For every marketer, it is quite common knowledge that the lead quality is usually more important than lead quality. But still, lead qualification from marketing continues to be a pain point for many companies.
As a savvy marketer, how would you know whether a lead is truly prepared to buy? Also, how can produce more quality leads for your sales teams? The answer to these questions is within your lead qualification process.
What is lead qualification marketing?
Lead qualification is a process that is used to evaluate and measure the chances of each lead to become a paying customer of your company. And for savvy marketers, lead qualification is a much-needed process, when you want to increase the efficiency of your sales and marketing teams, generate more leads, and more closed deals.
How lead qualification works
Earlier lead qualification process used to be a manual process executed by the sales development representative (SDR) during the early stage of the sales process. Sales representatives used to reach out to every lead scoring their way, throwing pre-defined questions to analyze whether they were a good fit for their solution or not.
There are several frameworks build to assist sales representatives to qualify leads effectively
Budget, Authority, Need, Timing(BANT)
This was originally devised by IBM. This is the original framework of the lead qualification process and is still being widely used today. The potential questions of the “BANT” approach are the following;
- Do you have a certain budget allocated for this purchase?
- Do you have the authority to make the purchase decision?
- What are the pain points, need, and biggest challenges faced by your team currently?
- Is this a priority purchase for your team at this time?
Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority, Negative Consequences and Positive Implications (GPCTBA/C&I)
This was originally devised by HubSpot in order to put the sales representative in a highly advisory role for more informed buyers. The potential questions of the “GPCTBA/C&I” approach are the following;
- Does your company have specific f goals?
- Do you have the necessary resources in place that are needed to implement a plan?
- How are you handling these challenges currently?
- What is your timeline to implement this plan?
- Are you already using the budget to resolve the problem(s) we have discussed?
- According to you what are the concerns your company stakeholders will raise?
- What are the implications or consequences for you to achieve your goal or not
- What are the implications or consequences for you to achieve your goal or not?
(H3)Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization (CHAMP):
This was originally devised by InsightSquared. “CHAMP” deals with pain points, needs, and challenges the leads are experiencing. The potential questions of the “CHAMP” approach are the following;
- What goals do you want to achieve by resolving these challenges?
- How buying decisions are made for solutions like ours and who has the authority to evaluate this solution?
- What are your expectations about the investment money needed to buy this solution?
- What is your prioritization for starting the implementation plan of this solution?
Each of these frameworks has some pros and cons. BANT is quite simple and quick framework but misses a few modern aspects of the B2B buying process like the growing number of stakeholders involved in the buying process. GPCTBA/C&I takes into account the sophistication of the B2B modern buyer but is a quite complex process that is not well suited for smaller teams. CHAMP gives more emphasis on the problems faced by buyers but has the potential to slow down your buying process.
Although there are still need for a manual component to lead qualification framework tries to automate the entire process. In order to do this, you can simply compute a lead score from the available data of leads.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a process used by the sales and marketing teams to determine the value of leads or prospects, by assigning values to leads based on their behavior that’s related to their interest in a product or service. The value assigned to each lead varies for different companies. But, lead scoring is commonly characterized by the interest shown towards a company by a lead or their position in the buying cycle. Organizations assign point-based systems (usually on a scale of 10) for lead scoring or just refer the leads as a cold, warm, and hot based on their interest and previous engagement.
According to HubSpot, just 37% of businesses respond to their leads within the first hour. And between 35% to 50% of the sales goes to the company that responds first.
Failing to have an effective lead scoring system in place, you will be left with no other choice than to manually go through your entire lead list and separate the leads based on whether they are qualified on not.
Defining lead scoring criteria
Lead scoring is a highly effective method to determine the qualification of a lead. This method uses a predefined point-based system to completely avoid the wild guess or gut instinct approach from the lead qualification process to effectively add and manage leads.
Following are the step required to implement an effective lead scoring method;
Create ICP and buyer personas
Develop ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona for your target accounts and target contacts respectively to determine specific characteristics that are common among your best customers.
Decide which data points you will consider
You can consider behavioral data points like downloads, form submission, website engagement, etc. And demographics data points like job title, company size, location, etc.
Assign point value
Assign point-based values based on their sales readiness. For example, if the leads who request for a free trial successfully convert into a paying customer at a higher rate, then you should assign a higher point value to the trial requests compared to the others like blog subscription request.
Set thresholds
Set qualification thresholds that clearly indicate what exactly different score means. What are the scores that represent SQL and MQL? What is the score that disqualifies a lead? Setting the threshold for these will provide a structured system to manage how leads move through your sales cycle.
What is MQL
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect that has shown some interest in your product or company based on the efforts of marketing teams and is highly likely to become a paying customer. Usually, an MQL is someone who has intentionally engaged with you by taking any actions like submitting your form, listing into your program, downloading resources like e-book, reports, surveys, etc., or frequently visiting your company official website.
These are highly promising leads that are very curious and is considering your product or service but still have not made any further steps into your sales conversion process yet. Although, they are likely to be more receptive to your sales pitch compared to a normal lead generated without any lead qualification process.
What is SQL
A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect that researched and vetted first by a marketing team and then by the sales team and is deemed ready to enter into the next stages of the sales conversion process. A SQL has shown intent to buy any a product or service and has completed lead qualification criteria of a company that determines whether a lead is a right fit or not. A lead is moved to the SQL category when they have gone past the engagement stage and is ready to be moved to the next stages of the sales conversion process to become a paying customer.
The core characteristics of a SQL varies among the different organization and even within an organization, as marketing teams and sales teams usually don’t agree on the lead qualification process.
A SQL is determined by an organization lead management process, which is usually identified by the actions of a prospect that shows their buying intent. Many organizations have implemented a lead
scoring process to identify serious buyers, which is developed to save the time of sales representatives and quickly achieve their sales target.
