Lead
Contact who has registered their interest on your website or through another interaction
Lead qualification means differentiating all your leads according to how far away they are from becoming real buyers. This process of converting visitors to your website into paying customers is best illustrated by a sales funnel.
Contact who has registered their interest on your website or through another interaction
Contact that matches your ideal customer profile, but has not yet shown an interest in buying
Contact whose behaviour signals that they are in the middle of a purchase decision
Contact who has confirmed interest in making a purchase and to whom your sales team has assigned a deal
Contact with at least one completed deal
One of your customers who is a raving fan of your company
How “qualified” a lead is determined by whether they’ve already been in contact with your marketing or sales team and what information they’ve been given. It also depends on which target group the lead is assigned to, which buyer persona is involved or which problem your lead wants to solve. Last but not least, the click behaviour of leads is tracked and incorporated into the lead qualification process.
Pssst … the sales funnel is not the only way of representing the sales process! In contrast to the sales funnel, the flywheel is not aligned in a linear fashion, but is circular. Accordingly, a successful sale does not represent the end of the sales process. Instead, the flywheel also takes into account the power of word-of-mouth marketing or recommendations from satisfied customers and their positive effects on the success of other sales activities.
For half a century, the best marketing and sales campaigns were much more art than science. Think of those memorable...
In the last several years, the inbound philosophy has taken the digital world by storm. People are ditching aggressive,...