Published 18 May 2022

7 Expert Strategies for Developing More Sales Qualified Leads

Sales qualified leads are high-value leads that can be converted into paying customers. However, the journey from an ordinary lead to a sales qualified lead can be challenging. Most website visitors are not ready to purchase, and only a small percentage of marketing qualified leads are fit for sales. This blog helps you to increase the ratio of sales qualified leads by providing strategies such as deploying lead scoring, creating funnel targeted content, tapping into intent data, using integrated marketing solutions, streamlining sales and marketing teams, starting partnerships, and harnessing social media accounts. These strategies help identify and nurture highly qualified leads, ultimately boosting sales.

Introduction

Sales qualified leads are your golden leads. They are high-value leads that your sales team can charm and convert into your paying customers.But a journey from an ordinary lead to sales qualified lead is long and bumpy. The reason?

Approximately 96% of your website visitors are not ready to purchase from you.
Only 44% of marketing qualified leads are fit for sales.

That means when you pass your website traffic through the marketing funnel; you are left with very few sales-ready leads. Further, only a handful of those leads complete the entire journey and purchase from you.

So, don’t get happy when thousands of leads enter your funnel because, at the bottom, you will only find countable leads.

Now, no need to feel low. This guide has compiled the 7 expert sales qualified leads strategies that can increase the ratio of SQLs in your funnel. So, let’s boost your sales in 2022.

How to Identify Sales Qualified Leads in Your Funnel?

Before exploring expert sales-qualified lead strategies, first, understand how to find SQLs in your crowded sales funnel.

SQLs are those leads who are ready to be vetted by your sales team. So, all the leads who are directly interested in your product and ready to understand more about it from your sales team are your sales-qualified leads.

However, moving an MQL to SQL status is based on your lead scoring system. Lead scoring is a ranking system that measures the readiness of a lead to become your customer. Every business sets different lead scoring factors based on its internal and external dynamics.

Generally, businesses use these two lead scoring frameworks – BANT and CHAMP.

BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. IBM develops this lead qualification method to find SQLs based on the prospect’s budget, authority, need, and timing of purchasing your products or services.

CHAMP is Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization. InsightSquared suggested this framework that first targets prospects’ challenges and pain points.

You can also coin your custom lead scoring framework based on your product and targeted audience needs.

7 Expert Sales Qualified Leads Generation Strategies

According to AppsFlyer, a modern customer’s journey has around 5-50 touchpoints. With so many touchpoints, it is hard for marketing and sales teams to identify sales qualified leads and reach out to them at the right time.

But it is not impossible either. You can easily walk leads through different touchpoints using the result-driven sales-qualified lead generation strategies.

Here are the top seven strategies that sales teams are using today to generate highly qualified leads;

1. Deploy Lead Scoring After Thorough Consideration

Lead scoring is a fundamental step toward your SQL. You cannot identify and nurture your highly qualified leads without an undefined lead scoring system. Therefore, you should first start with creating a proper lead scoring system.

To do so, you should gather as much information as possible about your potential customers. You can use a buyer persona technique to know your customers better.

In this technique, you have to categorize your ideal customer based on factors like job title, income, gender, age, location, etc. This data will help you understand the readiness of a lead to purchase from you.

Once you have gathered significant information about your potential customer, you can start thinking about criteria that can make a lead your perfect sales material. It could be anything!

For example, if a lead downloads an ebook from your website, this shows they are interested in your product. But, this doesn’t make a person ready to purchase your product. However, if a person contacts you further after downloading your ebook, they are interested and even consider buying your solution.

You should use an automatic lead generation solution to make your lead scoring efficient. You can set your lead generation software parameters to identify highly qualified leads. This way, you will get instant notification when you have a sales-ready lead in your funnel.

2. Create Funnel Targeted Content

Content is a king, queen, and everything in between. Content marketing is one of the best ways to nurture your leads at any stage.

However, you have to focus on producing content specific to a lead’s position in your sales pipeline. Each piece of content has a different intent and engagement value. Using the right piece of content at the right time, you can quickly generate more sales qualified leads.

For example, blogs are a perfect way to make people aware of your product. You can create how-to or engagement blogs to aware and retain your potential customers. On the contrary, case studies are the best way to turn your MQLs into SQLs.

Similarly, every content piece can nurture different types of leads in your sales funnel.

So, the best sales-qualified lead strategy is to design your content marketing plan for each sale funnel stage. In fact, you should create a comprehensive content gallery on your website, including different content elements like blogs, events, case studies, etc.

Here checkout ActiveCampaign’s website–

ActiveCampaign’s funnel targeted campaign

They have used 8 different content elements to target leads at every stage–

Get Started,
1:1 Strategy Session,
Community,
Events,
Help Resources,
Product Updates,
Marketing Glossary
and Blog.

Here blogs help to make aware and engage readers. The events and product updates help them directly connect with sales-qualified leads. And the community section is suitable for retaining customers.

3. Tap into Your MQL’s Intent Data

As you already know, your marketing qualified leads turn to your SQLs. So, you can leverage your buyer’s intent data to gather insightful information about your MQL. This will also help you create funnel-specific content and create a better lead scoring system.

