How to Automatically Qualify Your Leads to Increase Business Productivity | Ivo Campos

Article written by Ivo Campos.

Attracting and capturing leads is one of the biggest challenges facing B2B companies. However, with an already established Inbound marketing strategy, and with results in attracting leads, the challenge changes. The goal now is to ensure that users who ask for information about their services, subscribe to their newsletters, download their content, and in general, the contacts in their database, are quality leads that turn into business for the company. A large volume of low quality leads or leads with a low conversion ratio to revenue will result in a dissatisfied commercial team and therefore less collaboration between marketing and sales. All of this translates into less results for the business.

The following graphic presents the main challenges in lead generation since 2010. The quality of leads is always present, repeating each year:

Source:

Cience.com

Lead Qualification Model

With this challenge in mind, the B2B Marketing team’s focus should be to increase business productivity, attempting to qualify and identify the most relevant leads. To achieve this, we will focus on finding potential customers that my company finds interesting, as well as those who are interested in my products or services. I call this the Double II Model for lead qualification.

• How interesting are these leads to our company? That is, their profile, their job title (authority and decision-making power), the size of their company, the sector (if relevant to our business), the volume of income, etc.
• How interested are they in us? That is, their activity and the type of pages they visit on our website and, in general, their response to our brand and content. We will have to connect this information with its challenges and objectives. The type of content they read will give us clues about their goals and challenges – without having to ask them.

We can visualise the Double II Model in the following way:

Lead Qualification: A Live Process

In order to identify the information we should obtain from our potential clients and thus qualify them automatically, it is important that the lead rating model is a live process, implemented and evolving based on the results. These are some of the sources that will help you define your rating:

• The sales team’s definition of the lead. In addition to asking your sales team for the profile of the perfect customer, you can participate in sales calls and meetings to find the qualification questions that the sales team is now asking and discovering those which can be automated.
• Hold regular meetings with the sales team to analyse both the best and worst leads and fine-tune your process.