Qualified Sales Leads

Great companies move beyond lead generation and develop a process to qualify leads. Unqualified leads that don’t match your company’s criteria are a waste of money, time and resources for your marketing and sales team.

At Valve+Meter Marketing our lead generation services marry the most effective methods of attracting leads and engage prospects during a lead qualification process. To improve conversion and strengthen your company’s sales pipeline, lead qualification services thoroughly analyze prospects to verify where they are within the sales funnel and whether they’re worth pursuing for your highly skilled sales reps.

Not all leads are created equal and qualifying sales questions separate high quality prospects from cold leads. Our team uses data to qualify leads and optimize a custom lead generation service for your business. When metrics drive your marketing efforts, businesses can experience transformational growth.

Conventional Lead Generation Versus Performance Marketing for Sales Qualified Lead

One of the most important elements that distinguishes lead qualification services is the marketing methods used to attract leads. Every marketing campaign begins with lead generation. At the most basic form, an open sign and a sales representative are marketing. Good companies design internal business development teams and engage professional marketing teams to attract potential customers. Great companies apply math to marketing to find the most effective strategies and methods.

The most conventional and recognizable methods of generating leads include:

These methods are largely based on expensive assumptions. Your ideal buyer must first be within the audience, then be enthralled with your singular advertisement. The wrong marketing method or the wrong marketing tool misses your target audience. While traditional media advertising efforts look impressive by reaching broad audiences, the return on marketing spend is poor. Specifically, expensive television ads do little more than fuel the ego of a business by glamorizing owners, products or services. 

Traditional Advertising

Historically, print ads, radio ads and television ads have been used to attract large audiences. These conventional marketing methods function to trawl impressive audience numbers catching a wide range of leads that might suit your product and service. 

These methods are largely based on expensive assumptions. Your ideal buyer must first be within the audience, then be enthralled with your singular advertisement. The wrong marketing method or the wrong marketing tool misses your target audience. While traditional media advertising efforts look impressive by reaching broad audiences, the return on marketing spend is poor. Specifically, expensive television ads do little more than fuel the ego of a business by glamorizing owners, products or services. 

Far more crucial than reaching broad audiences is finding qualified sales leads for your sales teams. This demands data and expert performance based marketing.

Online Advertising

Within performance marketing, metrics inform your decisions. Online advertising allows businesses to follow metrics. Online marketing strategies like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are far more data driven and thus, less capital is required to attract leads.

 Especially for nuanced products and nascent businesses, PPC helps to hone in on the specific interest and demographics of your most responsive audiences. Expert marketing teams use PPC, retargeting, A/B Testing, and other metric driven tools to design the most effective advertising. These steps require time and talent that may be overlooked by many businesses.

When a business deems a digital campaign successful by the quantity of leads, you often overlook some pain points. A high number of poorly qualified leads can overwhelm sales reps and due to this clogged sales pipeline, qualified leads are lost. For businesses wherein sales cycles are longer than a single contact, PPC and sales teams must be carefully managed to work in unison. 

NETWORKING AND REFERRALS

Actual contacts can receive individual messaging. Peers and existing customers have long been the best advocates for businesses. Prospects that emerge from follow up and relationship building help businesses grow but this requires stable sales teams, time and resources. Referrals, networking and partnering with other companies typically improves conversion rate and reaches the key decision maker but not all businesses can wait on a slow sales pipeline.

What is Lead Qualification?

In terms of performance marketing, lead qualification is the application of math to your marketing decisions. Specifically, all fruits of the lead generation process including online advertising, content marketing, email marketing, networking, and referrals appeal to buyers at all levels of the sales funnel. 

Lead qualification process culls key decision makers from low quality leads and vets their position within the sales funnel. 

When you disqualify leads early in the qualification process you eliminate a major pain point of sales teams. Qualifying leads puts an end to your delivery of a spectacular sales pitch to the wrong prospect. Qualification is the process to judge the likelihood a sales lead will purchase your product or service and become a long-term customer.

The overarching goal is to reduce wasted effort of your company’s sales teams by filtering out the poor quality leads. To determine who is a qualified lead, Valve+Meter designs your ideal customer profile (ICP). Our lead qualification specialists analyze all leads that emerge from marketing efforts including PPC, SEO, email, and other campaigns. Our lead qualification services gather as many insights and as much data as possible about the prospects. 

If our analysis indicates they could be a qualified lead, our specialists transfer to your sales representatives. Outreach from one of your company’s sales representatives entered into the customer relationship management (CRM) gleans more useful information from the prospect. Data such as what the prospects needs are, their budget and their timeline guide remarketing strategy. 

Our lead qualification services, like all of Valve+Meter’s Outbound Marketing endeavors to reduce time waste, improve close rates and optimize marketing spend. Whereas the role of your sales representatives is to delight customers, our role is to attract leads and keep prospects engaged with your brand until they are ready to buy.

