Is the way your call center handles leads one big guessing game? It’s okay to admit that your process for lead qualification isn’t as scientific as it should be. However, you can expect your sales team to continue feeling defeated unless you do something about it. Improving lead qualification is the secret for continuously improving your sales efficiency.
If you’re struggling with poorly organized sales data, it’s time to learn what you should be doing differently with your leads. Better sales data is the key to getting out of the frenzied cycle of trying to make up for low-quality lead information by simply calling more leads.
Your Sales Numbers Are Struggling Because Your Sales Data Is Obscure
Obscure sales data is one of the most commonly overlooked causes of low conversion rates. Unfortunately, most sales managers today have misaligned perceptions of how an effective sales team should be spending hours in the call center. They have fallen into the volume trap.
The volume trap refers to the false belief that gathering as many leads as possible to get a high conversion rate is the “trick” to high closing numbers. This belief is actually built on some pretty fuzzy math. Placing more calls doesn’t magically increase the conversion rate for a sales team.
In reality, your sales team is likely to get even higher rejection rates when the focus is on contacting as many callers as possible. That’s because your sales team is probably reaching out to unqualified, low-quality leads that are simply not actual candidates for the product or service your company is selling. Here are the common scenarios in play for up to 75% of leads when you’re simply “diving into the pile” of random leads to make pitches:
- The name and contact information included with the lead are actually outdated or incorrect.
- The prospect has already purchased what they need from another company. If leads are more than 90-days old, there’s a good chance that your lead has moved on. However, most lead lists that are sold today are never purged of old or outdated leads. That means you’re paying for bad data!
- The prospect is on the National Do Not Call Registry. This is more than just an “oops” that inconveniences your sales team. When your company contacts one of these numbers, your team is actually in violation of federal do-not-call laws. As a result, your company is now vulnerable to fines and legal action. These penalties are being risked for leads who are 100% unreceptive to your product! This is one way that using bad sales data can harm your company on two very big and important fronts.
- The prospect was never a genuine prospect. There are many ways that this can play out. Even a person who signed up to get information from your company can easily be a “false lead.” That’s because companies often task junior marketing employees with looking up competitors in the same industry. In another scenario, your lead was simply generated by an online blogger or product reviewer who was researching a specific market. Another common problem with leads is that they were generated by prospects who cannot financially become customers because they are not the ones making financial decisions. Finally, all sales teams have to deal with prospects who were simply exploring services or products online out of curiosity. They were never serious about making a purchase.
These are the leads that your sales team could spend 75% of their day chasing down. Meanwhile, high-quality leads are being lumped in with these low-value, time-wasting leads. It’s no surprise that your conversion rate is down in the dumps.
The Danger of the Guessing Game
Sales managers are often reluctant to admit that they don’t have a way to track sales data. As a result, they end up relying on gut instinct. This is the quickest way to create a sales team of “winners” and “losers” instead of empowering your whole team. Superhero sales agents may be able to pull off decent closing numbers. However, the rest of the team is stuck in a cycle of low performance.
The tragedy here is that those middle-performing and low-performing sales agents could all significantly increase their closing numbers if they had good sales data. What’s more, those superheroes who just barely pull of a miracle every month could actually be closing so many more sales in the same time period if they were given quality data.
How to Get Better Sales Data With Lead Qualification
You need to automate your process for lead qualification. Take a deep breath before allowing your mind to jump into scenarios of complex testing and data management that will become your responsibility. The truth is that there are simply too many variables to test on your own. That’s precisely why your peers and competitors are using Pipes.ai to automate every single step in lead qualification.
Using Pipes.ai, sales teams are getting the data they need to conduct A/B testing that allows them to customize effective messaging for every prospect. Is your team struggling with sales efficiency? You can start learning how to do things better by downloading our new e-book called “No More Cold Calls: A Foolproof Plan to Build a List of 100% Qualified Sales Leads” that blows the lid off of all the pain points your team is being crushed by day after day.
