How Lead Qualification Solves Most Common Problems Related to Lead Generation

Published by Nilangan Ray on March 29, 2019

One of the biggest worries of marketing teams is the quality of leads generated from their campaigns. Nobody wants to waste time on bad leads. The worst thing that can happen after putting a lot of effort in your marketing campaigns will be your sales team telling you that the leads you got for them are bad or unqualified. This is actually not an uncommon scenario. A quick Google search will show you that a lot of companies have this problem where sales teams are complaining about bad lead quality. This results in both parties blaming each other.

The most common challenges that marketing teams face are:

• Having a high cost per conversion
• Irrelevant leads generated.
• Sales team saying leads are not sales-qualified.
• A need for qualifying leads because resources are limited.
• No proper lead qualification framework because potential tools are either expensive or do not provide good support.

These problems can be solved by taking a few steps:

1. Identifying campaigns that are bringing good quality leads and amplifying them.
2. Identifying campaigns that are bringing bad quality leads and removing them.
3. Reallocating the newly freed budget to better performing campaigns.
4. Qualifying leads before they are transferred to sales teams.
5. Setting up a lead qualification framework.

Enter Salespanel, the software we created to help you take all of these steps and solve the problem. Salespanel tracks leads generated from different marketing campaigns and brings them in one place. With the help of tracking parameters and referrer identification, Salespanel can know which visitor came from which campaign. For Google or Bing ads, Salespanel also detects Ad ID, Campaign ID, Ad Group ID, and Search Term. What this means is that Salespanel can identify which keyword your lead searched for and which ad copy they saw.  For other marketing channels like social media and newsletters, the visit source is recorded.

On the Salespanel dashboard and a contact’s detailed view page, you will be able to find this information. You can also create segments of leads from different campaigns by creating Feeds. This is a one time task. Once done, leads coming from different campaigns will automatically be added to their respective feeds. You will now be able to monitor results from each campaign and find campaigns that are bringing good leads and campaigns that are not. You can also run optimizations based on the provided data to improve the conversion. 

We use this method ourselves to weed out ineffective ads and allocate more budget to effective campaigns. This is a great way of reducing costs and increasing conversion rates.

Another common problem is that both existing customers and new potential customers engage with your marketing funnels. So, it is important to separate them because they are nurtured differently. Existing customers can’t be ignored because, for many business models, existing customers are more valuable than new customers. There are many ways you can create a separation. One simple method will be to filter visitors who have visited a particular page that only customers have access to (eg: payment completion page).

Lead Qualification

The next step is lead qualification. Not all leads are equal. Some have a higher ticket price, some are closer to your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) than others, some are Product Qualified but not Marketing Qualified. Your resources are finite and should be dedicated to good quality leads. Leads who match your ICP need to be provided more attention. Leads with high ticket prices need to be dealt through enterprise sales procedures.

In a commonly followed procedure, leads go through two stages- marketing qualification and sales qualification. Leads need to be sales qualified before the sales team can start selling to them. A marketing qualified lead is someone who has shown interest in your business and is likely to purchase. A new qualification phase called Product Qualification is used by SAAS businesses for qualifying leads based on how they engage with the product. We will discuss this in detail in another article. Businesses use action points like page views, activity rate to qualify leads. For example, a lead who has checked out the pricing page and has activated product trial can be considered a marketing qualified lead (MQL).  

With Salespanel, you can set up segmented feeds or point based lead scoring modules to filter out qualified leads. Once a lead is considered MQL, they are vetted by both sales and marketing teams to determine if they are qualified. This is done by examining the lead’s profile data and activity information. An NPS based in-app survey software can also help you ask the right questions and qualify leads. All of the required information is provided to you by Salespanel. 

Leads who are not qualified enough are sent to a nurturing campaign. You can automate the entire process by creating a workflow to export leads from Salespanel Feeds to your email marketing software using Zapier. We will discuss more on this on a different article.

Now that you have qualified your leads, it’s time to have your salespeople take over. On Salespanel, you have two ways to do this. The first option is to add salespeople to your Salespanel account and Assign the leads to them. The second option will be to set up an integration and transfer the leads to the CRM your company uses. From there, your sales team will take over and close the deal. At the end of the day, sales and marketing teams work together as a cohesive unit.

Salespanel helps you do your job better. By taking these steps, you will be able to ensure that your marketing efforts are getting the best results while keeping your sales team happy and increasing your company’s ROI. Salespanel also comes with flexible plans. We have something for every B2B business. We will also help you set up your workflow and achieve your goals. Want to know more? Message us through live chat.