hero of the company.
What we mean by that is: there’s always a lot of attention heaped on the sales person who closed the latest deal. It’s important to remember, though, that someone had to properly open that deal in the first place.
If you’re focused on opening higher quality lead (rather than a higher quantity), you will have done a lot to make the company far more profitable.
Keep Your Expectations High
Whatever lead qualification tools you use, make sure that you are always re-evaluating its effectiveness. Keep your expectations high and look for other solutions if one isn’t providing everything you need.
If the tool you are using is worth its salt, it will stand up to multiple re-examinations and re-optimizations over the years.
Keep your eye on what’s working and what’s not, and look hard at every tool and method you use to engage with prospects.
When you use them right, you’ll be able to qualify your leads and consistently contribute to the company’s bottom line.
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