If you check your CRM right now and look at your leads and contacts, would they look like this?
Or would they look like this?
If it looks like the second image, then I’ve got some news for you. You aren’t capturing valuable information about your leads, prospects, and website visitors—information that can help you drastically improve your company’s revenue and deal conversion rates.
This post will help you evaluate the leads passing through your sales funnel, and see if they’re up to mark.
Oh, and in case you want your SDRs to skip the hassle of manually prospecting, and find piping hot leads within 30 seconds, we’ve got a Chrome extension for you.
Click here to find out more about it.
What is Lead Quality?
Lead quality can be defined as the measure of how likely a lead in your sales pipeline will convert into a customer. Understanding and prioritizing high-intent leads in your pipeline based on lead quality will help you close a lot more customers.
The quality of a lead can depend on a large number of factors. These can include anything from the authenticity of their email to conversion information and engagement history.
Let’s look at some lead quality metrics and how they are measured.
How is Lead Quality Measured?
While leads are the bread and butter for sales teams, it’s really the bacon and eggs that seal the deal. The similarities between a good CRM lead and a bacon-egg sandwich is quite uncanny. Bread, butter, bacon, egg; accurate contact information, company data, conversion information, engagement history. You see what I mean?
Much like a restaurant skimping out on the ingredients in your overpriced bacon-egg sandwich, leads that lack essential components are not worth your while. The following checklist will help you get a better picture of what the perfect CRM lead looks like and where yours may be lacking.
1. Accurate Contact Information
When it comes to contact information, there are multiple fields that will determine the quality of a lead. Discrepancies or missing contact information can prove to be costly later on and end up wasting your time or putting you in embarrassing situations.
First & Last Name
The most basic components of a good CRM lead are accurate first and last names. Getting the name right is crucial because it allows you to personalize your sales efforts. Let’s face it, we’re less likely to open promotional email with our name spelled wrong. Nothing grabs our attention more than the name we go by and hence, that’s the most basic item on our checklist.
Company Name
Another no-brainer would be to include the name of the company by which your lead is employed. By determining which company your lead works for you unlock a whole new section of company data that can determine the chances of your lead converting. Company data, as we mentioned, is a whole other section that we will address later.
Job Title
The job title of a lead plays an important role in determining whether the lead may convert or not. The position of your lead in their company will determine the decision making power they hold. An executive is much less likely to influence decision making as compared to a director or manager. As a result, you might prefer to target employees in the upper echelons of a company. These parameters can be integrated into your CRM to filter out unjustifiable leads.
Email Address
An email address is the most basic and realistic method of contact with your lead. An accurate email address gives you a medium through which your sales efforts can be deployed. Interactions and conversations that lead to a conversion all begins with an accurate email address. A correct email address is arguably the most important component of any lead.
Further, your lead capture forms should be set up in a way that disqualifies forms submitted using Gmail or fake/disposable IDs. This is because they always tend to be junk leads and a complete waste of your effort. Here’s more on why validating emails are so important and how you can do it.
2. Company Data
As previously stated, capturing information about a prospect’s company gives rise to a whole new section of data that can determine their buying intent. There may be plenty of variables that can boost CRM lead quality but the most necessary ones include:
Industry
Your product might be of use only to certain industries or sectors. As a result, it wouldn’t make much sense to target leads that do not belong to those particular industries or sectors.
Employee Strength
If you’re an enterprise-focused SaaS company that prices its products based on the number of users, targeting small businesses wouldn’t be worth your while. Conversely, if your product is at a nascent stage of development and cannot handle the intensity of enterprise level functioning, you’d want to focus your efforts on smaller businesses.
3. Engagement History
The engagement history of a lead includes the history of their interaction with your content. Content-user interactions can give you a great deal of insight into a lead’s intention to convert. The following are a few engagement interactions that can boost CRM lead quality.
First & Last Page Visited
The first page a lead visited can give you insights into the intention behind their visit, how and why they may have come to your site. The last page visited would give you insights into their intent to convert. Both put together would tell you how much time they spent on your website, another great variable that can be used to score a lead. The first and last page visited are important indicators that can help you determine the quality of a lead.
