What are leads?
Leads are the potential customers we seek to attract to our business and convert them into recurring and loyal customers to our product or service.
First and foremost, how do I know who is a potential customer for my business?
Part of your brand strategy must define how to reach your target audience and to do this you must define your ideal customer through a thorough analysis of your audiences. Once you know what your customers need, want and are looking for, you can understand their buying methods and therefore your sales and marketing strategy teams will be able to create efficient customer acquisition campaigns.
Once your campaign is launched,
what is the next step? This is the moment when your potential customers or leads have contacted you or will contact you through your website, your different social networks, sharing their contact information in a template or any other way within the different points of contact you have defined.
It is important to keep in mind that your customer can be a person or a company and this is according to your target audience attraction strategy.
Now that they have already contacted you , it is the perfect time to analyze their viability and whether or not they are consistent with the audience you are looking to attract. This moment is key. It is here that you should be cautious, analyze that list and pass only those you need to take to the next step of your sales funnel, thus becoming a customer with potential value.
Leads can show varying degrees of interest and depending on this, your teams can define the value or attraction they have for your company. This can help us differentiate that contact between a prospect and a lead, a potential customer.
Remember that a lead has only shown interest in your product/service/web, but this is not synonymous with a guaranteed sale since it is only at the beginning of the sales funnel. These are the prospects with whom you already have a deeper communication and are much more interested in acquiring your product or service.
Importance of lead generation
It is important to engage in lead analysis and generation, not only because of the positive impact your company has with customers, but for your company it is the beginning of a successful loyalty process. It also has many other benefits such as:
- Find your target audience and contact them.
- Collect relevant data about your target audience.
- Solve your customers’ doubts.
- Find insights to improve your product or service.
- Make improvements to your sales and marketing strategies.
- Understand the stages of the sales funnel for each customer profile.
- Efficient management of your target audience.
Classification of leads
We can classify our leads according to two characteristics:
1. The degree of interest
- Hot leads: These are those who request more information about your product or service and are the most likely to buy from you. They are the most important leads that enter your sales funnel.
- Cold leads: These contact you through more informal means such as social networks and are those to whom you will give data but they will not be 100% interested in what you offer them.
2. The phase in the sales funnel:
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): these are the leads that are genuinely interested in your offer but you still have to do some convincing work and request more information about them to find out if they qualify or not to continue in the funnel. The area in charge of defining whether they qualify or not is the marketing area, and if they are viable, they are passed on to sales and enter the funnel.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): are those leads that are ready to buy and their responses to your contacts with them are more efficient and confident. They are the leads that are more advanced in the funnel and are completely ready for negotiation and purchase.
Generate effective and valuable leads
To generate leads efficiently you must focus on the strategy, from the analysis and definition of your target audience to the lead attraction strategy.
Stage 1: Correctly define your target audience
By having a clear understanding of your target audience, the various departments, especially marketing, will have a clear path to follow in order to attract them through the best strategies.
To create this profile you must understand the general and key characteristics of your current customers, know and understand what your current and target customers require, want and need as well as the demographic, economic and social data of your buyers.
Some specific data that will help you a lot to have a much more accurate target audience can be: location, age, goals, challenges, interests, priorities, needs, methods and means of decision making.
Stage 2: Definition of sales and marketing strategies
We have already defined the target audience, now it is time for the marketing and sales departments to create the strategies to drive those leads towards the buying process and sell them your product or service.
Remember that marketing will be the one doing the strategies to connect with your audience and sales will be the one doing the strategies to manage relationships with prospects and close deals.
Segment and classify your leads successfully
To properly segment your leads, a process known as “Lead Scoring” is generated in which a score is given to each lead to verify where it is in the sales funnel. This data will tell us what activities we should carry out with that lead.
Steps for lead scoring generation:
- Gather all the information concerning each lead to try to create a complete profile of him/her. In case you don’t have all the data, consider only the most vital ones that will help you make better decisions.
- Generate a table with the most relevant criteria for your business and their measurement parameters. Remember that these are based on your objectives and customer profile.
- Define the characteristics your lead needs to fit these criteria.
- Score the lead according to the information you have about it.
- Follow up on the lead or send it to the sales department for follow-up.
IMPORTANT! This process must be applied by lead segment since each one can vary according to the strategy you are applying or the objectives you are pursuing. An example would be to segment by stage in the sales funnel.
Pipedrive, your CRM ally for better lead management
This is where Pipedrive comes into your business, CRMs are the perfect allies to help you to keep track of leads and manage them appropriately.
Day by day, consumers have a lower rate of resistance to waiting, they have constant communications with brands and companies that interest them and they want them to be fast and efficient, no matter if they are via web, email or social media. According to Pipedrive, a Forrester study indicates that more than 70% of customers consider it crucial that companies value their time and more than 50% tend to forgo a purchase if they do not get a quick response.
Therefore, it is of vital importance to have a tool that allows you to improve this communication and attention with each of your leads and a CRM is definitely your best option because it allows you to sort and classify each lead, plus you can manage all actions relating to communications and the sales process with that lead.
By using a CRM you can visualize your sales opportunities according to your lead, analyze each lead, understand the leads and include them in the sales funnel by converting them into qualified prospects among many other actions and tasks relevant to closing a deal.
Remember that in addition to an efficient CRM like Pipedrive, it is vitally important that you know the tool and study the information it provides you with in detail, as this data will tell you what your leads are looking for and will help your strategies and your products or services evolve.
Get more and better leads with Pipedrive
If you want to try Pipedrive 30 days free of chargeenter this promotional code when you create the account: pdp-vilarroig. And to create the account, follow this link. You can also contact us to help you in choosing or accelerating the use of Pipedrive if you are already using it.
