Businesses need to focus on the efforts that have the greatest potential impact. The first step is identifying your target market, then categorizing your leads so you can utilize marketing tactics like sales funnels.
What is A Sales Lead?
A sales lead is a person or business who you’ve identified as your target market. They may or may not have interacted with your business or received targeted marketing from you. There are different types of leads to help businesses track and prioritize next steps.
Cold Leads
A cold lead is someone you’ve picked out as a potential customer, but as far as you know, they have not had any exposure to or interacted with your business in any way.
It’s important to spend time connecting with cold leads. Offer helpful information, speak to their pain points, and continue to follow up.
Warm Leads
A warm lead is someone you’ve connected with in the past or who may have expressed interest in your product or service, but has not yet converted.
When reaching out to warm leads, reference your previous meeting, share new information, and position yourself as a problem solver for their specific situation.
Hot Leads
A hot lead is someone who made the first contact with you requesting more information about your products or services.
Since hot leads have already determined that you have a solution to their problem and are excited to move forward, it’s incredibly important to prioritize these leads. Show them that you are the one to help them, not your competitors.
Information Qualified Leads
Information qualified leads are a lead that you have information or data on, but you don’t know if they are the target market for your product or service, or if they are interested. For example, they may have utilized a resource from your business, such as a blog post or ebook.
The next step for these leads is to learn more about them to determine if they are a good lead. Inquire about their needs, ask them if your free resource was useful for their situation, and continue providing valuable resources along the way.
Marketing Qualified Leads
A marketing qualified lead is similar to an information qualified lead, but this lead is hotter because they are actively researching and interacting with your company. Perhaps they attended a webinar or interacted with your email marketing.
Close the loop and make them a hotter lead by starting a conversation and offering your products or services.
Sales Qualified Leads
A sales qualified lead is an information or marketing qualified lead who you’ve also determined to possibly be an ideal customer.
The only way to find out for sure is to start the conversation and find out if your company is a good fit for them.
Next Steps
Most businesses will use CRM (customer relationship management) software to keep track of every lead and details about the relationship, moving them down the pipeline to next steps like meetings, negotiations, and closing the deal using marketing and sales tactics.
Need CRM help?
Identifying and managing leads can be a full time job for a business. Outsourcing these tasks can dramatically increase your ROI so you can focus on sales. We’re here to help!
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