March 27, 2019
by Mary Siewierska / March 27, 2019
No matter what business you’re in, you will grapple with the lead generation process at some point.
I’m sure you generate loads of them, but do you know how to make sure they are good quality leads? In my last post, I showed you how to generate quality B2B leads, today we will take a look at one aspect of lead gen: lead qualification.
Your guide to sales and, ultimately, success.
Lead qualification is understanding whether or not a sales prospect matches your ideal customer profile. Most importantly, it includes considering the possibility of them becoming a stable and loyal customer.
As we discussed last time, qualifying leads is a challenging process. Yet, it is achievable.You just need to design a clear path that will get you through the process. How to design such a path? Well, I bet you immediately thought about using some lead intelligence tools. They sure are important to the process.
Even with those tools, there is still more work to be done. You need to get your hands on the job. How?
Think about sales at your company. What do you do when somebody shows an interest in your solution? You ask them questions to discover whether they are the right fit for your business. Why wouldn’t you use the same method even before your sales conversation?
Read more to find out how to ask qualifying questions when prospecting.
We’ll go over:
Questions are very powerful. For one, they let you acquire information relevant to you and your business. But that’s an obvious point. The other one is more important for our case here. Questions are powerful because, from the onset, they put you in the right state of mind to find quality leads for your business. How does this happen?
Well, questions can reframe your mind, so you focus on finding solutions. As soon as you ask a question, your brain starts looking for answers. Just try this. Ask yourself, “What did I have for breakfast yesterday?” I bet you couldn’t help but wonder about the eggs on toast you ate (at least, that’s in my case.) You see, once you ask a question your brain demands to find the answer. It’s backed by research. It’s an instinctive mental reflex that goes by the name of “instinctive elaboration”.
So now we know what happens in the brain, but how does it reflect on your quest for finding the best leads and qualifying those leads?
The process of finding leads is called prospecting. It’s the first stage of your sales pipeline, and the one that you have to be attentive about. At that stage, you search for potential customers (AKA prospects) and try to qualify them against a set of criteria important to your business. If they don’t meet the criteria, you don’t do cold outreach. If they do, that’s perfect! You’ve found your leads!
That’s why questions come in handy. You can ask yourself questions when looking for a lead to check whether they meet the desired criteria, and hence, are a great fit for your business. But that’s not all there is.
With questions, you know exactly how your lead qualification process looks like, you can control it, replicate it or identify what works and what doesn’t. Isn’t that convenient?
TIP: Don’t worry. You’re not alone with this. If you’re looking for inspiration for questions, read popular sales books. They can be really helpful to design your path to finding great leads. You may be skeptical at first, but they do work. I showed it here.
How does it look in practice?
I want to find 20 great leads for my business. What shall I do? I should brainstorm the qualities I want my business to have and design a question-led process that will help me test whether that lead is my ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). I’ve found the first lead. What’s their business size? Great. It’s the same as my ICP’s. What’s their employee count? Awesome, my perfect customers have the team as large as this one. Yet, my next question disqualifies the lead. I cannot help them. Let’s look for the next one.
You get the gist. Thanks to questions like these you can eliminate the leads who you cannot help with your solution. But you will generate the leads that are of quality for your business.
So here you go. 20 sales qualifying questions for finding great leads. Are you going to use them? What are the questions you use? I would like to know.
This list is by no means exclusive. You can create your own set of questions. Discover how to ask better questions by following the advice of other salespeople. Here are some resources I use at Woodpecker to ask better questions.
New to business and need some more pointers? Check out our information on lead generation in a startup.
Mary Siewierska is a Content Marketing Specialist at Woodpecker.co, a cold email and follow-up automation tool. She’s passionate writer on Quora and an avid Twitter user.
Objection! Your Honor, leading the witness.
Don’t believe the hype about inbound marketing replacing cold prospecting.
Is acquiring new customers important to your business?
Objection! Your Honor, leading the witness.
Don’t believe the hype about inbound marketing replacing cold prospecting.