Who Performs Lead Qualification?

There are two types of lead generation specialists within a sales and marketing team who execute lead qualifying. Sales development representatives and business development representatives qualify potential prospects and help to manage your sales pipeline. Instead of simply handing every lead to a closing sales rep, these specialists perform processes to filter leads to the right position. These roles are very similar but distinct because inbounds leads and outbound leads require uniques strategies.

Sales Development Representatives or SDRs most commonly work alongside inbound marketing teams. When a potential client discovers your product or service and reaches out to you, these inbound leads are greeted by SDRs. The role of the SDR is to discover where the prospect is within the buyer’s journey, provide lead nurturing, and identifying whether the prospect is an ideal candidate for your brand. There are many inbound leads that are not relevant and can slow down the sales process. There are also leads that need to be quickly turned over to closing reps. Other prospects will require more time and effort which typically is the role of an appointment setter. Sales development representatives use specific processes to qualify the lead and access technology including CRM to manage data and insights gathered during lead qualifying. This data is highly effective and improving inbound marketing content, messaging and shaping new markets to pursue.

Business Development Representatives or BDRs are typically part of an outbound marketing team. These professionals use many of the sale qualifier techniques and technology, but the focus is on how to improve outreach, advertising, direct mail, email and phone cold calling. All forms of outbound marketing contact cold leads or prospects that have yet to show interest in your products or services. BDRs execute complex campaigns within the tactics but they also fill the role of lead qualification. A fully trained and highly skilled BDR may prospect, qualifying leads and improve processes within your business to increase effective outbound marketing.

Why is Lead Qualification Important?

Most conventional businesses view marketing as an expense. In large part this is due to the cost of traditional advertising models. Without a process to target, contact and qualify prospects, your representatives will lack the tools to move leads through your sales process. Lead qualification services find and manage leads for your sales and marketing team. This saves your company time and resources that would have otherwise been wasted on low-quality opportunities.money by only focusing on and prioritizing the best leads that fit your company’s criteria and offerings.

All of Valve+Meter’s marketing services are teachable tools. Often when it comes to lead generation, businesses believe that they are simply outsourcing what they could do in house, but at Valve+Meter, our clients continue to own everything we build. In essence we operate as an extension of your business. Ultimately, few businesses have the capacity for complete outreach, paid marketing and content marketing teams. By partnering with Valve+Meter, you gain access to all of our services immediately.

Expert Strategies Drive Effective Results

Accessing a wealth of marketing resources at Valve+Meter, businesses gain a new perspective on marketing. When money is invested only in the most effective campaigns, marketing becomes an asset that releases the potential stored within your sales and operations. Instead of spending resources and energy on poor quality prospects, Lead Qualifying Services uses two proven strategies to find your sales team better leads: BANT and GPCTBA/C&I.

BUDGET, AUTHORITY, NEED AND TIMELINE (BANT)

This proven framework begins with a discovery call wherein sales reps follow BANT methodology. These communications are conversational and friendly but core questions distinguish highly qualified prospects for your team.

Budget

Before moving into any sales process, we verify the lead’s budget aligns with your product and service. 

Authority

Many initial prospects are not the final decision maker. Lead Qualification Services asks the lead where they fall within the organization and who else will eventually be involved in the buying process. Valve+Meter asks them what the past decision-making process was like and if it would make sense to invite other parties to a future call.

Need

Can your product or service solve the specific pain point for the unique lead? The lead qualification process determines the specific need of the prospect and verifies that your brand is a viable solution.

Timeline

In order for the lead to become qualified, you must know when they are looking to make a purchase. Every sales cycle is unique but you do not want to lose high quality leads due to negligence. By asking this question, hot prospects at the bottom of the funnel can be immediately sent to your sales team. Other high quality prospects at the top of the sales funnel of near the middle can be processed for follow-up, appointment setting and even email marketing campaigns.

Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget Authority, Negative Consequences, and Positive Implications (GPCTBA/C&I)

A more robust framework for a lead qualification service is a very large acronym, but GPCTBA/C&I helps lead qualification optimize the sales process especially for longer sales cycles and complex B2B sales.

This model puts the sales rep in more of an advisory role. They need to be informed about not just the product and services they’re offering, but also what the prospect’s business model is, their goals, and how your product or service can help with the company’s larger picture.

During the GPCTBA/C&I method, lead qualification reps touch on the following questions.

Choose Valve+Meter for Lead Qualification Services

Valve+Meter is a lead-generation agency built to focus on prospects and outcomes that grow your sales opportunity pipeline. Our lead qualification service works with B2B companies on optimizing sales qualified leads and prospecting campaigns to drive growth. Outsourcing SDR lead qualification and outbound BDR services helps to save time and money for our partners. We combine inbound marketing strategies with account-based marketing to build a repeatable, scalable lead qualification machine for your sales team. Ready for a new kind of lead-generating partner? Request a free marketing analysis today.