Knowledge is power… but access to knowledge is even more important. Even if your sales team is asking the important questions to your prospects, what happens to the information they gather? Does it just exist in notes written down on a piece of paper or typed into a word doc? If so, that knowledge is being under-utilized. It should be delivering much more value to your organization.
You need a formalized lead qualification process to make sure your sales team gathers the right information and turns it into actionable data that can be used to help you sell. To effectively implement lead qualification, you need to build the right fields in your CRM and train your sales team to use it properly.
Why bother?
Implementing any process with your sales team takes both time and money, so you need to carefully consider any new process you introduce. Lead qualification, however, is an investment that is guaranteed to give you a great return on investment.
Consistently gather essential information.
Whatever industry you are in, there are some pieces of information that are essential to gather before you can advance a prospect to a sales opportunity. By using a formalized lead qualification process, you can make sure that every sales rep is asking the important questions to every prospect.
Empower your marketing campaigns.
The data your sales team enters into your CRM for your lead qualification process can also be used to implement targeted calling and email campaigns. Without this important data, you would not be able to specifically target prospects based on information important to their businesses.
Gain greater insight about your market.
By entering answers to important questions into specific fields in your CRM instead of just writing them down, you can run reports based on the information your sales team gathers. These reports can help you see trends in your market that you might not otherwise have been aware of.
How to Start
Before you can start qualifying leads, you need to decide what the most important pieces of information are for your sales process.
What to include
Ask yourself, “What do I need to know about a prospect before I can advance them in my sales pipeline?” A marketing company, for instance, might want to know what platform the prospect uses to run its website and how much the prospect has budgeted to spend on marketing this year. You need to identify what information is most important to your sales cycle.
What not to include
The fewer qualifiers you include, the more likely it is that your sales team will use the questions you keep. Overwhelming your sales team with too many will reduce your adoption rate in inhibit the effectiveness of your lead qualification process, so keep it simple!
Lead Qualification Success
Coming up with a great process and building out all the needed fields in your CRM won’t mean anything if your sales team doesn’t have the discipline to gather and enter the information required for your lead qualification. Spend time showing your team how to ask the right questions to get the necessary information to qualify leads.
Show them that lead qualification isn’t just another thing they need to do – it is a tool that will help them close more business. To get the most out of lead qualification, though, it helps to work with a partner who has been there before.
NuGrowth Solutions has implemented lead qualification programs for clients in industries as diverse as software to manufacturing. We can work with you to
- Find out what questions your sales team should be asking.
- Train your sales team to use
- Build out the required fields in your CRM.
- Help you use that data to improve the success of your sales team.
If you are looking to improve your sales effectiveness through implementing lead qualification, NuGrowth Solutions can help. To find out how, contact the NuGrowth team at 800-966-3051 or fill out a contact form and we will be in touch.
