There are many improvements that can be made to your marketing strategy once you have a better understanding of the importance of lead quality. One of the greatest predictors of return on investment for lead generation marketing is how targeted the lead are, which is why making improvements to this aspect of your campaign is vital to your success. Lead generation marketing provides the opportunity to use a variety of marketing tactics to reach a wide audience, but narrowing the focus is the key to creating the most valuable lead lists.
The more effort that goes into qualifying leads before they are channeled to your sales team, the greater your conversion rates will be. This can be thought of like putting your leads through a funnel at the top, with the most qualified prospects coming out the smaller end. Should you be concerned over providing a decreased number of leads to your sales team? Probably not. Fewer leads with a drastically increased conversion rate is going to create the highest return on investment possible, and that is good news for everyone. This is the benefit of quality-driven vs. quantity-driven lead generation marketing.
So, how can you improve the quality of the leads you are generating? It all starts with understanding what makes a quality lead. Once you understand what makes a quality lead and how important quality leads are to your business, everything else will start to fall into place. There are at least five things you must determine in order to properly qualify a lead:
- Does the prospect have a need for the product or service being marketed? You don't want to be in the business of trying to sell a tanning booth to a beachfront resort in Hawaii.
- Is the prospect the primary decision maker? If you aren't dealing with a person who has the authority to make a purchase, you are wasting your time and theirs.
- Is the prospect ready to make this decision in the immediate future? If they aren't looking to purchase in the next six months you can move them to a 'call in the future list,' but don't waste your sales team's time sending them to make a presentation now.
- Can the prospect afford to implement your product or service? You don't want to make a presentation for the purpose of "window shopping."
- How much business is the prospect likely to bring in? You need to make cost-effective presentations.
Some of these questions should, of course, be analyzed in the context of your actual product or service in order to fully qualify the prospect. Once you have established a protocol for using your lead generation marketing strategy to find highly-targeted leads and seen the bottom line results, you will never go back to a broad-based lead generation campaign again. The steps that are taken to properly qualify leads in the beginning are much more cost effective than passing unqualified leads to the sales team and hoping they will be able to "sell" them. It is almost impossible to "sell" an unqualified prospect whereas a qualified prospects practically sell themselves. Like anything else in business, making improvements to your lead generation marketing strategy should be an ongoing process.
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