Did you know that 57% of the buying decision is made before a prospect or potential customer even contacts your business?
This means the consumer has the power to do the bulk of their research and vendor qualification up front before reaching out to your business or team (and sometimes never at all).
The good news is, it’s these consumer behaviours that can be measured and monitored to enable the very start of your marketing and sales qualification process. The better news is, keep reading and we’ll tell you how.
Common symptoms
The timing's never quite right for a prospect? Can you call back in 4 weeks? Or, let me come back to you.
Excessive number of meetings before signing?
Low conversion from lead to customer?
It’s time to consider what makes a lead qualified and how you can better classify them for more appropriate messaging or even justifying their inclusion at all.
“If leads were fruit – would you pick them unripe?
What’s the difference between one lead and another?
What do you call a lead that has done very little to qualify themselves? A lead…. nothing more, nothing less. Wait, I thought a lead was more valuable than that? Not until they’ve earnt it. The process of qualification merely begins here.
It’s time to start looking at who your leads are, figuring out how to categorise their journey and support them through to sale. Remembering, they might not even speak to you until the decision is made.
Do we need better quality leads?
So we understand our leads can be at different stages of the buyer’s journey and are likely different personas. But, how do we find out who they are? Context is the key to getting this process working really well for you. Gearing your website pages with information that matches the signals of your ideal customers is a non negotiable. Beyond that, using your CRM to present data or historicals of your contacts, prospects and customers a great place to start the process of identifying a good lead (ideal persona) versus a not so good lead (negative persona).
Quick Tip: Start by taking your 5 best and 5 worst leads over the last 30, 60 or 90 days.
If you’ve yet to create personas for your business, take some time now to profile your ideal client and also your non ideal. Our free persona builder tool will guide you through the key identifiers.
Being patient and giving titles
We've recently adopted a new mindset to exclude a prospect before you include them. It was off the back of a great post written by Harrie on our team around negative personas and the power of saying no.
But what about saying not now, or not just yet?
Being mindful of when a prospect is fully ready to buy is a great way to operate. Creating scarcity is handy, but simply getting buy in or approval on a mutual timeline even more powerful.
How? By making your leads confirm they’re right for your business and ready through a series of planned activities and tests. Your website (marketing) should be the entree to your qualification process, not your hard out sales pitch. Provide opportunity through information to get to know your prospects.
By using layers or steps with your visitors / leads / prospects will allow for smarter marketing and sales.
Identifying and filtering these contacts is the first step. Are you seeking further information from your prospects to help build a clearer profile of suitability or readiness?
In terms of timing - which are the common labels or categories for the different stages of leads before they’re ready to shell out some coin and become a customer?
Here’s a visual set of lead stages before purchase:
Simple, right? You can print that one out and keep it handy for your workflow and content planning so you remember to classify a lead before jumping the gun and self sabotaging a perfectly good deal.
It's important to note that success hinges on being clear around what criteria Marketing classify a lead as ‘marketing qualified’ ready to handover to Sales.
Foster a healthy conversation around what your team would classify as marketing qualified or ready for sales to contact the prospect. This can vary from business to business, though by simply being clear on these signals and reviewing regularly these stages will allow your team or business to optimise the handover from one stage to the next.
As much as we’d love every prospect to buy now, it's often not feasible. Therefore, we should remain patient and aware of the buyer's timeline, instead of our own agendas. Having to foster scarcity, urgency and artificial motivation will be much less of an issue when you've built your lead pipeline correctly.
To get clear on your Marketing and Sales goals for 2016, be sure to take advantage of the complimentary Lead Calculator below. Your "Smarketing" will thank you for it.
Happy marketing + selling.
