If someone, in a meeting, talked about the importance of qualifying your organization’s leads, would you know what it is about? Qualifying leads before entering the funnel is as important as the sales process itself, so you can bring in companies that are in your ideal customer profile (ICP). In this article, we are going to take a closer look at lead qualification and what ICP is, how to identify it and why it can help your company sell more.
How lead qualification works
The concept of lead qualification consists of segmenting the prospect audience to understand which people are most likely to buy from your company, that is, potential customers. This process automatically creates better business opportunities and greatly optimizes your sales team’s time, without wasting time on leads that are not ready for conversion.
Within the inbound methodology, qualification starts with lead generation. The type of material you offer your visitors before they become leads influences the quality of your base. As you develop specific materials aimed at the doubts and objections of your buyer persona, that is, your ideal customer, the leads generated are likely to be more qualified, as they consumed content focused on their needs.
Qualifying each lead in your base is essential to define how each of them will be worked within your strategy. In the end, you must identify whether the lead should be reworked by marketing, in the nurturing process, directed to immediate commercial action, or simply disqualified. This is a strategic way of evaluating your real chances of making a sale at the moment, and also generates the opportunity to close other negotiations over time, making the dynamics between the company and potential customers very close. Communication becomes more direct and results more satisfactory for both parties involved.
The fundamental characteristics to determine if a potential client is suitable or not are: need, suitability, budget, authority and timing.
- Need – Defining if the lead has any problems/pain that your products/services can solve is the most important factor.
- Adequacy – Can your company meet this potential customer? It may seem like the perfect lead, but it’s never going to be a customer if it’s not suitable.
- Budget – You must inform your base how much your solution costs. Your leads need to know if they have enough budget to become customers.
- Authority – Does your lead have the decision-making power to become a customer? Especially in the B2B market, some decisions can only be made by higher positions in the company’s hierarchy.
- Timing – Identifying the timing of your lead is essential to understand what action should be taken. There are very qualified leads that are not yet ready to become customers.
With these definitions in mind, you must develop an efficient qualification method for your company. Counting on an automated qualification tool, which stores data about each lead, making it available to the entire team, and indicating a score. From the score, your team will be able to define what should be done with that lead. It is very important to have a qualification method and always look for new ways to improve this process. Thus, the marketing team can define the focus of their strategies. In addition, the sales team must invest time only in those leads that are able to become customers. This increases the conversion of leads into customers continuously and decreases expenses.
During prospecting, it is possible to capture a large amount of data about the customer. In qualification, it is necessary to deepen knowledge about the prospect to decide which is the best way forward and which automation list this potential customer will enter. For example, if he has already downloaded e-books and has been clicking on newsletter materials, it may be time to offer a discount on the product.
It will be necessary to manage those first stages of the sales funnel. For this, CRM is the best resource. This is because, as you advance through the funnel, the lead becomes a potential customer. That’s where the approaches will start, when looking for more advanced information — trying to follow-up — or even working a little more on qualification. When you opt for a good CRM software, all advances are automatically recorded. The information is archived in a single place, which can be accessed by both the sales and marketing teams. At this stage, those gaps we talked about will be filled, based on the data provided by the lead.
From there, lead scoring is generated, another essential resource. It is with it that you will be able to identify – quickly and completely visually – relevant information about the lead score. This will enable the best leads to the sales team. In addition, segmentation becomes simpler and marketing actions more precise.
If it’s not yet the ideal time to move that lead to the next step, you may have to better explore qualification and nurturing resources, as I mentioned earlier.
In addition, it is important to have the help of a lead tracker, a tool capable of tracking everything the lead does in relation to the company. That way, you know about every interaction, from the first contact to the moment he closes a purchase. This can be used strategically to your advantage. The lead tracker helps, among other things, to customize the entire sales strategy, identify the most valuable content offered, identify ROI trends for these materials, verify the real journey that the lead takes until the purchase, and a new call to action.
The lead is eligible to become a customer. This is a special moment in the qualification process. The faster the commercial contact, the greater the probability of conversion. For the lead to be qualified in the right way and the actions generate great results, it is very important to have a defined integration of marketing with commercial. One of the most common mistakes made by most companies is not integrating these sectors well. The qualification process loses its value if there is not good communication between the marketing and commercial teams. The result of this alignment is: greater ease of analyzing the ROI of marketing and commercial actions, in order to suggest continuous improvements.
Without a well-done lead qualification, your ROI is very likely not good. There is a real cost to not having a lead qualification method, and you don’t have to suffer the consequences of it.
What is ICP and why is it so important for sales?
ICP is an acronym for Ideal Customer Profile. This is a representative profile of key customers to which the company should direct its prospecting efforts in order to have more sales results.
More than tracing a target audience for campaigns or defining a fictitious persona, the ICP points out more objectively which profile of prospects we should focus our approach and negotiation efforts on. The idea is to find, capture, approach and negotiate with those who really have a chance of becoming a customer and not waste time with leads who are not yet ready to consider a purchase. Focusing sales efforts on activities that can really increase the conversion rate makes perfect sense in this context, and that’s exactly what the ICP allows you to do.
By determining an organization’s Ideal Customer Profile, it is possible to outline approach and negotiation strategies that are more focused on the potential customer and, therefore, much more assertive. In addition, it is a way of aligning the efforts of different teams within the company – it will be easier and more tangible for the marketing team to carry out more accurate and qualified prospecting and thus send better opportunities to sales representatives. With this, it is possible to get the most out of the quality and quantity of leads captured, with optimization of conversion rates throughout the entire sales funnel. What matters is increasing sales efficiency and bringing more revenue to your company.
Consider these benefits of defining an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for your organization:
- Increased efficiency in marketing and sales
- Shorter sales cycles
- Higher conversion rates
- cost reduction
- Higher average sales ticket
Defining the ICP basically consists of identifying the essential characteristics of a group of key customers, for example:
- Analyze the characteristics of the main customers – the data that your company already has is an incredible source of information and insights to identify what your Ideal Customer Profile is.
- Identify clients with the best Return on Investment (ROI) – the ideal is to analyze the client portfolio and list the main characteristics of those who bring the best return on investment in the overall picture.
There is no point, for example, in evaluating only the contracts of greater value if these contracts are from customers with default cases or who have registered several complaints over time. A differential to delimit the ICP is also analyzing the results of satisfaction surveys. Surveys such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) indicate customers who can become business promoters and recommend services to other potential customers. And finally define the Ideal Customer Profile – focus all sales prospecting and communication for this profile.
To define the ICP when you still don’t have a customer base to analyze, such as start-up companies, it will be necessary to raise hypotheses. The definition of the ICP, in these cases, will come from the customers that it is intended to have – considering the main customers of potential competitors. As the customer base builds up, it will be necessary to analyze the data and review the previously identified ICP, understanding whether the targeted customers really are part of the ideal profile for the business.
André Vasconcellos is the CEO of the company SalesRush
The post Lead Qualification and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) appeared first on DNEWS.
