In the B2B world, it’s easy to assume that every lead you go after is going to think alike. It’s risky to make assumptions the B2B industry is overly uniform and businesses automatically gravitate to products like yours. In truth, every business customer is different. Your sales and marketing team could end up wasting time going after leads that don’t even qualify based on your criteria.
It’s time to learn how to engage highly qualified leads to avoid wasting time you could spend on more important things. What’s important is to give your sales and marketing team the right tools to land those leads. As top marketing blogs point out, too many sales professionals aren’t equipped with the right assets or resources to do this.
Getting Your Sales and Marketing Team Together
Many B2B marketing analysts note that out of all leads sent to B2B sales departments, only 27% of them fit being qualified. This means a lot of wasted effort, perhaps because your sales and marketing departments work separately. Without having a conjoined effort, neither one will know whether a lead is truly qualified or not.
As another benefit to aligning sales and marketing, they’ll both know where a lead is within the sales funnel. Every lead needs nurturing through this funnel, and it can tell you whether the prospect is worth the extra push through to the conversion phase.
Tools like Lead411 can help you identify the best time to contact a prospect or company based off of sales triggers, like recent funding, new hires and even what other products that company has purchased. This is an incredibly valuable time saver, and alerts can notify you and your sales team on when new prospects enter into your filtered criteria.
How Engaged is Your Lead?
By studying how many page views, interactions, and redeems your lead compiles with your marketing content, you can immediately tell which ones are worth going after. The key factor here is those who engage more than once clearly have more interest in your products or services than if visiting once or twice.
Be sure to use analytic tools to study just how engaged your leads are with content before engaging them further. Real-time metrics help considerably with this so you can take quick action to get ahead of competitors.
Answering Some Other Key Questions
Engaging leads early, you’ll find some ways to get some questions answered by either having direct conversations, or sending them surveys in marketing emails. Ask four key questions you need answered before proceeding.
The most crucial question is: What is the prospect looking for, or need to help their business grow? Plus, you want to know how long it’s going to take for the lead to make a buying decision.
Next, find out what their budgetary requirements are. Then ask whether they’re the authority figure on making the final decisions to buy.
All of these tell you everything you need to know to personalize your future communications.
Don’t forget about putting together B2B customer personas so you can fully understand pain points of every lead. This means everything in making the sales funnel journey more personal.
Visit us at Lead411 to learn more about how to best approach and engage B2B leads.