Lead qualification or validation is an important process that all sales departments should engage in. Nevertheless, it is surprising to see that most salespeople don’t do this.
Instead, they chase every lead that is given to them, which often means a lot of time and resources are wasted. In this post, we will take a look at the importance of lead qualification, and why it is something that all smart sales directors do.
When generating leads, a lot of companies simply lump everything together. This means that they collect the information from all of their phone calls, form submissions, advertising campaigns, and so on, and they put it into one big lead list. This is a huge error because not all of these details are going to be from genuine leads.
They could be irrelevant inquiries, misdials, internal phone calls, inquiries from job applicants, customer service inquiries, sales solicitations, personal phone calls, and spam. Lead qualification, therefore, is the process of separating true sales leads from non-leads like the ones that have just been listed.
Lead qualification requires exceptional accuracy, and a lot of salespeople aren’t willing to put the effort in. However, it is highly advisable that you do, as the fruits of your labour will be more than worth it. Let’s take a look at the benefits of lead validation in further detail…
Lead qualification will ensure that sales managers have fewer leads to work with. This is a benefit because it makes certain they do not waste their time on non-leads, and that they have more time to directly follow-up worthwhile leads. They will be able to put more skill and thought into what they are doing, which means more sales are going to be closed.
Not only this, but extremely promising leads will be identified instantly if lead validation is done in real-time. This means that sales managers have the chance to strike quickly, ensuring there is no time for the lead to grow cold.
Lead qualification does not only assist the sales department, but it can help the marketing department too. This is the case even if you outsource marketing, which you can find out more about online. It leads to continual and rapid improvement of online and offline marketing efforts.
Data can be very misleading when changes are made to online marketing campaigns as a result of inquiry production, as opposed to validated lead production. For example, let’s say you have two adds – ‘X’ and ‘Y’ – and ‘X’ has generated 200 inquiries, yet ‘Y’ has only generated 100 inquiries.
More effort will go into ‘X’, but what if ‘Y’ has a greater number of validated leads? Well, you are going to be missing out!
As you can see, qualifying leads is something that all sales directors should be doing. It helps to ensure that all of your time and resources are being used efficiently, rather than being wasted on leads that are never going to amount to anything.
