One of the most important objectives of marketing areas in organizations is to identify and generate leads or commercial prospects that eventually become new customers for your company. Month after month the indicator of Leads generated through different channels such as digital advertising, organic social networks, website, call center or physical facilities, among others, is reviewed. Could we say that the marketing area is doing a better job if the Leads generated increase month after month, or that they are doing a bad job if they decrease? The answer is a resounding NO!
More Leads are not better Leads
A Lead can be defined as a person who has shown interest in a company’s products or services and in that process voluntarily left their contact information through a digital form or other channels such as a phone call, a visit to a store or a commercial office. Some companies receive the data of thousands of Leads per month but have a limited sales force that can adequately serve only a percentage of the people who leave their contact information. This means that some Leads will be left without immediate or personalized attention from human sales agents (attention with tools such as Bots will be discussed in a future article). In order to increase the effectiveness of the sales force, it is necessary to prioritize the attention and be selective when making that commercial call that will help to close a deal. This is why it is important not only to generate commercial prospects, but also to ensure that these prospects have not only the interest but also the real intention and ability to buy.
Defining the profile of your Lead ideal
In order to prioritize the Leads to be served, the first step is to define the profile of the ideal customer for the products or services offered by the company. At this stage, you can use segmentation methodologies by product or service that take into account geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral variables. Another very effective methodology is to define the “Buyer Persona” for each product or service line. The “Buyer Persona” is a semi-fictional description of the target customer to whom our offer is addressed. Ideally, it should have a first and last name, age, place of residence, socioeconomic status, income level, educational level, interests, dreams, fears, reasons for purchase, among others. In Focux Digital we even generate a photograph of their face with an artificial intelligence tool to have more recall and empathy.
How to qualify and connect a Lead
Once the company is clear about its ideal target customer, all marketing and advertising actions must be focused on reaching this segment effectively with strategies to generate “awareness”, this means that we must draw the attention of people in this segment with content of their interest and powerful messages that motivate them to learn more about the offer and even leave their data to access a particular content, a free trial or have commercial advice.
The different digital marketing automation platforms and CRMs allow companies to perform a better profiling or qualification of leads automatically. For this it is necessary and advisable to obtain information that allows us to perform this profiling more accurately than just having their basic contact information.
Some examples of questions that can be asked in the lead generation forms can be: income level or budget available for the purchase, how long they plan to make their purchase, their age, the reason for their purchase, among others. The questions depend on the type of product or service and its sales cycle.
We can program an automation or algorithm that takes into account the responses of the leads and perform ratings with a weighted matrix, i.e., assigning more points to the answers that the company defined as decisive to prioritize that contact. The result will be a qualified or unqualified lead, and we can even establish lead prioritization ranges as defined in the strategy.
When the lead is profiled or qualified, we must be clear about how this contact will be assigned to the commercial advisors so that they can deal with it in a timely manner and make use of the information they have already provided us with. Again, marketing automation tools and CRMs are an invaluable help to perform this process in real time and measure the management and effectiveness of the sales force.
The journey has just begun
Once the lead is qualified, prioritized and assigned to a commercial advisor according to its profile, a new stage begins: the sales funnel. The digital transformation strategies of the customer journey that we develop with our clients are focused on optimizing the commercial process with strategy, data and technology in order to generate more business and reduce the sales cycle. In a future article we will talk about how to optimize the sales funnel using digital strategy, data and technology.
