How To Generate Qualified Leads

Learn the secrets to generating qualified leads that are highly likely to convert into paying customers. You need qualified leads that will actually turn into sales, and the best way to get those is by attracting them in the first place with a compelling offer. Tools like LeadGrow can help you keep track of all your leads and craft a strategy that’s a perfect fit for the company size, industry, and budget-level.

Here’s What We’re going to discuss now:

• Why you should quit chasing quantity and concentrate on quality instead.
• How to optimize the top of your sales funnel for direct quality.
• How to identify the most promising leads with lead scoring and disqualify leads with qualification frameworks.

Ready to start generating leads that actually convert to sales?

Read…

Every Marketer Needs To Face The Dilemma Of Lead Generation

[Data]”, senior search engine optimization specialist at WordStream, Gordon Donnelly, discusses a problem that each and every marketer faces when generating leads: quality vs. quantity.

“The real issue here isn’t, are conversion campaigns more effective than lead generation campaigns?

It’s that Facebook lead gen seems to exist on this spectrum where the more we focus on increasing lead quantity, the more we run the risk of losing quality; vice versa, the more we concentrate on quality, the more we run the risk of losing volume,” explains Gordon.

While he was speaking about Facebook advertising, this applies to some direct generation methods. There is always a trade-off between quantity and quality. But which one of them is more important?

Why You Need to Stop Chasing Quantity and Focus on Quality Rather

You have probably heard the term”vanity metrics” before. These are metrics that don’t have a direct impact on your bottom line.

They are known as vanity metrics because there’s a desire to focus on improving them just because it makes you feel good, not because it helps to increase your revenue.

Is how many leads a vanity metric? It depends on whether they’re qualified or unqualified leads.

• Qualified leads are your ideal customers: they know they have a problem, they are aware that you are providing a solution, and they can afford to pay for that solution.
• Unqualified leads are not your perfect customers: they may not be aware they have a problem, they are unsure of what you are offering, and they may not be able to afford the solution.

It goes without saying that qualified prospects convert to paying clients at a much higher rate.

Moreover, they make better customers, because they tend to be less likely to request a refund, require less service, and are more open to your other supplies.

Naturally, an unqualified lead may turn into a qualified lead with time, whether through becoming more aware of the problem, or learning more about what you offer, or just improving their financial situation.

“So what’s the harm in getting their contact details then?” You may be wondering. “Who knows, maybe they’ll wind up buying from me .”

But you need to take into account the fact that you have limited funds. So once you spend these resources on acquiring unqualified leads, you have less resources left to spend in acquiring qualified leads.

And because qualified prospects convert better, this means that you’re missing out on potential earnings.

In other words, unqualified leads are costing you money, which is something that you can not afford if you are serious about growing your business.

Example: Noah Kagan Saved 47 percent on His Email Bill by Pruning His Email List

When Noah Kagan, the creator of AppSumo and Sumo, saw his MailChimp bill, it made him sick. No thanks,” he thought to himself.

But on average, only 19 percent of their readers would open and 2.5% would click every email.

At the time they had around 105,000 subscribers on their main email list. But normally, only 19% of their readers would open and 2.5percent would click each email.

“This means MOST individuals are NOT reading our emails. And this is most likely true for you, too,” explains Noah.

He targeted”not active” subscribers he defined as people who haven’t engaged with any of the emails in 3 months.

Noah ended up decreasing his email list size from approximately 105,000 subscribers down to 72,000 subscribers. Because of this, his email advertising bill went down by 47%, from $719 to $375 a month (savings of $4,128 annually ).

“Your self is going to be hurt moving from 105,000 email readers down to 72,000 (like we did),” he says.

This is a great example of how unqualified leads are costing you money: you pay to acquire them, then you pay to keep them in your email list.

It’s ideal to refrain from acquiring unqualified leads in the first place. Of course, that is not always possible, but simply being proactive about qualifying leads can radically increase lead quality. And that is going to have a direct impact on your bottom line.

Optimize the Top of Your Funnel To Bring Quality Leads

You need to take into account the big picture if you want to generate leads that actually convert to sales.

Consider your sales funnel:

Lead quality depends on:

• Traffic caliber.
• Bait quality.

Quite simply, you need to:

• Drive the perfect kind of visitors to your sales funnel.
• Give them an enticing lead magnet.

Let’s take a look at each of these two important factors needed to create quality leads.

