Whether you are conducting your business for B2B or B2C purposes, generating leads is crucial. But what is even more important is to generate qualified leads who turn into paying customers. If you are already running a marketing campaign, you might probably be generating a good number of leads. But the problem is some of them are qualified while the rest are not, isn’t it?

If you are generating a lot of unqualified leads, you are going to irritate your sales team for sure. Fortunately, there are some techniques that will allow you to separate the qualified leads from the crowd. Now, let’s explore those techniques on how to generate quality leads for sales by improving your marketing techniques.

Why Lead Generation Is Important?

Lead generation is important because it puts you in touch with people who are or who might be interested in your products or services.

• Lead generation lets you interact with your potential customers. Meaning that you can keep your business keep in touch with them.
• Apart from lead generation, you won’t be able to nurture the sales funnel so as to maximize the sales volume.
• With generating leads, you can educate your potential customers without spending a single penny. For example, you can send newsletters to your leads mentioning the importance of using the products you sell.
• More leads will maximize more sales or increase conversion.
• You can show retargeting ads to the leads you generated using their browsing data.

How to generate quality leads for sales

In order to generate high-quality leads, initially, you need to understand your existing sales funnel and analyze customer history.

Understanding your sales funnel

First off, you have to study the existing sales funnel of your business. You need to know each and every bits and piece of the journey of a paying customer. You have to observe the different life stages of a customer – when a subscriber becomes an opportunity to lead to a customer.

Providing Value

Maintaining a blog will increase the probability of generating more leads. If you are yet to realize the importance of a blog section of your website then here is a piece of surprising information:

Source: Slideshare

If you can educate your visitors with your blog posts then, you will be getting quality leads who are really interested in your products.

Besides, you need to increase your webpages (401 to 1000 pages) to get 6 times more traffic from whom quality leads will be generated.

You should also be building new landing pages for each marketing campaigns.

Analyzing the records of your customers

This is very important when it comes to your financial and sales department because you need to know how much revenue is generated from a customer. If you are not already maintaining all the customer purchasing data manually, then using a CRM software along with an Accounting software and matching the fields (matching customer name and email with opportunity email) can provide you with a good report.

This report can help you figure out which types of subscribers and opportunities became the paying customers. This way you can identify the best leads from the opportunities and subscribers. Though, you may need a minimal amount of manual intervention to adust along the way.

Actions you need to take

Once a visitor turns into a subscriber the sales journey starts right then. The deeper the user goes into the sales funnel the more care he or she needs from you. Here are a few points that we found to be effective:

• Talk to your sales team: Since your sales team is directly interacting with the leads, you will get a good idea about which type of leads are the most qualified to become a paying customer. Whenever taking their opinion, do not consider it too seriously because most of the opinions will be derived from their inductions. The best way is to do the split tests to test the efficacy of the opinions given by your sales team.

• Add a simple tweak to your lead form: If you are selling your $5000 software for a large corporation, then a business with only 10 employees is less likely to buy your software. Hence, it is wise to add a field like how many employees do you have in your business. If you are targeting the leads who want to buy luxury buildings and cars then you should be asking for the annual income of the leads. Because, a person, having only $3000 annual income is less likely to buy your $20000 luxury house.
• Beware of high user behavior score: You will find that some users are not making any purchase but is found playing around your website too much. These are the users who may be wandering about your site just because of learning purposes or they have a personal interest in your products wondering if they could buy your products. There is a free tool like Google Analytics to measure such user behaviors.

• Optimizing your subscriber forms: Research suggests that a subscriber form with too many fields yield to a low number of conversions. This is why keeping your subscriber form short and simple with fewer yet important fields will help you get your visitors converted to qualified leads with ease.
• Optimize your website: Supposing that you want to buy a gaming PC and for this purpose, you landed on a website that sells this item. But, you are having troubles to get to see the product comparison page or review page or you are experiencing a tedious check out process. Then chances are very high that you might lose your drive to buy that specific product from that website, isn’t it? This is why we suggest you make the checkout process simple and keep the necessary options in place allowing the users to navigate to their desired pages faster.
• Streamline your web pages with testimonials: Your potential customers always love to read customers opinions, testimonies, and reviews before making any purchase. These kinds of stuff help the existing leads become more qualified.

• Answer the queries of your users: If any user reaches out to you with any query try to answer him/her as early as possible. One thing to keep in mind is that whenever answering the questionnaires prioritizing the users according to the customer life stages is likely to produce more good results. For example, a potential customer deserves more care than a first time visitor.
• Segment the lead sources: You should be tracking the lead sources in terms of geographic locations, demographics, campaign and so on. The reason you will do this is to identify which sources are generating more revenues. If you do have this data then you can run your campaigns for the segment or source that are producing higher revenues.
• Block spammers: Spam form submissions can result in more leads who are certainly not qualified. To stop this you can use reCaptcha services, Akismet plugin etc.

The big picture

As we said earlier, the deeper a visitor moves to the sales funnel the more attention he or she deserves from you. If you do run the automated newsletter or advertising campaign only to the qualified leads then we can say that you not only save a ton of money but also can save your sales team from those annoying visitors who won’t buy in any way.

Finally, you have to prepare your own strategy that fits your needs when it comes to generating qualified leads. Once you prepare your own strategy, apply it, add tweak and repeat the process. This way you can make your marketing techniques more efficient. We look forward to your thoughts on generating quality leads through better online marketing approach.