Why Lead Quality Matters

Lead Generation

Quality over quantity applies to a lot of things we do in our daily lives – especially in certain aspects of sales. Lead generation is at the forefront of quality over quantity.

Lead quantity – gathering all the leads you can find and wishing for the best as you take time and resources out to reach to every single one – is seldom as effective as lead quality.

When the success of your business relies on the constant gathering of new customers, it’s a no-brainer that quality trumps quantity. Many salespeople and marketers waste their efforts targeting leads that will never amount to anything. Low-quality leads may save you time and money at first, but in the long run they will only end up costing you more.

What good is a pipeline full of leads when you don’t even know if they match the audience you’re trying to target? Quality leads meet the demographics of your target audience. The very best lead quality can even go beyond that, meeting their psychographics (personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles).

With qualified leads, you’re all but guaranteeing that you’ve checked off as many of the target audience qualifications as possible.

Need more convincing that quality leads are essential to your lead generation strategy?

The Costs of Using Bad Leads

Time chasing weak leads

When pursuing unqualified, bad sales leads you risk wasting your time. The time spent trying to reach a bad lead could be spent on more productive things such as closing multiple deals with leads you know are more likely to buy. Knowing who you’re contacting can save you a tremendous amount of time.

Bad data also slows employees down so much so that they feel their performance suffers. Something such as calling a person that no longer exists at a number wastes more than 27 percent of their time [Anodot].

Money/Resources on wasted time

How you reach your prospect, whether it be by direct mail or a widespread email campaign, costs money. For every bad lead, your business loses money that could be spent on a reliable lead.

Opportunities missed

Opportunities are missed when you’re using inaccurate data. In the US alone, businesses lose $3.1 trillion annually due to poor data quality [Anodot]. Image how much you would save by getting qualified leads. With weak leads you also lower your opportunity to close a sale.

Finding Real Value

So why would you trust just any company to provide such a critical service? You need a sales lead provider that brings you real value. Here’s what to look for:

Experience

How long has the company been providing its services? You want a company that knows what it’s doing.

Quality Control

Find out where the company gets its data from. Does it just collect and resell other companies’ data? Be sure to find a provider that constantly qualifies its own data.

Customer Satisfaction

Research what customers are saying about the company. Look how its reputation stacks up against others.

Availability

Find a company that has experienced people who are available to help when you need them. Good customer service is a must.

Do your research and put your trust in a company that has the data and services that will help you build your sales.

What can you expect from FreeSalesLeads

Curious as to what you can expect from FreeSalesLeads? We want to make sure your experience with our product is the very best.

We’ve created a video to show you what you can expect when you sign up for FreeSalesLeads. Play it below!

 

We’ve made finding new sales leads easy with our online service. Discover millions of business and consumer leads when you sign up for free.

Want a step by step guide to getting started and growing your customer base with FreeSalesLeads? Check out How FreeSalesLeads works.

Prospecting Strategies – Infographic

Many business owners and salespeople dread having to prospect. There are many ineffective and outdated prospecting techniques that people are still using. With the right techniques, your prospecting can guide you to better-qualified leads. Better-qualified leads means higher growth rates.

Hubspot found that in 2020 “the top priority for marketers [was] generating leads.” With an understanding of the strategies involved in prospecting, you can gather and turn high quality leads into clients.

Prospecting Infographic

How to Sell in a B2B Situation

Business Agreement

B2B sales used to be a lot easier. Businesses would have to reach out and talk to a salesperson who’d pitch them the product or service. However, today’s buyers prefer to conduct research and select what to buy on their own, without any influence from a salesperson.

B2B sales success hinges on your approach. Businesses now do internal research for every buying decision they must make. The growth of the internet makes this task an easier one, one that doesn’t always require information from a salesperson.

Although buyers can easily find information, it isn’t always the right kind of information. Buyers still need salespeople. Because prospects won’t as easily come to salespeople as they use to, salespeople must take new approaches to sell.

Teaching is the new pitching

A big trend at the moment is teaching is the new pitching. Supplying the buyer with valuable information they can use in their business is a big plus for you.

While listening to your prospect’s needs, you should be thinking of different ways to teach them how to solve their issue. Your goal should be to point them in the right direction leading them to tips and tricks within the industry. Show them the best solutions through your blog or social media sites or stats posted on your website. The more you help them out the more loyalty you’re building up for your company.

Teaching doesn’t just involve giving them outside information on how to improve their business, it also involves teaching the prospect about your product. The more the buyer knows about how your product or service can help them, the more likely they’ll be to buy.

Having a basic understanding of the ins and outs of how your product/service works before buying is a huge advantage for buyers. The more they learn from you the less they have to learn on their own. It helps drive investment of time and information in the buyer.

Social Selling is Effective

Social selling is effective in B2B selling. With the overabundant supply of sales and marketing messages buyers see, they are highly skeptical. This skepticism is carried over into their conversations with salespeople. Because of this skepticism, it’s important salespeople help prospects to the path of purchase rather than focusing all their energy on closing the deal.

Sales teams who incorporate social selling into their strategies tend to perform better than those that don’t. Social selling breaks through some of the skepticism. Your presence and interaction with the online community gives your business a better reputation, especially among the younger buyers.

Social selling also allows salespeople to lay out the path to purchase giving buyers a glimpse into how the process would work. The community can then engage, leaving comments, asking questions, and sharing your content. The more you engage online the better reputation you’ll build and the wider of an audience you’ll be able to reach.

Buyers today rely a lot on peer recommendations. Having a social presence that drives consumer comments and interaction is good. People will look to social media and other online channels to learn more about solving their problems and researching your company.

