A typical sales cycle is six to nine months, but it can extend well beyond that and even run into years sometimes.
This is despite the fact that you believe your prospects are the decision-makers, have the financial ability to buy, have a need, see your company as a differentiated and preferred solution, and understand the business impact of buying from you to be substantial.
Nonetheless, it’s useless to continue to chase such leads in order to close deals. Instead, categorize your leads to see if you can continue to nurture and convert them.
Lead is a term used in marketing to refer to a potential customer or the potential opportunity for a sale or transaction.
A lead is anyone who has interacted with your company or organization, for example, through a call-in, a website lead, networking, or events. However, such a person may or may not become a customer.
A qualified lead is a prospect—a potential client or customer—with the intent to buy.
A qualified lead is usually generated by the marketing team and evaluated by the sales team.
However, one key characteristic of a qualified lead is that it must fit the profile of a customer with the intent to buy.
The proper qualification of leads is therefore necessary for developing a good sales pipeline.
Qualified leads can be broadly classified as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).
Marketing Qualified Leads, or MQLs, are leads who, by virtue of their position, company revenue, or company type, have taken your company’s website and/or email communication and qualify as good prospects for sales outreach.
Sales Qualified Leads, otherwise known as SQLs, are the leads that your salesperson has spoken to and has confirmed are sales-ready.
Lead qualification is the process of evaluating your potential customers based on their financial ability and willingness to pay.
In other words, lead qualification is the process of finding prospects who fit your ideal customer profile and have a high chance of becoming customers.
A lead will have the following five characteristics to be considered a qualified prospect:
Lead qualification is an important part of the sales process due to the following reasons:
Customer segmentation is the process of tagging and grouping your customers based on their peculiar characteristics.
Here are the types of customer segmentation you should know:
The following are some of the advantages of customer segmentation:
Here’s what you should do to be successful if you want to target your qualified leads based on customer segmentation:
It’s not easy to close deals sometimes unless you understand the buyer persona and what influences buying decisions.
That’s why it’s necessary to differentiate between leads and qualified leads to be able to effectively market to each segment and close more deals.
This saves the sales and marketing teams’ time, money, and energy from chasing leads that have no willingness to buy from you or who may likely result in little to no return on investment.