EST 1980
//
Jun 29, 2022
Qualifying Leads in Your CRM From Inbound Marketing Efforts
by Nicole Stiverson
Look, we get that many marketing teams create campaigns that are geared towards social media and influencer marketing, but what’s the point of 10k followers and ‘Likes’ if not one of those is a qualified lead?
Yes, social media campaigns are great for brand awareness and engagement, but if you want more conversions, lead nurturing will be crucial so you need to know how to use your CRM to:
- Identify inbound leads
- Qualify inbound leads
- Score and segment inbound leads
- Know when to contact your qualified inbound leads
Inbound leads have visited your website, read your content, and spent time learning about your company, building trust in your brand, and ultimately making the decision to interact with your sales team. Unlike outbound lead generation, where your sales team reaches out to cold leads, inbound leads are already warm and reach out to you.
You don’t want just any lead; you want a qualified lead that fits your defined buyer’s journey.
How to Identify Qualified Inbound Leads
Before launching any campaign, it’s important to gather your customer-facing teams (such as sales, customer service, and marketing) to create ideal customer profiles (ICPs) or buyer personas and segment them into target audiences. Look at data from past campaigns, read company testimonials and referrals, and even check out the competitors' customers to craft fictional characters that represent your ideal types of leads.
READ MORE:
When you create your IPCs and target audiences, it is also the perfect time to qualify your inbound leads.
How to Qualify Inbound Leads
Any successful sales funnel must have a qualifying stage. This stage determines if an incoming lead matches the ICP or buyer persona you’ve identified and helps your sales team:
- Identify the best leads
- Close more deals in less time
There are two things you must do to qualify Inbound leads:
- Ask yourself a series of questions while reviewing the incoming lead
- Ask your lead a series of questions
Ask yourself a series of questions while reviewing an incoming lead:
- Does this person or company need what you’re selling?
- Have they made actionable steps to learn more about your company and products, like downloading a white paper or subscribing to your email newsletter?
- Does this person have purchasing power within their company?
- Do your solutions fit their budget?
Ask your leads a series of questions:
- How did you hear about our company?
- Tell me a little about your company and the services you provide?
- What pain points are you looking to relieve for your company or a particular project?
- What is your budget allocation and timeframe for this project?
Use a CRM to Score and Segment Your Inbound Leads
There are good leads, bad leads, and just plain weird leads. That’s where setting up an automated lead scoring and segmentation process in a robust CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, like or Sharpspring, is beneficial to help you sort through the leads that come in to find the best fit for your products or services.
Score Your Leads:
It’s easy for marketers to get swept away by the number of leads that come in, which may result in having poor leads caught up in your sales cycles. Improving the sales process by and assigning specific values to incoming leads can help eliminate time-wasting contacts.
Segment Your Leads:
is just what it implies: breaking your leads into smaller, relevant categories. For example, one category might be leads who visited your website. Another might be a lead who landed on a particular service page on your site. Both categories are qualified leads, but you can craft different messages to leads within each segment to increase personalization, engagement, and conversions.
Check out this lead segmentation case study from Sharpspring
When to Contact Your Leads
So we’ve discussed identifying, tracking, and segmenting your leads, but when do you contact them? Every salesperson has known the excitement of getting a hot lead that’s a potential sales opportunity, but they’ve also probably made the mistake of contacting them too soon (or not soon enough) at some point in their career. It happens to the best of us. But using all of the previous topics we’ve mentioned above will hopefully help you identify the perfect moment to contact your prospect.
Actually, that’s what inbound marketing is all about: reaching your target audience with an omnichannel approach using relevant content that delights and inspires them to reach out to you when and where they choose. We call this the inbound marketing flywheel, and your CRM and lead qualification process create momentum for all the other pieces to work together within your inbound strategy.
We know your marketing and sales teams are busy doing what they do best, so let Watermark fill any skill gaps when implementing necessary inbound strategies like CRM, SEO, social media, and content marketing.
today for a zero-commitment discovery workshop where we will help you identify customized solutions for your marketing needs.
Related Blogs
Aaron Campbell
—
Dec 27, 2022
Nicole Stiverson
—
Dec 29, 2022
Nicole Stiverson
—
Dec 12, 2022
