A lead is a person (contact) who is interested in your company, your service, or your product. The prospective customer provides you with their contact information so you can follow up. This can be initiated through online or offline marketing activities.
Prospective customers become leads
For example, a kitchen retailer launches an online survey to provide participants with tips on kitchen planning. To access these tips, participants provide some personal information, such as their email address, name, interests, etc. The communication channel is now open. The prospective customer has become a lead. This lead can be nurtured further, for example, through follow-up emails. A high-quality lead—one for which a lot of information is available—offers the sales team a good chance of closing a sale.
In this blog post, you can read about what makes a promising lead and how it is categorized (e.g., likelihood of purchase).
What are qualified leads?
An essential question that sales and marketing absolutely must answer together: What do we consider a qualified lead?
The two departments should work together to define the requirements for leads and determine who is responsible for which stage of the lead lifecycle.
A possible sequence of events:
- Marketing departments generate leads through online activities (e.g., white paper downloads, coupon promotions, etc.)
- In addition, the marketing department pre-qualifies the leads generated.
- The sales team receives the leads as soon as there is an intention to buy or a likelihood of a purchase. If leads are handed over too early (purchase interest may be too low), the sales team will not be successful because very few deals will be closed.
Evaluate Leads in Terms of Quality and Quantity
What is the best way for marketing departments to handle the leads they’ve collected?
A scoring system (quantity and quality) developed jointly by the marketing and sales teams makes it possible to assign a lead to a specific category and, consequently, to the appropriate internal department for further processing.
A lead is assigned a score on a scale ranging from “Interested” to “Ready to Buy.” For example, if a lead is assigned the “Interested” score, it remains with the marketing team so they can take further action and gather important information about the lead. At a later point, the lead is passed on to the sales team.
Here’s to qualified leads! We’d be happy to advise you.
Supporting the “Lead Qualification” Process with a Methodology
Once a lead has been qualified, the next step is to assign it to a category. In the world of lead generation, there are generally four categories that indicate when certain activities are necessary and when the best time is to hand the lead over to the sales team. As we described earlier, sales and marketing should be in agreement regarding the definition and responsibility for each lead.
The 4 Basic Categories of Lead Generation
Lead
A lead is a prospect who has contacted our company for the first time and whose company name, email address, and name we have received. This may have occurred through downloading a white paper, filling out a form, or similar actions. The best approach is to provide the lead with information, explain the background, and build customer loyalty on an emotional level.
Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQL)
We know more about this contact than just their name and email address; the lead receives information about our services. This qualified lead has the following characteristics:
- Fits our persona (target audience) and our company
- The region from which the contact originates is known and appropriate
- Known as the right person to contact
- A solution to a specific problem is being sought
The company should nurture and develop a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) in order to reinforce and encourage the intent to purchase. The lead then moves on to the next qualification stage, known as a sales-qualified lead.
Sales-Qualified Leads (SQL)
With these types of qualified leads, genuine interest in making a purchase is already evident. The following criteria are recognized in this category of lead qualification:
- This lead will be handled by the sales team and
- can be assigned a value / expected sales closing
- There is genuine interest in purchasing the product or service
- The contact person is a decision-maker and has a budget available
Opportunity (Sales Opportunity)
With this type of lead, the likelihood of purchasing a product or service is very high. The lead is involved in a potential business transaction with the company.
TIP:
As part of your lead generation efforts, learn more about personal data (GDPR) in our blog post “What Is a Lead?”
Generate high-quality leads over the long term
In the long term, you can generate consistently good leads with the right mix of strategies
- Create a website and optimize it for search engines to attract the right visitors (inbound marketing)
- Call-to-Actions: Prompt visitors on landing pages and websites to take action in order to consume more content
- Continuously offer new and interesting content to website visitors and prospective customers (blog, white papers, video tutorials, etc.)
- Email campaigns or advertising banners that lead to landing pages and offer content tailored to the target audience
- Launch Google Ads, LinkedIn, and social selling campaigns—see also “Generating Online Leads”
- Using Telemarketing as a Complementary Outbound Tool
- Marketing automation: a tool that guides customers through the customer journey and provides them with personalized information. Marketing automation tools make it possible to map out marketing processes in a time-saving manner and run them fully automatically.
Analyze and evaluate each field to define the next steps and, in doing so, create an ongoing process that will support you in generating leads over the long term. Keep in mind: Qualified leads are the next step toward more revenue, greater success, and another satisfied customer. It’s fun, isn’t it?
TIP:
Feel free to check out our blog post on “free lead generation” for more information .