Drive the Right Kind of Traffic To Your Sales Funnel

You want to make certain that the traffic you are driving to your sales funnels is composed of your ideal clients.

You can do this by:

• Clearly defining your target audience, then excluding everyone else.
• Emphasizing the key benefit that your product provides.
• Making it clear what it is that you’re all about.

Notice that if you push the wrong kind of traffic to your sales funnel, then you shouldn’t expect those leads to convert to paying customers.

That’s why you need to be ruthless about targeting your ideal clients and excluding everyone else.

For example:

The previously mentioned Noah Kagan excludes women from his Facebook ads campaigns. Why?

Because when he studied the information, he realized that girls were not opening his emails. So he stopped targeting them.

Here is how Noah explains it:

“It’s not that I don’t like women. I love them!

But the point is that they are not actually as interested in my articles.

There is probably someone who can better share that sort of content with them.

So I target my audience which is males, 25-44.”

Excluding people like this may feel uncomfortable at first, but you want to bear in mind that you want qualified leads, so it is reasonable to only go after your ideal customers.

Give Them an Enticing Lead Magnet

Once you have the attention of your ideal clients, you will need to then give them a reason to get into your sales funnel.

You can do this by offering them a lure, also known as a lead magnet, which is something that you give away for free in exchange for their email address.

This is anything that can be downloaded or obtained online:

• An ebook.
• An email program.
• A video course.
• An app.

Bear in mind that in the event that you want it to attract qualified prospects, you need to be certain that it provides an answer to a problem your perfect customers are struggling with that is somehow related to your product.

There is a lot that can be said on the subject of creating an extremely successful lead magnet, but ultimately it all boils down to providing a ton of value.

As we have explained in a recent Instagram article:

It is probably safe to say that the #1 mistake people make when it comes to lead magnets is hastily throwing something together without putting any thought into it, then being shocked that it doesn’t convert as well as they had hoped.

You need to approach creating your lead magnet the same manner that you would approach creating a paid product.

In actuality, your guide magnet should be so great that you could charge money for it if you wanted to, you just choose not to.

How To Know Just Who Your Ideal Customers Are

There’s always quite a bit of guesswork involved in establishing a business.

You will need to make educated guesses about who your target audience is, what problems they’re struggling with, and how to solve those problems.

But once you launch a company, data starts coming in. You should use that data to refine those initial assumptions.

And when it comes to knowing who your ideal customers are, once you have enough information, you do not have to guess anymore. You can just see who’s buying your goods.

You should look at the people who have already purchased something from you and ask yourself:

• Who are they?
• How did they learn about my business?
• What made them buy my products?

As soon as you have these answers, you can adjust your advertising to target those that are similar to your existing customers, since they’re those most likely to convert.

Notice that this is not something you do once. It’s a never-ending process of continuously refining your knowledge of your target audience.

Why You Need To Add Just the Right Amount of Friction

There’s a common lead generation advice that states that you ought to remove all friction if you want to attract leads.

In other words, you would like to make it as easy as possible for the prospective client to give you their contact information. Eliminate everything that stands in their way.

The rationale behind this is that when people are using the world wide web, they tend to be extremely distracted, so if getting your guide magnet requires even the slightest amount of effort, they’ll simply leave and won’t come back.

The issue with this approach is that it is optimizing for quantity.

But is someone who would be so easily discouraged from downloading your guide magnet really your ideal customer? Probably not.

Of course, it might also be the case that your lead magnet is simply not good enough, which is why people can not be bothered to download it.

But the point is that introducing just the right amount of friction to the opt-in process can help you increase lead quality.

For example:

• Ask for their name as well as for their email address.
• Use routine Facebook advertisements instead of Facebook lead ads.
• After all, it stands to reason that someone who:

Has an issue.

• Is aware that they have a problem.
• Wants to get a free solution to that problem.
• …will be willing to type in their name, click on an ad, or start an email and click on a confirmation link.

Example: Facebook Lead Ads vs. Landing Pages

Facebook provides a form of ad that’s designed for lead generation called lead ads.

It enables people to complete an opt-in form without leaving the platform, with only a couple of taps on their smartphone display (Facebook pre-fills it using the data pulled from their account).

The idea is that it is much easier to subscribe to an email list that way as opposed to clicking on a regular ad, visiting a landing page, then typing in the data.