The difference between MQL and SQL
In order to build a highly effective lead qualification process, you should first understand the difference between an MQL and a SQL. This understanding is very critical if you actually want to understand the complete buyer’s journey that will ultimately affect your success for nurturing leads through the sales funnel.
Now, as you can clearly see there are some overlaps between the two lead qualification processes. For example; when a user visits your company website and downloads a gated content like an e-book, a PDF report, etc. This user has given you a signal that he is interested in your content, but hasn’t shown significant buying intent. So, you add that user to your prospect list and then start to nurture such users with useful content and relevant offers. Eventually, this user does an inquiry about the demo of your product or service, and then this user becomes a SQL.
This clear distinction between these two types of the lead qualification process is very critical. Just think about it for a moment, out of both lead qualification process, neither is more important from one another as a lead from both the lead qualification process can convert into a paying customer. Although, in order to reach there, you must have a clear understanding of how to nurture leads from both the lead qualification process through the sales funnel before giving these leads to your sales team.
Alignment between sales and marketing
One of the most critical factors in achieving a scalable revenue model is the alignment between sales and marketing teams. In recent years buyers’ behavior has changed and marketing teams must contribute a significant part of the entire buying process. Sales teams understand that the traditional buying process has changed a lot and the buyers are enabled with information more than ever and as a result they are self-serving their requirement instead of talking to a sales representative.
If you are not on the same page as your sales team and working very closely with them than your lead scoring, lead qualification, and lead generation efforts will not be effective and is sure to encounter failure. When marketing and sales teams don’t work with the same definitions, rules, and guidelines, lead qualification process turns into total chaos.
This is why it is very important that your sales and marketing teams are on the same page and are working together while determining the criteria of MQL and SQL and also while determining criteria for lead scoring. When it comes to defining criteria for lead qualification, sales teams have very different and closer perspective and so their contribution can provide several important insights that otherwise marketing teams may not have known. This is why alignment between sales and marketing teams is a must in modern companies.
Following are the key elements that marketing and sales teams must agree upon;
Target buyer and their buying process
The sales and marketing teams must be on the same page about who is your target buyer is, what they do, what they like, why and how they buy. And the efforts to find the answers for these should not be isolated to either the sales team or marketing team alone. But, this should be a combined effort.
There are three important elements to understand your target buyer that is “ICP”, “buyer persona” and the “buying process map”. Your ICP, buyer persona, and buying process map are the foundational elements of your revenue chain and as a result agreement between the two teams is critical. The research on your target buyer informs sales and marketing processes, content, messaging, and campaigns. Once the agreement is established between your sales and marketing teams, then you must bring your entire organization on the same page and then train your various teams about who is your target buyer.
Revenue process:
Once your company truly understands who your target buyer is, they have to agree on the revenue process. The entire revenue process is based on the set of defined conversion points that move from the top of the funnel that is from the awareness stage to the stage where you close the deal. There are many conversion points that you can consider, the revenue process that is shared by different teams should primarily focus on five to seven critical conversion points. Once you have developed an agreement on your revenue process, then a flow chart or a clear picture should be developed to help everyone in your various teams to understand what it is exactly and more importantly what does it mean. Your sales and marketing teams can use this process and all the relevant conversion points to jointly analyze your revenue process, identify any roadblock in the process and make informed decisions about what has to be resolved.
Messaging that’s created for revenue process
Messaging your target buyer is a very important part of your revenue process. And, disagreement on messaging between sales and marketing teams is a common problem. The alignment problem between the two teams about messaging usually occurs because the messages have not to be created to use it in the day-t-day warm-up of leads as the sales teams do. This can be easily resolved by testing the messages by riding along on your sales pitches and then analyze how your leads react and then based on their reaction optimize your messaging so that it is highly effective. Doing research on your messaging can be highly effective, but the real test is when one of your sales representatives send these messages to leads. Only then you can be sure about which messaging work and which ones do not.
Content alignment
Content alignment problems can easily be solved by bringing your sales and marketing teams to a mutual understanding on the following;
- Where to find the content
- How to identify the effectiveness of the content
- How and when to use the content
- Overall content strategy
Once your sales and marketing teams come to an agreement on content strategy, sales teams should train their sales representatives about how should they use the content in the buying process.
Service level agreements
There is a lot of service level agreement between the sales and marketing teams that are must develop alignment between the two teams. Marketing teams have agreed to produce a set quota of qualified leads at the same time sales teams have to agree on guaranteed lead follow up process that instructs how quickly they will follow up on a lead and the effort they will put in the process. Sales teams have to agree to provide periodic feedbacks. Delay in lead follow up harms the entire revenue generation process and it must be avoided.
Feedback loops and optimization
The final piece of the puzzle for the alignment between the sales and marketing team is the agreement to communicate periodically and optimize the entire process. You should conduct a series of periodic meeting that happens between your sales and marketing teams. And the goal of these meetings should be to discuss what’s not working and what’s working.
Optimize your lead qualification process
Every company evolve eventually and changes over time, especially when they create new solutions. As a result, it is very important that your lead qualification process evolves accordingly. For example, a change in your marketplace or a new product may open the doors to your company for entirely new demographics. And if you don’t change your lead qualification process accordingly, then the qualified leads may fall through the crack. So, it is highly recommended to thoroughly evaluate your lead qualification process. Figure out how your target customer base has evolved and then optimize your lead qualification process accordingly.
Conclusion
There’s no exact science to develop and implement a lead qualification process. Different companies have different lead qualification process as every company is unique and so what they look for in a lead are also unique.
But the key to effective lead qualification process lies within developing a clearly defined system and sticking to it.
