Pre-Qualify Prospects for More Effective Lead Generation

Pre-Qualify Prospects for More Effective Lead Generation:from Business 2 Community by Matt Ford
Businesses do B2B sales lead generation to help get new clients. The problem with the whole process is that, at times, a company’s lead generation campaign is not able to bring in leads that their sales team wants to work with. As a result, leads can be discarded or put aside, and that means lost opportunities. When your company dabbles in lead generation, like telemarketing, email or digital, it should produce leads that give you more chances at getting new clients.
Why does a lead get tossed aside by sales? The answer is because they do not deem it as qualified. When a lead is not qualified, it means that the prospect does not meet the minimum requirements that your sales team want to see in a prospect before they can give a proposal. Of course, you cannot work with just any company – think of other businesses that have no budget or don’t have that many employees. As such, it is important that you hand only qualified leads to your sales team.
In lead generation, there is something we call pre-qualification. In the course of contacting your clients, you can ask them your qualifying questions before you deem them qualified as a lead, thereby making your lead generation campaign more effective at generating leads that your sales reps would be happy to handle. How do you do this?
Well, one way for you to pre-qualify your leads is through the use of telemarketing as part of your lead generation campaign. Here are some of the advantages of pre-qualifying leads:

Pre-qualification results in higher quality leads.

In generating business leads, you want to generate only the highest quality credit card processing leads, IT sales leads, cash advance leads, cleaning services leads or any leads. However, you cannot achieve such a goal if you are not able to know if your prospects are a proper fit for your business or not. The more time you generate mediocre leads, the more time you could be wasting due to the fact that you have no idea on the current status of your prospects and whether you can indeed do business with their company or not. Always aim for leads of higher quality.

Pre-qualification makes it easier for sales.

One concern that some companies must address is how sales and marketing get along. The job of your marketers is to devise ways to attract new leads. The job that your sales team has is to close those leads and hopefully turn them into sales. The problem between the two is that sales sometimes does not want to deal with the leads that marketing hands them. Why? That is because leads are not pre-qualified and do not meet your sales teams minimum requirements.
Pre-qualifying your prospects through telemarketing allows you to get the job done before your marketing team has to hand over the lead to sales, making it easier for your sales reps to deal with. Your reps will spend more time dealing with prospects that you can work with and not have to go through leads you don’t need.

Why use telemarketing?

Why use telemarketing? Why can’t you qualify leads through email marketing? Well, that’s because telemarketing allows you to get in contact with decision makers directly as well as gives you the chance to ask your questions during the course of a single conversation. If you ask for such information through an email, you risk the chance that your prospects won’t even reply to your email because they need to put in information which they can’t immediately or are not at liberty to disclose.
Pre-qualify your prospects to see better results from your lead generation campaign. Of course, better results means more sales, and the more sales you make the more your company will grow.