What is the best way to generate qualified leads for my business?

A few years ago I had a conversation with a sales manager at a B2B company and he told me that a prospect is more important than a lead. I asked him why he thought so and he told me it's because a prospect is a qualified lead. 

I laughed for a minute and I asked him what he considers a qualified lead. He said, “A qualified lead is someone who is interested in our services.”

"A qualified lead is someone who is interested in our services"

I quickly realized that THIS IS WHERE MANY B2B company CEOS, Sales Directors and Marketing professionals FAIL before they start marketing their business. 

If you want to generate QUALIFIED leads, you first must UNDERSTAND what a qualified lead is and what it is not. Then, you must understand the PROCESS of qualification that a prospect needs to go through in order for you to determine if the lead is indeed qualified or if it's UNQUALIFIED. 

Qualified is a LOOSE term and what you consider qualified might be very unqualified for someone else. 

Before you start any strategy you must first define all the variables and understand the words you are using. 

How do you define a qualified lead in your business? Leave a comment below and let me know - Would be interesting to see!

If someone calls up our marketing agency and they say, "We need you build us a website ASAP." Are we going to start celebrating yet? NO! We get requests like this a few times a week. Most of these requests are from people who don't know what they really want. They have NO BUDGET in mind and just need some education. Once they realize that a website does not cost $500, they start to wonder if they even need a website to begin with. 

Often having a LinkedIn profile that serves as a website might be enough for what his person is trying to accomplish. 

If you do not have a business, don’t start with building a website, instead start by getting clients. I closed 30 deals for our LinkedIn Authority Blueprint with NO WEBSITE, NO LANDING PAGE, Just a Youtube video and a LinkedIn Article. I did that to prove to the entrepreneurs we teach that they do not need a website to sell a service that solves a problem. (After we did that, we created a landing page.. See it here)

Before you get a client you need to identify WHO an ideal client is. Then you can make a list of PROSPECTS (some people call them SUSPECTS), and from that you can see which ones have some interest. 

A prospect with some level of INTEREST is called a LEAD. Once you have a LEAD in your pipeline, you need to qualify that lead to see if they are likely to close anytime soon. 

Most leads that you qualify will be UNQUALIFIED, but that does not mean they are worthless. A lead might be unqualified to close in the next 90 days, but they can close next year. 

That is why many organizations have a category called “Marketing Qualified Leads” MQL and another category called “Sales Qualified Leads” SQL

MQL’s are great for us to NURTURE with marketing until they are SALES qualified - then at that point, when there is actual buying intent, they get passed off to sales to go through the closing process. 

LEAD QUALIFICATION PROCESS FOR B2B COMPANIES

There are 4 ways to qualify a lead.

1. NEED

2. Decision Marker

3. Budget

4. Time Frame

- Some people also add a bonus which we call VALUES but let’s leave that one out for now. 

WRITE THAT PROCESS DOWN!

If you have a prospect fill out a form on your website, that becomes a LEAD in your system. If they DO not have a NEED for what you offer. For example we service B2B companies that need qualified leads. Lets say a B2C ecommerce company contacts us for affiliate marketing services. We realize that at this point, this LEAD that came in is NOT QUALIFIED because it has no NEED for any of the services that we can provide at this time. 

We might refer that lead to another company that can help them with their affiliate marketing needs. That will become a lead for them to qualify further to see if they are MQL or SQL. 

MQL means that they have the need, they might even have the budget but they are just not ready to buy right now. They are just fishing for information at this time. You need a great marketing automation system to keep them engaged until they are ready to buy. This way you do not tax your salespeople with a bunch of leads that they are wasting their time with. 

Now that you have a clear picture of what a PROSPECT is, what a LEAD is, and what a Marketing Qualified Lead is, let me tell you how to create a list of prospects and turn them into leads. 

Let’s say you have a B2B service business and you want to add 10 new clients this year that pay you $100k a year. You want to add a million dollars in new sales this year. 

You have a clear picture for the type of client that you want. You even know the names of the companies you are going after.

That means you have a list of companies but you do not have any prospects because you do not have a list of PEOPLE in those companies. Your goal would be to create a list of decisions makers or influencers for you to contact in those companies. The messaging that you would use, would get them excited about learning more. 

When one of those prospects you are targeting raises their hand, they are considered a lead. They showed some interest. Now it's time for you to qualify them to see if they need to be passed to a sales person for closing or they need to be nurtured with more information before they can become a client. 

There are many methods to generate leads. You might use LinkedIn to search for those prospects in those companies you are targeting. You might collect emails and send them a series of emails that will get them excited about clicking on something or replying to the email. You might target those specific people with Facebook and Instagram ads, talking to them about their specific needs. 

You might even run some Google ads to make sure that you come up if these people search for you or your brand-related keywords on Google. Yes, that is the first thing people do when they get an email or see ads consistently for your brand; they search your company to see what’s cooking with you. 

Let’s say you have a B2B law firm that specializes in Immigration and you want to generate leads but you are not sure who your clients are 100% and you do not have a list of companies you can target. What you can do in that case is target people searching for specific key phrases for problems that those types of companies have. For example, you might know that HR managers have questions about verifying social security numbers. You can create a great guide for HR and HIRING managers and run an ad that promotes that guide to them directly. 

When they get to that landing page, you give them access to the guide if they enter some information like their email and how many employees they have. From there you can start the process of qualifying that lead by sending them emails, videos, and more information. Eventually they will want to speak to a lawyer and you consider them a SQL if they are the right size company and answer questions that qualify them to want to hire your firm. 

Generating qualified leads for your business is NOT magic. It's a total science and you can predict how much business you will get with some testing. The key is to have a STRATEGY in place that will help you test out a campaign. 

Once you get results from a campaign, you can keep growing the campaign and get more and more results. 

For example, let’s say you have an IT company that offers cyber security services to companies and you want to generate leads. You know that for every 10 people who contact your firm, 1 person will be a MQL and for every 10 MQLs you will get 1 SQL. You also know that you have a 50% closing rate on firms that become an SQL within a 90 day period of time. Those firms usually purchase your lead in product worth 10k and 30% of those purchase your back end product worth 200k a year. The average client stays with you for 5 years so the LTV (lifetime value) of ONE backend client is 1 million dollars. 

You need a strategy to generate leads that turn into qualified leads that eventually turn into sales. What is your strategy?

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Take a moment and also leave a COMMENT with what you learned from this article. We love to see how we are adding value to the people in our network. 

If you need some support, please take a moment and email us at [email protected] and let us help you craft a strategy that will help you generate more qualified leads for your business. We love speaking to B2B marketing executives, sales directors and business owners that are eager to grow their businesses. A quick 15 minute call will help us audit your current strategy and get you in the right direction if you are not getting the results you expect today. 

Looking forward to watching you succeed! 

Joe Apfelbaum

Ajax Union

PS: Want to learn how we create marketing strategies for people on LinkedIn? Watch our webinar replay for the LinkedIn Authority Blueprint at www.ajaxunion.com/blueprint