Can you imagine the existence of a company without sales?
That's a big ‘NO’.
Like your body needs oxygen to survive, the same way sales are considered the air a company breathes. Sales is difficult. Building an ascendable sales model has become a typical challenge for growing businesses.
Sales professionals deal with ample negativity every day. It is difficult to power through all the no’s on the road to a yes. The most priceless asset for sales professionals is time. With targets to meet, it becomes frustrating to waste time with a lead that has never considered buying from you in the first place.
All marketing-generated leads cannot be considered sales-ready leads, because every contact is not a new lead. Irrespective of the lead generation technique used, whether the source is social media lead generation via a lead ad or Facebook ad, email marketing, or content syndication, qualifying your B2B leads is key. The marketing team drives plenty of leads to the sales team through multiple sources like a lead ad or Facebook ad and the sales team goes through the process of trying to convert them into a lead and close them. But all their efforts fail if the potential lead was not qualified. This is where the blame game starts between the marketing and sales team.
Wondering why this blame game takes place when generating leads?
Only because there is a mutual lack of understanding about what a qualified lead is precisely.
Lead qualification is the systematic process of evaluating potential prospects to determine whether prospects are suitable, ready and willing to buy your products and services. This is an intrinsic part of the sales process. Qualifying a prospect includes determining whether a prospect has a need or want for your product, the authority to make the purchase, and the money to afford and execute the transaction.
Sales qualification is a tricky process, especially in B2B lead generation. Before moving ahead with the sales process, it is highly recommended to do a lot of relevant research and information gathering about the prospects. This can be truly helpful when you get a chance to talk to a prospective customer person-to-person. But before making a call to your prospects, make sure you know the right sales-ready methodologies and sales qualification questions to get you on the right track. Now the burning question is, what are the sales-ready methodologies and sales qualification questions to get you where you want to go?
In sales, it’s very important to care about your prospects, in order to build a long-lasting relationship with them.
Customarily, sales lead qualification has been a manual task, performed by sales development representatives in the early stages of the sales process, to maximize the sales efforts and its output. But, in modern days where time is equal to money, it becomes indispensable to clearly define a well-qualified lead to avoid wasting time on cold prospects and utilize them for maximizing sales lead generation efforts and lead nurturing towards the best potential customers for your product.
The lead generation process is a long one and needs to be aligned with an organizations overall demand generation process in order to create a smooth customer journey. A B2B marketer might be able to create a great lead generation campaign that involves a thought leadership blog post with an even better landing page. A robust lead management and lead qualification method can help you achieve an increased conversion rate from your outbound marketing and inbound lead generation methods.
There are a number of different frameworks and sales lead methodologies, that can be beautifully represented by their acronyms. The most widely used methodologies are BANT and CHAMP. There are many more, that can be added to the list in future. For now, let us start with BANT.