For marketing and sales teams, lead validation is the heavy-lifting portion of running a call center. If you’re not currently validating leads, you’re dramatically hampering the effectiveness of your call center team. If you’re currently trying to handle lead verification on your own using a system that your internal team has cobbled together, you’re probably making a huge time investment in a process with a very small payoff. How do you handle lead validation when no one knows how to validate leads in your small or medium business? Most brands outsource this task to get professional-level validation for what works out to be a negligible cost. Here’s a look at how to move forward.
How to Validate Leads
Let’s be clear about one thing. Validating leads usually takes lots of training. If this is something you’re going to try to handle within your business, it requires dedicated in-house experts. Tasking a sales team or call center staff with the burden of lead validation hurts everyone. First, you won’t get the results you want. Second, your teams are going to devote substantial amounts of time and effort to a task that probably doesn’t even have proper success metrics in place.
Lead validation is a process of verifying and scoring the quality of the leads your company has either self-generated or purchased. No team should be assuming that a phone call, blog comment, interaction on social media, or completed form on a website indicates that a lead is a strong lead. When leads aren’t validated, sales teams are left dedicating the same amount of effort to every single lead. This removes the opportunity to prioritize high-value leads that are much further along in the sales cycle. Based on industry standards, you can expect roughly 50% of every 500,000 leads you get to be illegitimate leads. When teams don’t have the knowledge or technology to vet leads, they often resort to assigning lead lists to sales team members for manual verification. This lengthy, draining process is truly one of the worst uses of time for your team! In addition, it can be very easy for an overworked sales team to overlook discrepancies, spelling errors, and other flaws in lead lists.
The Wakeup Call: Most Conversions Aren’t Sales Leads
Many call centers are struggling because they’ve fallen prey to the common misconception that all conversions are leads. If you’re currently relying on Google reporting to obtain your leads, you should know that roughly half the prospects you’re courting from the lists you’ve made aren’t leads at all. Everything from incomplete forms to mistaken intentions could prevent these prospects from ever evolving into customers. This is where things become lopsided. While your marketing team is celebrating a high conversion rate, your sales team is suffering with a low closing rate. Getting better, truer leads could be the answer for aligning all departments.
Lead validation is the first step to getting quality leads. Why? When your team can determine exactly where leads came in from, they can optimize the pipeline to increase the return on investment for every lead interaction. What’s more, getting your own lead verification system in place allows you to include parameters that Google doesn’t even consider.
Performing Lead Validation
Let’s say that your team does want to tackle lead validation internally. The primary task is to verify that the contact input that’s been collected from each lead is 100% genuine and current. In order to do this, lead data must be compared to existing data sources. If there is conflicting information between lead data and real-world data, those differences must be reconciled before the lead can be pushed through. The process of lead verification includes cross-validation of a prospect’s name, email address, telephone number, and IP address. In order to be both accurate and thorough, the validation process must run the data that you have on file for your lead against hundreds of confirmed, authoritative data sources. However, the journey isn’t over once both verification and correction duties have been performed. Next, it’s necessary to conduct lead scoring.
Lead scoring is a process of assigning a quality score to each lead. This is often done using a 100-point scale. Additionally, quality scores are often assigned to different data points that make up the overall score. Lead scoring is typically done based on a company’s specific parameters for judging the quality of prospects. Scoring can be based on factors that include demographics, the way that a prospect interacted with a brand, the frequency of interactions between the prospect and the brand, and the way that the prospect discovered a brand.
Some Extra Benefits of Lead Validation
Why is lead validation important? Lead validation benefits your business on nearly every level. Yes, increased sales will help your company to reach its goals. However, you shouldn’t overlook the morale boost that sales, marketing, and call center teams can get from actually having quality lead lists!
Lead validation enhances your marketing practices by making it easier to tweak campaigns quickly to create tailored campaigns for your target demographic. Additionally, lead information makes using marketing automation more effective. “Clean” information is always helpful for business development because it allows you to set goals based on accurate data. Let’s not forget that validating leads the right way makes it easier for your company to stay in compliance with regulatory guidelines for handling and storing customer information.
Finally, your sales team has the most to gain from properly validated leads. In a call center, the quality of your leads dictates your close rates. When your sales team has quality leads, workers can leverage the information they have during sales calls to create messaging that is more effective.
Is It Time to Rethink the Way You Handle Lead Validation?
Is lead validation becoming a real pain point for your business because nobody knows how to properly validate leads? Discover why so many other businesses your size have already started using Pipes.ai’s Lead Optimizer to automate all lead validation. Sign up for the Lead Optimizer today and validate 600 leads for free.
