Inbound Lead Qualification Tips and Best Practices

Do you think you are at the crossroads of allocating the appropriate time and resources when qualifying leads? 

Lead generation or lead qualification is an act of identifying and cultivating new potential customers. It continues to be the target of all businesses and digital marketers out there.

Before we move ahead, let us check the following statistics that will show the state of lead qualification.

  • 61% of  today’s marketers believe that lead qualification is their #1 challenge.
  • 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead qualification.
  • Less than one-fifth of marketers think that outbound practices offer valuable leads.
  • 80% of marketers think that marketing automation generates more leads.
  • Leads are likely to be hiked by 9x when the marketer’s follow-up within 5 minutes.

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A few top tools that help sales and marketing teams achieve their inbound lead qualification goals.

1. Pathmonk

Pathmonk gives you immense capabilities to qualify leads without making any changes to your website. The lead qualification tool identifies important insights about your website visitors and matches their behavior patterns with the previous visitors to identify and prioritize the most promising leads.

Pathmonk is an amazing AI system offering features beyond just throwing random questions. With this tool, marketers can deploy full qualification logic within seconds to qualify or disqualify leads immediately.

2. HubSpot

Next in line is HubSpot, most B2B teams know its capabilities as a whole. In terms of a lead qualification platform, it offers everything from lead generation, meeting scheduling, quote generation, and more.

The ergonomic design of the platform is such that marketers can easily close deals, manage all the leads, reach out to prospects, and update/optimize content continuously at ease.

3. Unbounce

Your landing pages play a significant role to highlight your product or seasonal offers. The more effective these pages are, the better the leads you will attract. Unbounce is a platform that helps you create custom landing pages without the need for any coding skills.

The platform is equipped with AI systems to generate more conversions and make A/B tests easy for each landing page.

4. Acquire

Many prospects need answers to one or two questions before entering the sale pipeline. In such cases, marketers can offer help to prospects with the help of Acquire’s webchat interface. Acquire can handle most of the questions of users with the help of a chatbot. The chatbots further help you gather more data on  prospects to kickstart a lead qualification process.

5. Prospect.io

Lead qualification should be targeted at the earliest stages. Prospect.io is a marketing automation tool letting you build up effective email lists, automate outbound sales processes, and increase your team’s overall productivity. The tool can further be integrated with other CRM solutions to help you drive more targeted traffic to your landing pages.

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Why lead qualification is essential for marketers?

Undoubtedly, lead qualification must be an integral part of your sales process as it can save you time, money, and energy.

Marketers must align their sales teams and sales processes around lead qualification because:

  • It can help determine if the lead is interested in your products and services.
  • It can make sure they have the timeframe and budget that suits you.
  • It helps to find whether the prospect is in the right direction to be benefited from your services
  • It helps to connect with the people who have the authority to make purchase decisions.

Despite the various advantages of inbound lead qualification, more than 20% of salespeople struggle with qualifying leads. Regardless of the industry you work in, having an efficient lead qualification process is key to avoiding time wastage. Here are a few tips to incorporate into your inbound lead qualification process.

  1. Email alias
  2. Maintain a good quality website
  3. Proper protocols for social media presence & following
  4. Press & News Coverage
  5. Use LinkedIn to find out the perfect lead for your brand.

Lead qualification is all about research; the more you spend time vetting your leads, the better the leads you get.

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Final Word

Whatever lead qualification tools you use, it is essential to measure their efficiency. Marketers and sales teams must keep their expectations high and look for other solutions if the one chosen is not offering everything they need.