WordStream did a study to see what converts better: lead advertisements or regular ads that send people to a landing page.

They examined over 3,000 campaigns and about $9.5 million in advertising spend on the course of 60 days.

They focused on two metrics:

• Conversion speed.
• Cost per action.

“So while cost per action was higher, the takeaway here is that lead generation campaigns convert to prospects (from clicks) at a 2.07% higher rate than conversion campaigns. Which, due to the more streamlined user flow, is something we expected!”

WordStream then did another study where they examined their own data throughout the same 60-day time period to ascertain which lead generation method resulted in higher quality leads.

WordStream reasoned that:

• Lead ads were more effective at converting clicks to leads.
• Regular advertisements that sent people to landing pages were more capable of generating quality leads at a lower cost.

As you can see, the further friction involved with showing people regular advertisements, then sending them to a landing page works in your favor, assuming you are optimizing for lead quality.

Lead Scoring

We’ve already discussed the importance of analyzing information to identify your ideal customers and adjusting your marketing strategy accordingly.

There’s also something called lead scoring which permits you to assign a value to every lead based on how likely they are to convert so that you could then prioritize reaching out to the most promising leads.

Companies that sell low-touch products which don’t require salespeople to reach out to prospects do not necessarily have to use lead scoring, but it’s crucial for businesses that sell high-touch, expensive products and has dedicated sales teams.

When that is true, you do not want your salespeople to waste their time calling leads up who are unlikely to buy, so you need to place a good lead scoring system set up.

Here is the main idea behind lead scoring:

• You examine the conversion rate of your leads.
• You determine the attributes that leaders who have converted to paying customers to have in common.
• You then assign each new lead a score based on their attributes. The more attributes that they share with the leads who have converted to paying customers, the higher score you assign to them.

Your sales team then prioritizes leads with the maximum lead scores.

This may sound super complicated, but it can all be automated with machine learning. You just need the right software.

Sales Qualification

When you have a sales team that reaches out to the most promising prospects and programs sales calls together, you will need to be sure they know how to quickly disqualify leads that are unlikely to convert.

There are several qualification frameworks that can help with this:

BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline). A salesperson working with this framework seeks to find out whether the guide has the budget required, the ability to make the choice, an actual need for the product, and is able to make the purchase within a reasonable period.

ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money). Similar to BANT, a salesperson using this framework seeks to figure out if the lead has the authority to make the choice, real demand for the item desperately wants a solution and can manage the product in question.

FAINT (Funds, Authority, Interest, Needs, Timing). A salesperson using this framework seeks to find out if the lead has the funds needed, the ability to make the decision, is interested in the solution in question, demands that solution, and intends to buy within a reasonable timeframe.

There are many other frameworks such as CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization) and MEDICC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion).

But the point of all of these frameworks is to quickly disqualify leads so that the salesperson wouldn’t waste their valuable time on someone who was never going to buy anyway.

It is reasonable to research these frameworks, decide which one is most suitable for your business, then provide your sales team with coaching.

It’s also worth noting that there is often a psychological obstacle to disqualifying leads. It may feel counterintuitive to reject someone who has expressed an interest in your product.

But you want to remind yourself that if you’ve got a solid framework for disqualifying leads, then you are not losing anything because they were never going to buy anyway.

Moreover, there’s also the limited resources issue that we have discussed at the beginning of the article.

The longer time, energy and money spent on low carb leads, the less time, energy, and money you’ve left for high-quality leads.

It’s important to always remember that your resources are finite and that you will need to manage them wisely in case you wish to get anywhere in business (or in life, for that matter).

Summary

You may think that bragging about your 1,000,000 email subscribers sounds great-but it’s not the number of leads that matters. What’s more important is how likely they are to convert to paying customers because if you have a list of 1,000,000 readers who don’t care about what you’re selling- then it just becomes a costly ego boost.

You don’t want just anyone’s contact details. You want the contact information of your ideal customers.

• Drive the perfect traffic to your sales funnel.
• Offer your perfect customers a direct magnet so valuable that they’d be crazy to say no to it.
• Place a lead scoring system in place so that your sales team could prioritize the most promising leads.
• Pick a sales qualification framework and then instruct your sales staff.
• Gather data and analyze it. Who is buying your products? Make adjustments accordingly.

More qualified leads mean more paying customers, more paying customers mean increased earnings, higher earnings mean more profit.

And much more profit means more money for you.

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