[Tips & Tricks] New leads don’t buy your product? Time to improve your sales qualification process

As much as 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. One of the reasons for that can be a bad lead qualification process, which means that 79 times out of 100 you can be wasting your time and money, trying to pursue leads that from the beginning are not ready to buy. According to MarketingSherpa, 61% of marketers pass leads to sales immediately after collecting their data, without any verification. We present the tools that will help you increase their quality.

Identify your contacts – know your potential customer from the get-go

With SALESmanago every lead you collected on your website is supplemented with information on its behavior, helping you understand what products or services in your offer brought their attention. Website behavior can be tracked thanks to the cookies technology, which means you have to identify the lead only once, and from now on all their visits to your website will be connected with their 360 customer profile. If the lead was browsing your website earlier, before it was identified, this information will be also included, because SALESmanago keeps historical visits of anonymous visitors to present you with a full view of the leads’ interest.

Know their needs – use behavioral segmentation

Once you know who is browsing the website, you need to know what they want, what were they looking for. That can be managed by creating an appropriate Segmentation Matrice, in which you define the list of URL addresses on your website connected with different products in the offer. As a result, a visitor who browses different subpages, reading articles describing your offer is getting tagged with the name of that product, giving you a quick view on what potentially they might buy.

Let’s say, you work for a car dealer company and you want to segment the leads that could be interested in different financing options. If they visit a subpage with the description of the leasing service, a right tag will be assigned to them (e.g. FINANCING_LEASING). That’s how you know, this lead could potentially convert into sale and you can proceed accordingly.

Measure the level of their interest – use tag and contact scoring

You need to remember that even though behavioral segmentation gives you some information that can help you initiate direct contact, this might be not enough – every lead can check different products in your offer. You will know then how deeply they know your offer but it won’t indicate the most interesting offer. A solution to that is a tag scoring feature, that shows how many times the contact was tagged as interested in a specific product.

Going back to the car financing example. You can set the scoring value, which will mean to you that the customer was not just browsing what options are available, but really wanted to learn more about the leasing option. In such case, if a given person visits three subpages with information about leasing it will not only be tagged FINANCING_LEASING, but by the name of the tag the system will show you how many times it was applied so in the end, you will see FINANCING_LEASING (3) position on the leads’ segments list. You can qualify for sales leads that exceed a certain value in the tag scoring, to make sure you’re talking to leads with specified interest in your offer.

Another way to distinguish good quality leads is by using contact scoring. It increases anytime the lead is active – opening your emails, or browsing your website. Let’s say, in a day you get a 100 new leads. There could be many selling opportunities, but as we’ve already established, around 79 out of that 100 won’t convert. A solution is to pick the ones that are the most active and therefore have the highest contacts scoring. A lead that has visited your website a large number of times and with a scoring of 100, will be far more probable to convert than a new one with a scoring of 5, so you want to start contacting these new leads by choosing those with the highest contact scoring first.

Make sure they understand your product – use lead nurturing

Even leads with high contact or tag scoring might not be ready to buy yet, because they could be missing some important information on the product, which makes the majority of them resign after the first conversation with your sales representatives. Try delivering them this information with an automatic educational message cycle. Thanks to lead nurturing, you can get 50% more leads ready to buy. Studies show that lead nurturing emails are 10 times higher response rate compared to regular emails.

In SALESmanago’s Lead Nurturing Wizard or in Workflows feature, you can create message campaigns that will start after a chosen lead fulfills some requirements, for example, the contact has been assigned a specific tag or was added to a specific sales funnel, which makes them qualified for a lead nurturing campaign. After you select an event that’ll start the messaging campaign, you can pick the message that will be sent as well as the time of sending (how much time after the campaign was activated).

Turn good leads into sales – use the Sales Alert and help your salesmen

Finally, when you have a good quality lead (segmented, high scoring, nurtured), you have to have a way of informing your sales team on this fact. Sales alert is a simple automation that sends a notification to your sales representative, that they should contact a specific lead.

You can choose behavior that should trigger sending this notification. In most cases, for leads who qualify for sales the most common trigger is any website visit. They already proved they’re interested. If they are looking for the information again, it’s the best time to reach out to them.

All of that gives you a bigger chance of succeeding while reaching out to new leads, as you made sure to pick the high value ones.

marketing automation