A Lead Without Intent is Just Someone’s Contact Information: The Qualities of a Good Lead

Generating leads is an essential part of the sales process and a priority for every business. However, it’s one tough challenge for a company. A study by HubSpot found that 63% of marketers consider lead generation their most significant difficulty.

Though generating tons of leads might just not be enough. If you want your sales processes to run smoothly and reach their destination, you should be focusing on the leads showing buying intent.

Ensuring that your leads are of a certain quality is a critical measure to take before you start wasting your time and resources on bad leads. In this article, we will explain in more detail the nature of a good lead, how to identify lead intent, and how to turn leads into buying customers.

What Is Lead Intent?

A lead with intent is any potential customer who has been appropriately nurtured and may be passed on to the sales team. This lead is somebody who matches your ideal customer profile and has already demonstrated some level of interest in your business by visiting your pricing page. They are neither cold nor hot leads but are consumers in between and can turn into a prospect under proper care.

Your lead generation strategies may differ considerably depending on the kind of leads and where they are in the buyer’s journey. Let’s dive deeper and explore the qualities of good leads and how to differentiate them from bad ones.

What Is a Good Lead?

All leads need proper nurturing and considerable time spent on them. Once you have generated leads, it’s time to analyze their behavior, classify them, and identify their main characteristics. Here are a few qualities typical of good leads:

1. They Are a Good Fit for Your Business

You can qualify leads as a good fit for your business by analyzing collected information on their lead profile. Answering the following questions will give you a nuanced picture of your lead’s intents:

• Does this consumer have a problem you can solve?
• Do they have a budget to proceed with your services?
• Is this person a decision-maker in a company? (If you’re selling to the B2B market)
• When will they be ready to purchase?

Generally, this questionnaire follows a BANT concept (Budget, Authority, Need, Time frame) developed to identify prospect opportunities. If the prospect meets the criteria above, it is a good lead.

2. They Have Shown Interest

Determining how interested leads are in your product or service is a significant step in lead analysis. It’s when actions speak louder than words. You can identify interest if leads:

• Signed up for your email newsletter
• Contacted your sales team
• Repeatedly visited your webpage
• Checked pricing page
• Signed up for webinars or other events.

How can you track the abovementioned lead interest trends? Through marketing automation solutions, like Phonexa, that provide detailed insights into leadgen campaigns of all types.

3. You Have Their Contact Information

Information is power. If you could collect some information on your lead, you have already attracted them, and they have already uncovered their contact information or even more. Utilize sign-up forms through unique landing pages or gated content to acquire the following information:

• Name, phone number, email address
• Job position and the company they work for
• Business goals and  priorities

This step of the lead validation process is crucial for applying suitable lead nurture strategies through depthful lead scoring. Using the lead scoring technique for lead generation, you can rate each lead with points and understand which has the highest values.

How to Identify Quality Leads?

While identifying good leads might save you time in the future, analyzing quality leads allows you to develop a better lead generation strategy. Use the following three tips to determine which strategy best suits your needs.

• Understand your current customers: If you already have customers, you have successfully attracted good leads because every current customer was once a prospect and a good lead. You can work backward and examine what factors turned them from a prospect to a good lead. Analyze the common patterns among your most successful, long-term customers, and you will most likely learn something useful. This will help you to generate a Customer Persona template and create customer-oriented decisions.
• Learn which campaigns drive leads to your website: By launching marketing campaigns and tracking the quality of the leads driven to them, you can evaluate the campaign’s success and get critical insights into customer behavior and willingness to purchase. Phonexa’s call tracking and distribution software, Call Logic, helps companies streamline their campaigns for more high-quality leads. Now you can improve or eliminate other campaigns that generate lower-quality traffic.
• Always use Google Analytics: Anyone working in the marketing or sales industry knows how Google Analytics collects data from your website to create customized reports. Using its features, you can track your ROI from a campaign and see how visitors behave on your website.

How to Generate Good Leads?

If generating leads is hard, generating good leads is even harder. According to Ascend2, improving the quality of leads is the priority for 58% of companies. The survey shows that more and more companies focus on quality over quantity of leads.

By setting up a proper strategy and applying the correct techniques, companies can decrease the number of bad leads in their sales funnel and accumulate higher volumes of better leads.

Ideal Customer Profile

Creating a detailed profile or persona of the client or the company your business is targeting is the first and foremost step in every lead generation strategy. You can only find a good lead if you know exactly who should be using your product or service.

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the client whose characteristics perfectly fit your business offerings. Arrange an ICP template based on two key elements:

• Company and industry: Focus on the companies and industries you think need your solutions. Who might benefit from your services the most? Try to specify as many details as you can. What states, cities, or regions do you target? What is the size and revenue of the prospective client company? Spread the worksheet to the sales, marketing, and customer success departments. Go through it together, let them add more critical aspects to the template, and launch campaigns to market to those specific audiences.
• Decision-maker: Identifying the person behind the decision-making process is a time saver for your team. Instead of exchanging emails back and forth with the employees without power in purchasing decisions hit the ones that can close the deals.

Omnichannel Approach

Remember that your leads use many channels for research and work, the same as you do. The secret is to stay connected to them using as many methods and channels as possible. This way, you not only enhance your brand awareness and stay connected with your leads but also stay informed and show interest in their achievements.

• Social media: Nowadays, this tool beats all other ways of communication. According to a report by Ascend2 in 2020, social media accounts for about 47% of success among B2B companies.
• Quality content: This kind of approach never grows old. Writing informative articles, blogs, emails, and other content focused on solving clients’ problems will build trust and credibility.
• Offline presence: Living in the times of the pandemic, businesses have improved their online presence. However, nothing can substitute real-time communication. Networking, trade shows, and webinars allow you to meet your potential clients face-to-face, create a good impression, and start new relationships.

Personalization

A personalized approach is key to letting your prospects know that you understand what bothers them and you know the way to fix it. About 72% of customers say they will only engage with marketing messages tailored to their interests. Customize and personalize your emails, messages, and content to address the specific interests of your niche audiences.

Automation

Using the abovementioned tactics and applying automation processes will save your business money and time. Marketing automation provides the ability to engage with customers via top-notch technologies controlled by AI algorithms and backed by omnichannel strategies.

Phonexa’s Lead Distribution solution LMS Sync features automation tools to get sales reps to close deals more quickly, while Call Logic provides an innovative and streamlined way to track and attribute every single call outcome.

Then there’s E-Delivery that helps you take omnichannel a step further through email and SMS marketing.

But that’s not all; how do you know a campaign performs well if you don’t use technology to track your efforts? When you pair the core products with other solutions within Phonexa’s all-in-one suite for marketing automation, you are ensuring tech coverage and attribution on all fronts of your business marketing.

This way, you can rest assured that every single lead has been provided enough touchpoints with your brand to convert.

Schedule a consultation with one of Phonexa’s experts to learn how LMS Sync can take your company’s marketing automation to the next level.