How to directly generate sales-qualified leads?

Every business needs to generate leads, no matter its size, type, or niche. Leads are the fuel that powers the machine that is a company, and without them, a business has no hope of long-term success. And everyone knows that. So, it doesn’t come as a surprise that people are pursuing online lead generation any way they can. However, in all that mess, you should never take quantity as a thing you’re after. Instead, aim for quality. We wanted to help you out with this. And luckily for you, we know a thing or two that can help you directly generate sales-qualified leads. We’ll talk about the different kinds of leads and why they are so important for your business.

What are leads?

This is a common term used in marketing. If you ever researched how to increase conversion rate, you heard about it for sure. Essentially, a lead is an individual or company that’s interested in your product/services. And a qualified lead is what one would consider your ideal customer. It’s someone who can buy and use your product. So, you use them to make sales.

Now, sales are important for any business. Without them, you’ll get nowhere. And you know this already, so why are we mentioning it? Well, because people confuse generating leads with generating qualified leads. And these two are two very different things. It’s not too hard to generate any leads. However, if you don’t put effort into getting qualified ones, you won’t see much benefit from it.

The good thing is that once you know how to get qualified leads, you won’t have to spend lots of time and resources converting them to customers. You’ll feel like it’s going easy. But that’s just how things are supposed to be.

Qualified lead

For example, let’s say you have a marketing strategy in which you offer something to users for free in exchange for completing a survey about your product and subscribing to your newsletter.

If the user later clicks on the links in your marketing emails, and if they visit your blog, you can be sure that the lead is qualified. Of course, you gathered some basic information with the survey. So, it’s easy for your sales team to analyze the lead and see what they can do about it.

Unqualified lead

Now that you know how a qualified lead behaves, you can assume how the unqualified does. It does all the things that are opposite. They fill the survey just for the free thing you’re giving away, they never read blogs, and they don’t read your emails.

You can follow the hard path of nurturing these, but it’s best to discard them. If they’re not interested in your product now, chances are that they won’t be in the near future. So, you don’t need to waste your time on them.

On the other hand, if you manage to directly generate sales-qualified leads, you won’t have to deal with unqualified ones at all. Let’s take a look at the things you can do to get there.

Use long-tailed keywords

A lot of marketers choose to go with generic keywords when going for search engine advertisements. But, this is a bad approach. You see, most of the users that visit your website this way will spend less than 3 seconds on it. More than 80% of your traffic may be unqualified. And traffic is important, but the quality of it is vital. And to get the most out of it, you should use long-tailed keywords.

As you can guess, these are longer and more specific. We’ll explain what we’re on about in our own example. You see, a lot of what we do at ConvertMore is connected to conversion rate, and we want people who read our blogs to be the ones we can help. So, instead of using a short keyword like ”boost website sales”, we use something like ”boost website sales fast with conversion rate optimization”. This way, we can be sure that even if we get less traffic than with the other variant, all the leads we get will be qualified.

Offer some technical content

Here, we don’t mean posting about rocket science that none of your readers will understand. Technical content is articles related to things that define your product.

So, if you’re making and selling furniture, you can give your customers a glimpse of how these are made. Take them on a journey through the production process or only through a certain part of it. You can explain how you pick the materials and why they’re the best choice. The possibilities are endless, and writing this kind of article will help your business. You’ll get a chance to showcase your expertise, and you’ll offer something valuable to your customers. It’s a win for everyone.

Use the right social media

Depending on what kind of business you’re running, different social media platforms will work better for you. For instance, if you’re in a retail business, Facebook and Instagram are your best bets. However, if you’re in the niche that does B2B, LinkedIn and AngelList accounts are what you can’t do without.

These are great because they let you see all the details about your leads. You’ll know their number of employees, the product they’re into, the location, and you might get a chance to contact the CEO directly. As you already know, it’s always good to get in touch with people in high positions. With them on your side, you’ll have a lot better chances of getting a sale. And that’s what you need.

Target using bottom-of-the-funnel contents

To get from a lead to a customer, people need to go through a buyer’s journey. To know where the leads are in their journey, we use the marketing funnel. The lower down they are, the more likely they are to convert. Now, when they get to this point, just having a click to call software widget on your website can do wonders. Interested parties will call you or request your call. And the only thing you need to do here is to close the sale.

But if you want to go a step further, you can do that also. Here are some tricks you can use to get them on your team.

• Provide a free trial. Although this is the oldest trick in the book, it still works great.
• Live demo. This is a new thing people came up with, and it is trending right now, especially with SaaS-based products.
• Offer remote assistance. This gives your customers assurance that whenever they hit a roadblock using your products, they can rely on you for help.

Although offering these won’t cost you much, or anything for that matter, it’ll give you a chance to directly generate sales-qualified leads. Look at it this way, the more you can offer to your customers, the more they’ll trust you and the more they’ll buy from you. So, use these techniques wisely, and don’t be afraid to add on to them.