On Lead Qualification: Steps to Convert Inquiries into Viable Sales Leads

By Brian Carroll, InTouch

A common lead generation practice using B2B inbound marketing includes offering white papers, demos, trial software, or other content assets in exchange for registration information. The problem is that many marketers immediately turn these form registrations (aka web inquiries) over to the sales team as "leads."

If your sales team perceives the majority of "leads" passed to them are no good, they're unlikely to spend time tracking prospects down.

I’ve already written about why lead quality should be emphasized over quantity. But, how do you weed through all those web inquiries to get to those that are truly ready for the sales team to engage so you can nurture the rest?

Here's a lead qualification process that may help you turn your web inquiries into viable sales leads:

Step 1 - Create a marketing funnel.

The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring inquiries (aka leads) into one spot and qualify them. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren’t sales ready. Lead qualification must first classify leads according to their "sales readiness" and business fit; and second, to manage all the incoming leads effectively.

Step 2 - Create the universal lead definition, and apply it to the remaining inquiries.

There are must-have questions your sales team must know in order to feel that an inquiry is worthy of being called a lead. Ask yourself:

What’s the company’s size, industry, and geography. At this point, you may want to remove inquiries based on specific marketing requirements or limitations. For example, you may remove foreign email address, student email addresses or contacts residing in locations or industries that you don’t serve. This step could reduce 5 – 10% of entries.
Ask business situation questions such as number of users, current systems platform, etc.
What is registrant’s role in the organization, or what is their authority in the buying process?
Based on their business need, how can you help?
What stage of investigation are they in the buying process? Many registrants are actually still early in the buying process and are conducting general market research. These contacts are very valuable and should be nurtured and managed over time—but these folks clearly aren’t people who are ready to buy. Be honest about what the search marketing effort is designed to achieve and is capable of accomplishing.

Purge those inquiries containing bogus information. It’s amazing how creative people can get. Remove duplicates and invalid names and email addresses. Keep in mind that simple forms tend to generate less invalid info rather than lengthy, time-consuming forms. People start to question the value of giving up too much info. Trim the form by about 20% to avoid this.

I read of one company that trimmed down the registration to include an extremely simple, two-field form. Conversion rate more than tripled with this simplification. At the same time, the company expanded their email follow-up process and was able to increase the total amount of personal data collected over time.

Step 3 - Create a behavior model to prioritize leads based on activity and data.

Apply lead scoring to prioritize your leads on order to follow-up in step 4. What lead scoring does is assign a point value to who prospects are, how they interact with your company and what their need is for your product. Most marketers give higher scores to those further along in the buying process based on their engagement. Lead scoring works best if you have 200+ inquiries per month. Otherwise it might be overkill.

Use your CRM or marketing automation suite to prioritize based on:

Level or engagement through touch points such as repeat web visits, downloads, or clicks.
Size of organization
Fit

You can measure all these touch points, but in the end if you want to know something you’ll need to talk to someone and engage them in conversation.

Step 4 - Use the phone (or email) to qualify high priority leads based on the scoring.

The phone is the gold standard for qualifying most leads. There’s no better way to engage. We have also found email to be a great way to create a one-to-one dialogue by asking questions. (Test this first with your audiences.).

Using these channels to nurture web registrants, learn more about each one, and then provide personalized and relevant information over time. You should be spoon-feeding prospects, provide truly valuable information, while moving them through the buying process.

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