As a result, when sales figures are low, no one knows which stages of the funnel are “sagging”, whose area of responsibility is the problem – marketing or sales – and how to fix the situation. Ultimately, the lack of coordination between teams can lead to conflicts and decreased motivation.
Today, the cost of attracting a lead is increasing in buy phone number library business, which further exacerbates the problem. Not understanding how many targeted leads advertising brings leads to the drain of large budgets, lack of optimization and scaling of campaigns in the right direction. For example, in the medical industry, according to our research, the cost of attracting a patient has increased by 300% over the past 3 years.
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Why Lead Qualification Is Important
The root cause of the problem is a different understanding between marketing and sales of what constitutes a target lead. Against this background, it may be discovered that the company does not have a coordinated customer acquisition funnel that would include all the stages of interaction prescribed for specific advertising campaigns. A "gray zone" arises in the funnel, where the responsibility of one department ends, and the responsibility of another does not yet begin.
UIS clients are marketers and sales executives from a variety of industries. Our experience shows that lead qualification is one of the most important tools for achieving measurable success of a marketing campaign.
There are two types of leads, depending on the qualification stage - MQL and SQL.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) are marketing qualified leads that demonstrate some interest in a product through interaction with marketing campaigns (e.g., responded to an ad). However, they may not yet reach the stage of active interest in purchasing.
MQLs do not include junk calls, errors, repeat requests from existing clients, etc. MQLs have a chance of successfully completing a deal, but their transfer to the sales department must be clearly defined and agreed upon.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) — qualified leads of the sales department (or leads whose qualification has been confirmed by the sales department). These are potential clients who have been recognized as ready to move to the next stage of interaction. A lead falls into the SQL category after specialists have made sure that the client meets the criteria established for such a transition.
Let's list what is typical for SQL:
Pre-filtered: Leads are filtered through various qualification processes, such as budget, solution timeframe, capabilities and needs. This is done following discussions with the sales manager and is performed either by the manager or by analysts.
Willingness to purchase: can be expressed in interest in the product, contact information left, desire to discuss specific terms of purchase.
Interaction history: It happens that such leads have already confirmed their keen interest in the brand more than once - they downloaded lead magnets, watched free webinars, or even used free versions of the product.
Identifying SQL leads allows your sales team to focus on your most promising customers, spending less time on initial acquisition and nurturing of less interested leads.
Lead qualification in business is a separate process, with explicit and implicit methods:
The explicit model includes explicit data provided by the lead: company size, budget, region.
The implicit model is based on the behavior of the lead, his interaction with marketing materials: opening letters, visiting the company's website and actions on it.
The combination of both models allows for a comprehensive assessment of the lead.
The qualification process involves dividing leads based on their likelihood of conversion. By adding important demographic and behavioral data, you can identify common traits among leads that have led to sales and optimize your strategy for these traits.
How to Qualify Leads Properly
First, define your qualification criteria. What makes a lead a good fit for your business? Base your search on the data that best predicts future sales—different companies will have different success rates.
To select criteria, ask questions:
What do all your clients have in common?
What data indicates purchase intent?
What are the signs that a lead can be excluded from consideration?
Distribute responsibility for lead qualification among employees. In modern business, it is important to implement tools and services that significantly simplify this process - we will talk about them below.
Agreed Funnel
The key to a well-coordinated marketing and sales department is to build an effective customer acquisition funnel. It all starts with joint discussions and agreement on its stages. The stages should include attraction, qualification, conversion of leads into potential buyers and, finally, closing the deal.
Marketing and sales teams need to clearly understand where marketing's responsibility ends and where OP's responsibility begins. It's important to agree on key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that will measure the effectiveness of each stage of the funnel.
15 Questions to Synchronize Marketing and Sales
What is the conversion rate at each stage of the funnel? Where are we losing the most leads? These and other questions are in our checklist
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UIS Team Experience
The UIS brand product is a complex SaaS solution for business and, accordingly, complex lead qualification. We provide our clients with tools for quality sales, which help, among other things, qualify leads, but there was a time when we ourselves encountered difficulties in this process. Marketing claimed that it brought in many potential clients, and the sales department complained that these leads were not targeted and could not be “closed”.
To solve this issue, a special department of analytics and control was created, which was engaged in an objective and independent assessment of incoming leads. The specialists are as unbiased as possible, their KPI does not overlap with the KPI of the sales and marketing departments. For the same purpose, a process of tagging requests was introduced. The main tools are listening to conversation recordings and tagging.
The following criteria have been developed for a qualified lead:
compliance of technical capabilities with customer requests;
absence of legal inconsistencies (for example, problems with the lack of documents required to connect UIS services);
the client's readiness to connect to the product in the near future, and not in the distant future.
If any of the listed obstacles are present, the client may fall into the category of deferred leads (backlog). In the category of MQL leads that were not converted into SQL, there remain potentially interested clients, with whom the dialogue did not take place for one reason or another - they can be returned to later. In turn, qualified leads (SQL) are prioritized.
Thus, a specially designated department determines whether a lead is SQL and records this in the general system. Subsequently, this data is used by both sales managers and marketers when analyzing their expenses, the cost of a target lead and, therefore, the effectiveness and return on advertising.
The introduction of lead assessment has had a positive impact on the quality of processing requests by the manager - specialists from the analytics department monitor the quality of communication, as well as the execution of necessary actions, for example, creating a client card in the CRM, transferring the lead to the next stages, etc.
Another tool that has raised lead qualification to a new level is omnichannel communications. Previously, the control department could not track communications if the client contacted WhatsApp, Telegram and other new text channels. The implementation of the omnichannel solution made all communications transparent - both voice and text, including communication in popular messengers.
Our conversion rate has gone from 30% to 40-45%. Even though our product and lead qualification remain challenging, we have seen significant improvements in our sales process.