Form Data
If a lead fills up a form on your site, there’s a good chance they’re considering your product. Interactions with a form on your site can only add to the quality of your lead.
Email Opens
A lead that opens a sales email (or multiple sales emails as opposed to just one) is more likely to be interested in your product. Information about how a prospect interacts with your emails can give away a lot of information about them and their intent to convert.
Pages Visited
The pages on your site that a lead visited can give you insights into their purchase intentions. Leads that regularly consume the content on your site might be more willing to convert as opposed to stray visits.
4. Conversion Information
The conversion information pertaining to a lead can be used to classify them into a certain stage of the buying cycle of your product. A lead that has expressed their interest for your product and is in an advanced stage of the sales cycle can be considered an active lead. A lead that has shown interest but is not ready to buy your product right away can be considered a long-term lead. Conversion information such as interactions, conversations, emails and forms can be recorded and used to determine the worth of a lead.
CRMs give you the ability to store all the aforementioned data in a single location. This data can be updated in real-time, allowing you to access it on-the-go. Using this data, customizable automations can be created on your CRM. This would not only improve your sales efforts but also do wonders to your team’s productivity.
While a good bacon-egg sandwich is great, what’s better is adding a slice of cheese, some garnish and a cold beverage to wash it all down. Similarly, while some sales teams may be satisfied with just the functionalities of a CRM, market leaders would choose to take those few extra steps that make them stand out from the rest.
CRMs will undoubtedly ease a ton of burden on your sales team and help massively improve your productivity. However, implementing a CRM means you’re still only at the halfway mark. There still remains a ton of filtering to do, meaning your reps are bound to manual tasks like qualification calls.
How Do You Improve Lead Quality?
Today, lead enrichment is the process where sales teams simply cut to the chase by using tools to help them arrive at a list of high intent, data-rich leads from their target audience. Lead enrichment tools do this by providing your CRM with the necessary dynamic data. This allows you to automate your lead quality scores and filter out unwarranted leads. It also helps you optimize and personalize your sales efforts.
Here’s some key buying signals that are must-haves if you want to improve lead quality and prioritization:
- Budgetary spend
- Ecosystem spend
- Psychographics
- Upcoming contract renewals
- Fundings, Mergers and Acquisitions
- Firmographics
Check out our post on buying signals to take a deeper dive into these signals.
Thanks to technology today, billions of daily interactions are being recorded on devices all around the world, capturing tons of consumer intent data every passing second. Slintel, a powerful sales intelligence and lead enrichment tool, harnesses the power of big data to predict your next customer with pinpoint accuracy.
Using market segmentation tools such as psychographics, technographics, and firmographics, Slintel analyses variables pertinent to your business and it’s product with the utmost rigour. This leaves you with high-precision, high-intent leads that you can bank on.
How to Manage Lead Quality
There’s a reason why products such as Salesforce and HubSpot are the standard, go-to CRM software across the most successful sales teams around the world. CRMs ensure that the quality of leads passing through your sales funnel is always where you want it to be.
CRM tools allow you to store, track and manage leads in one central location. A CRM will tell you exactly which stage of your sales pipeline a particular lead is in. Further, automations can be created as a lead moves through each qualifying stage of the sales pipeline.
In many cases, there’s a sizeable gap between the point when a lead is captured, and when it becomes sales-qualified. Manually sifting through thousands of leads on a spreadsheet when such a large time gap exists is simply not efficient.
A CRM automation tool, however, hands you sales-qualified leads on a platter. You can configure your CRM to do this by determining the score of a lead based on the information provided or certain events or decisions taken by the lead. By allowing you to make certain fields compulsory, you’ll be left with only those leads that contain the necessary information required to deem them sales-qualified.
Some CRMs like HubSpot have marketing automation functionalities that automatically capture conversion information. These may include form submission data, email opens, page visits and other such activity that can help score your leads.
You also have the option to further enhance your CRM lead quality through the various capabilities offered by integrating software.
