How to Qualify Inbound Leads for Marketing & Sales Teams

Why Qualifying Inbound Leads is Important

If you work in marketing or sales, your number one goal is to attract and qualify inbound leads – as many as possible. But a large quantity of leads does not necessarily mean they are all high quality. And when your sales reps reach out to non-viable leads, they waste valuable time.

You’d be surprised by how much time you can save by qualifying inbound leads before they are assigned. With the proper lead-qualifying process in place, your marketing team will have an easier time passing along sales-qualified leads. Here’s a quick guide on how to qualify inbound leads for marketing and sales teams.

How to Qualify Inbound Leads for Marketers

As a marketer, creating advertising strategies that bring in more inbound leads is essential to your role in the company. Knowing which strategies are most successful is also essential to your role. But how do you know which ones are creating quality leads?

Let’s say you’ve created a new asset that you’re promoting through email campaigns, PPC campaigns, and social media, giving you lots of data on everyone who downloaded the asset. Now what? Now, it’s time to use marketing attribution tools, such as call tracking and caller analytics to access data to ensure more successful campaigns.

Call tracking provides information on incoming callers, such as addresses & demographics, the specific advertisement they saw which prompted them to call, and more. Interaction or speech analytics is used to gain customer insights and achieve a better understanding of which leads are more likely to convert to sales. Together, these features can help your marketing team determine the best locations and times to place their advertising, as well as figure out better advertising tactics, to attract more quality leads.

Turning Qualified Leads Into Sales

Once the marketing team has a process for how to qualify inbound leads, your sales teams can begin converting those leads into customers. Of course, not everyone contacting your business will be ready to make a purchase at that moment; some may simply want more information. While those who are primed to use your services are certainly easier to move through the pipeline, this doesn’t mean your sales team should dismiss those who need a little extra persuasion.

Instead, sales agents should work to gather as much information as they can about these callers. The easiest way to do this is to create a set of questions for the prospect.

Here are some questions to ask prospects:

• What are some of your business’s pain points?
• Are you currently using other solutions?
• What’s the size of your budget?
• What’s your timeline for potential changes to your sales process?

And to make things easier for your sales team, consider using lead analytics tools, such as advanced consumer profiles. This real-time report automatically provides valuable data points for each caller. The more you know about your callers, the more your sales team can gain a better understanding of their inbound leads. Then the sales reps can determine the best touch points to address in order to turn them into customers.

The leads you attract to your business should be worth your investment. When marketing and sales teams work together to qualify inbound leads, it helps eliminate those that are more likely to be a dead end, while freeing up more time to give attention to the viable leads. This is one of the best ways to ensure ROI on marketing and advertising campaigns.

The best part? You waste less time and gain more profits for your business!