Intent data provides information on your potential customers’ online behavior. For example, which web page they visited on your website, what type of content they searched on web browsers, what other brands’ websites they have visited, etc.

By collecting intent data, you can target the people who are already searching for your products or similar products online. These people are already aware of and interested in your business solution. So, your sales team can reach out to them and convert them faster using different strategies.

Intent data can also help to—

You can implement an account-based marketing strategy to target relevant and high-value accounts using intent data.
Leveraging data, you can prioritize your leads based on their conversion readiness.
You can also know what type of content your targeted customers find useful so you can create more of such content.

4. Use Integrated Automatic Marketing Solutions

Today, it has become necessary for marketers to use different marketing tools to deploy their various marketing strategies. Besides this, customer relationship management software (CRM) is also essential for businesses to manage their customers and internal affairs. In addition, you also need data collecting, performance monitoring, and many other tools to run your operations smoothly.

In short, lead generation and marketing are not possible without tools today. This is a good thing because automation can improve the quality and speed of your workflow.

However, the real issue occurs when your various business automation solutions don’t integrate with one another. When your lead generation tools don’t sync with your CRM solution, you cannot reach out to hot leads at the right time.

In addition, manually transferring data from one tool to another platform will increase your sales team’s workload. Therefore, you should always use marketing and lead generation tools with integration options.

Today, every good marketing platform allows you to connect with other business solutions. For example, HubSpot events integration in Google Ads helps to import events like lead stages into Google Ads. This allows advertisers to understand which campaigns, ads, and keywords help to generate more sales qualified leads.

HubSpot's Integrated Automatic Marketing Solutions

5. Streamline Your Sales and Marketing Teams

The alignment of the sales and marketing team is essential for building an ideal buyer’s persona based on a real-time database.

If your sales reps and marketers don’t see eye to eye, you will miss out on many great opportunities. Sales and marketing might be two different departments. But, their end goals are the same–generate more sales.

Thus, you should ensure that your sales and marketing teams work in sync and share frequent data with each other. The marketing data is important for sales representatives to approach leads in real-time. Similarly, a sales database is helpful for marketers to launch personalized marketing campaigns.

Unfortunately, not many sales and marketing teams are aligned today. According to DataBox, only a few companies can say that they have well-aligned sales and marketing teams.

How to streamline Your Sales and Marketing Teams

If your sales and marketing teams are not well-aligned, you can use these tips to make them work in sync:

Put your sales and marketing teams on the same floor. This way, when your sales representatives and marketing agents are just one cubicle away, they can better engage.
Improve communication flow between both teams so that they can interact without any delay.
Ask your sales and marketing team to create their visions based on company goals. The sales and marketing team mostly set their independent goals, which keeps them apart.
Focus on team-building activities and host events in your organization for different department employees to engage in a casual manner.

6. Start a Partnership

This sales-qualified lead generation strategy is perfect for B2B and SaaS businesses. In this strategy, you can partner with other companies, customers, or even your employees to target more audiences.

Partnering with other companies is not a new lead generation strategy. Businesses have been collaborating with influencers, non-competitive brands, and their customers for ages now.

So, you can use this tried and tested technique to collaborate with different users to boost your brand awareness and expand your lead qualification horizon.

Here are a few ways to collaborate with people –

Case studies are a perfect way to collaborate with your customers and target their audience base.
Using podcasts and webinars, you can collaborate with other non-competitive influences in your industry.
You can also host live events to personally interact with your potential customers.
You can collaborate with someone on another platform where you have limited reach. For example, if you don’t have a strong presence on Instagram, you can collaborate with Instagram influencers to expand your reach.

For example, Brian Dean from Backlinko did a Youtube interview with Matt Diggity to discuss his future plans and why he sold his company.

Youtube interview of Brian Dean from Backlinko and Matt Diggity

This video has received more than 18K views within two months because both Brian and Matt belong to the same digital marketing industry. So, they can target more qualified leads by collaborating.

7. Harness Social Media Accounts

At UnboundB2B, we always say personalization is too old now. It’s time for hyper-personalization. It is time to tap into your sales accounts’ core issues and become their friend, not the sales agent.

And for that, you will not find anything better than social media. So, once you have a potential buyer’s persona ready, you can head over to social media channels to know what they truly like or dislike.

On social platforms like LinkedIn, you can bifurcate your leads based on the job title, company, industry, etc.

In short, you have to fully social stock your SQLs before vetting them. Then, when your sales team reaches out to SQLs armed with personal data, there is nothing that can stop you from converting those leads.

So, What’s Your Sales Qualified Lead Generation Strategy?

You have learned UnboundB2B’s favorite and used qualified sales lead generation strategies. We often use a cocktail of SQL strategies based on our clients’ requirements to generate more qualified leads.

Be it lead scoring or social media; one should use all the possible techniques to have a constant supply of sales leads. That’s because, without sales, you have no business.

So, have you figured out your sales-qualified lead generation strategy yet? If not, you can ping us anytime, and together; we can build a winning SQL generation strategy.