Don’t shy away from talking about the risks involved

Everyone wants to feel confident that they’ve made the right decision for themselves and their growth. It’s the same situation in business to business buying.

Talking about the risks a client perceives is an important step in the buying process. Salespeople should be open to discussing risks. The more a salesperson talks about the risks with their client, the more confidence they can instill in their decision to buy. Without ever talking about it you have no control over how they react to the doubts they have.

B2B buyers are increasingly seeking out ways to identify and reduce risk factors. In identifying the risks involved throughout the process, you can work with your client to reduce and erase risks driving them to a more confident decision to buy.


Get Business Leads

Adapting your sales to fit 2021

Adapting Sales

While we’ve been constantly moving towards a digital world, the pandemic has surely accelerated society’s transition to online buying. With more people working remotely and relying on online buying, it’s time to shift our selling practices towards the new age of online buying and selling.

With this adaption comes some new rules we should follow. Many practices that will be popular in 2021 we’ve already begun doing it’s just a matter of adapting completely to the change to maximize on the new sales age.

Create a Digital Customer Experience

Researching online before buying is becoming a popular thing to do. That means your website needs to be top-notch, supplying consumers with all the information they need to know to decide to buy.

With face-to-face interactions lessening during the pandemic, it’s even more important that your website is set up to give customers a great experience. Your website should be creatively designed to capture visitor’s attention with information that will convince them to engage and buy.

Customers want validation, and your website should be where they go to get it. Online buying is different than in-person buying. Users online want the information they’re seeking to be upfront. This is an advantage for you as you don’t have to use subliminal marketing online. You can be direct with your customers and not turn them away.

People respond to brands that understand their needs. So, you must give users an experience that’s relevant to them and your lifetime value. With comprehensive and compelling messaging, users can gather the information they need.

Most importantly for creating a compelling digital customer experience is being there. Listening to your customers and monitoring how they navigate your website will help you curate your digital customer experience. Try out different landing pages and calls to action to see how your potential and current customers react and direct your website towards that.

With the pandemic moving more people to online buying, it’s all about building connections digitally now.

Use technology to build curated experiences

With creating a digital customer experience it’s important you make it curated to your customers. We’ve already begun to understand the power of personalization to gain consumers’ attention and close more deals. What we need to capitalize on in 2021 is hitting that personalization hard. With digital customer experiences, it’s easy to make this goal a reality.

AI allows us to gain insight into our most valuable customer’s daily lives and understand what they want most. Data and analytics can tell us when and where to engage our customers and how. This technology gives salespeople the ability to use engagement tools that target the best day and time to call someone in each industry. By leaning more heavily on technology salespeople can learn about buyers to develop customer relationships that pay off.

While using this technology to increase sales volume, you have to make sure your messaging is still personal enough to make the customer feel as though the message was made just for them. The sales experience needs to be individually curated for each market and segment of your target audience.

Build connections

With a pause on in-person selling, upping your connection building will be important in the new year. A great way to create value for your buyers is to build a connection with them. However, with online selling, this task becomes more difficult.

A sales rep must now build that connection solely online or over the phone. It’s important that you have the basic principle of doing your research but that you also apply a different approach and adapt for each contact you’re trying to build a connection with. With in person connecting, it’s easy to read a person’s reaction but in shifting to online you’re not as easily notified as to the other person’s reaction to your pitch. This means you need to do a lot more asking and listening. Listen to what they have to say in order to read how they’re taking your pitch. Phrasing your questions and comments better can also help give you the insight you need. Without those physical cues, it’s important to key in on the verbal ones.

In building connections with your customers, you’ll associate great customer experience with your product, something others will be hard-pressed to beat. In doing your research and understanding how you can connect with your client, salespeople can up their game.

Empathize and Understand

This goes for both sales leaders and sales reps. Sales leaders need to understand that sales reps’ jobs just got a heck of a lot harder in some areas. In certain markets, people are buying a lot less. Sales leaders need to embrace empathy and provide personalized, detailed coaching techniques to help get teams back on track and confident.

Once back on track and confident in their selling, sales reps need to empathize with their potential customers. With the pandemic hitting businesses and consumers hard, it’s important sales reps understand each client’s situation and take a different approach to sell.

Don’t be afraid to ask how the pandemic is affecting your customers. You can use this information to craft custom-tailored solutions to their specific challenges. Offering discounts, deals, and delays can help you win the client’s business this time around and even push them to continue to do business with you in the future.

When you help people at their lowest, it builds customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Integrate sales and marketing teams

A major trend for 2021 will be integrating your sales and marketing teams. COVID-19 has driven sales to distance selling forcing us to blur the line between the sales and marketing department. It’s critical in these new times that sales and marketing function as one to create a plan that works towards the overall business goal. You must almost fully integrate these two departments to succeed.

Intertwining every aspect of the two departments will be critical to its success. You must share not only people among that two but also data. Don’t keep sales data and marketing data separate, integrate it into one and even consider making it transparent to everyone on the marketing and sales teams.

Both sides must know the overall goal and the part they play in working together to achieve it by practicing consistent processes. Marketing brings in leads and sales converts and upsells those leads. The two go hand in hand which explains why integrating them into one can drive revenue for your business.

Bringing both departments together should be an easier task than you think. As long as your goals are clearly stated and the basics of how to get there are laid out the two departments won’t have much trouble working together to make selling online a success.

Important takeaway

COVID-19 sped up the shift towards a digital approach to buying and selling. Many haven’t even begun the shift, and therefore the new year is a great time to get started. It can be a whole new world for some, but nothing you can’t learn to tackle. There are many advantages not only for the customer but for you too in switching to or even just adding an online community. Digital transformations are becoming the new selling point.