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What makes a company successful? Why do some businesses have more sales than their competitors?

How Identifying Qualified Leads Help Company Boost Its Sales

These are big questions indeed that almost all business owners have in their minds. Well, there can be many reasons behind a company's success, but the most dominant one is to understand your leads. Almost 20% of new businesses failed in their first year because of their inability to identify qualified leads. Not everyone visiting your website or social media pages are your customer. The future sales of products depend on your understanding of real customers. To drive more sales to your products or services, you must identify qualified leads first. If you are someone dealing in marketing or sales domains, this article is a must read for you.

A qualified lead is your potential customer for whom you have actually created your product or service. Every business has its own criteria to identify qualified leads based on their objectives and future goals. You cannot just pick one standard criterion for qualifying leads. The definition of leads is different for each company depending on their goals and aspirations. To effectively connect with potential customers, a company has to clearly define its qualified leads. You have to invest a lot of time to identify your potential leads. Your qualified leads have to be recognized by the sales and marketing

There are two types of leads, SQLs (sales qualified lead) and MQLs (marketing qualified lead). Your marketing team's definition of a lead may vary from how your sales team's define leads. It is not because of a communication gap, but it happened because both teams have to work in different domains. In this article, I would discuss in detail qualified leads and why marketing qualified leads are different from sales qualified leads?

MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)

The first stage of lead qualification is known as MQLs. Even if someone is qualified at this stage, you are still not 100% sure if this person will buy from you. If a person qualifies for marketing lead criteria it means he/she has taken the initiative to engage with your business, and you can convince him to buy your product or service.

At this stage, you have to be careful of spams and must evaluate every visitor to make sure if he is a potential buyer or just spam sneaking into your business. You can gather personal information about visitors or ask him some questions to ensure he is not spamming.

If someone is really interested in buying your product, he would not have any issue providing information like name, email, company's name, etc.

The marketers use different techniques to qualify someone as leads. They will look at persons' previous buying history, buying behaviours, feedback to questions, etc. Let's suppose you are in the mall looking at random stuff, or window shopping. It is also an example of MQLs; they are interested in products, and they want to know about products, without buying.

It is never guaranteed if MQL would buy a product or not, and in most cases, they don't buy anything. Most of the MQLs are not even regular customers of the business. Even someone who is browsing through your website or downloaded a free ebook can be your qualified lead by marketers.

SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads)

If a company is getting a lot of SQLs, it means the marketing team has done its job really well. SQL is someone who passes down through your sales funnel and has a solid intention of buying a product. The SQLs are qualified by both the marketing and sales teams; they are the potential customers who have already entered the sales process. For example, if a person reaches out to the sales team of a company to know more about products, he is considered SQL who wants to buy your product.

Now it mostly depends on the selling skills of the sales team; here is a big opportunity for the company to convert its leads into customers. The qualification criteria for SQLs is different for each company. To qualify a person for sales leads; the sales team evaluates various things, such as quotes request, research products, calls to a salesperson, etc. Identifying a SQL is easier than MQL because the actions taken by leads make the things quite transparent.

The communication of the sales team with leads also matters, the salesperson should not be in a hurry, and he must not seem cold. The sales team should give follow-up to SQLs to convert leads into mature customers. Once a company has identified SQL, the most challenging part is to convert them into serious buyers.

Focus on potential customers that drive more sales and help the company run a successful business.

How Can Clarity Help

After reading this article, we hope you understand why identifying leads is important and the potential difference between SQLs and MQLs. In the process of identifying qualified leads both marketing and sales teams have to play a major role in defining the criteria of qualification and evaluating who is qualified for that criteria. Making loyal customers took a lot of time and effort, and the company has to invest it in the right people. By identifying leads, the company only focuses on potential customers that would drive more sales and help the company run a successful business.

Clarity Ventures is fully capable of utilizing both front-end and back-end software integrations with your e-commerce platform. We believe in innovative solutions to give your business a competitive edge.

Stay ahead of your game with software such as Epicor, Infor, Syspro, Sage 100, Sage X3, Dynamics GP, ORACLE, Dynamics 365, SAP. Visit our eCommerce Framework and feel the difference!