What Makes A Good Sales Lead?
With the advent of the Internet and digital marketing, the way companies find buyers may have changed, but the basic truths of what constitutes a good lead remain the same. In a nutshell, a good lead is your company’s ideal customer. Who do you want to do business with, and how do you move that potential buyer through the sales funnel? Our growth advisory services will help you identify your target audience and develop strategies to reach them effectively.
THE INTEREST IS THERE
Cold calling because you heard through the grapevine that someone might be interested in your product is practically a thing of the past. Today, there are numerous ways to track the activity of your prospects online. You can see if prospects have been on your website. You can tell if they called you or filled out an interest form.
Account-based marketing tools – using IP identifiers – can even tell you exactly how many people from a certain company have visited your site and for how long. In other words, the interest is there, and the sales team now has tools and data to take action. In business-to-business transactions, a lot of times it’s not just one person making the decision to buy. Manufacturing may be a primary contact, but they must get the CFO’s approval as well as buy-in from purchasing. As a result, buyers do a lot more research before they ever reach out to sales. Sales is no longer providing most of the education, but rather guiding a buyer through the process.
Using our growth advisory services, we can help you build a targeted account-based marketing strategy that leverages these tools and data to increase sales and conversion rates. By focusing on specific accounts, you can tailor your messaging and content to address the needs and pain points of each company. This personalized approach has been proven to be highly effective in B2B sales.
INTEREST DRIVES INTENT
Among the pool of potential buyers, there will be some warmer leads and some colder ones. A warm lead will obviously be further down the sales funnel. They’ve already educated themselves and are in comparison mode, perhaps almost to a decision. A colder lead is going to depend on sales for more education.
You need both kinds of leads because not everyone is ready to buy, but the difference is that you will see varying degrees of intent. A customer has searched for your product or service, or something related to what you do. You can see the attribution from your website, whether they came in through a Google search ad or if they came organically to your site. We can tell where they are in the lead journey and what kind of intent they have for your products or services.
The way potential buyers find your offering will drive your sales approach. Someone who clicked on an ad while they were scrolling on Facebook is probably less serious than someone who typed your company’s product or service into a search engine. The second person has much more buying intent.
THEY ARE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Let’s say you have your eye on an ideal buyer. In this case, you might be using an account-based marketing tool to track the online activity of specific companies. And not only that, but you are also delivering ads to people at targeted companies.
This approach is a big investment of your marketing dollars, so the targeted leads are no doubt big revenue producers for your company. However, if you are not doing that and instead waiting to see who searches for you, you can’t really control whether the buyer will be big or small in terms of their spend. Using growth advisory services, you will be able to identify the right target audience and tailor your marketing efforts towards them.
In that case, the sales team can decide who to follow up with first, or you can use automation to do lead scoring, which will assign a numerical value to each lead generated for the business and help prioritize them.
YOUR SALES TEAM HAS THE TOOLS TO CONVERT THEM
Ideally, both sales and marketing use a CRM (customer relationship management) tool so that they can review the history of your company’s interaction with a specific buyer. Sometimes, because of the cyclical nature of business, your sales team may know more about that history than the new hire/potential buyer now in charge of purchasing.
Digital marketing tools make reaching your target market more efficient. If you are a CEO, it is going to give your business more scale. There is only so much time in a day that a salesperson can generate their own leads. If you are putting out the right message to people who are your potential buyers and they are seeing it at the right time, then your salespeople change from being hunters to being closers.
Making the sales funnel more efficient means sometimes transitioning the skill set of your sales force. If you have salespeople who primarily excel at the hunt, that’s a different skill set than taking inbound leads and closing them.
If you are going to implement demand generation or lead generation, then you also must ensure that your sales team members are fully prepared to answer the final question from educated buyers looking to compare – why buy from your company? Our growth advisory services focus on helping sales teams become more effective at answering that question.
