Lead Identification: Simplest Approach to Prioritize your Telemarketing Sales Efforts

by William Snyder Phone Number Lists for Telemarketing Businesses

Lead qualification is often a neglected part of telemarketing. The team goes through a gamut of database provided by business list brokers, but instead of focusing more on the quality of leads, they focus more on the quantity. A majority of the telemarketing teams fail miserably because of their inability to differentiate between warm, hot, and cold leads. Prospects say that they like the product or services offered and have the budget too, but they need to think about it. Many telemarketers find themselves in a similar situation, and eventually the lead slips away. An effective way to fix the problem is lead scoring. Read on to know how to understand lead identification and categorization.

Identifying a Qualifying Lead
Qualified leads are more than mere contact details. The telemarketer needs to have more information about leads and their company to ensure that they qualify for a particular product or service. The BANT approach usually helps in identifying qualifying leads:

Budget - Does the lead has enough budget to purchase the product/service?
Authority - Does the lead has authority to make the purchase decision?
Need - Does the lead have a need for the product/service offered?
Timescale - Does the lead have a preferred time when it wants to purchase the product/service?

The company gathers answers to the above questions for further filtering of the lead database.

Categorizing Leads
Information Qualified Lead

The IQL often takes initial information from the marketing personal, but might not move to the next stage. The marketer needs to keep in touch with the lead through follow-up calls. It is up to the marketer to analyze the actions of the lead and further categorize it into a cold or low priority lead for sales follow-up.

Marketing Qualified Lead
When the IQL shows interest in how the company can provide a solution to a certain problem, it becomes a warm lead. Telemarketers may offer a free consultation, trials, demons, and quotes to help the marketing qualified lead (MQL) move to another decision-making stage. When the MQL moves to a decision stage, it is called as a Sales Qualified Lead.

Sales Qualified Lead
SQL is a hot lead and all that a telemarketer needs to do is, call them up. Studies show that faster the sales follow up with SQL, higher is the closing rate. A prompt action of the telemarketer also sends a positive message about the company’s focus on its customers.

Last Few Words
Lead qualification and categorization play a crucial role in helping a prospect turn into a customer. Every business, whether it is small or big, needs to ensure that its telemarketers are able to identify qualified leads and further categorize them to make the sales closure quick and productive.

Summary
Telemarketers need to understand the importance of lead qualification and categorization. The blog discusses the way to do so.

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5 Ways to Generate High-Quality Leads
5 Tips to Improve Productivity of Telecalling Agents