5 Ways to Improve Sales Lead Quality

Lead generation is a challenge. As a marketer, you’re faced with not only meeting your KPIs, but also supporting the sales team. In an ever-changing B2B selling environment, it can often feel like there are never enough sales leads.

One of the biggest obstacles marketing teams face when trying to align with sales is centered around the quality and quantity of the leads. In this article, we’ll cover five key tactics you can use to help improve the quality of the leads you produce.

Use Intent Data

As digital marketing has evolved, so has the need for improved data. It’s no longer good enough to simply generate leads, you must also have in-market buyer data to help increase the velocity at which each lead converts.

Intent data helps you identify key buyer insights that can paint a picture of their decision-making process. A lead showing high intent has most likely engaged with products and content similar to yours. They’re also looking at various sites that trigger the gathering of behavioral data. This type of information is not only crucial to the marketing campaigns you run, but also to the sales team, as they need as many insights as possible to help connect with the prospect.

Take Advantage of Account-Based Marketing

Chances are, if you’ve worked in B2B marketing at all, you’ve heard of Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM is a strategy that segments your account database into accounts that fit very specific criteria. From there, marketers create personalized buyer’s journeys for each prospect, in hopes of boosting engagement.

This strategy provides a seamless integration and buy-in with the sales team, as they’ll be responsible for identifying the priority accounts for the campaign. On top of that, you can also give them visibility throughout so they know how each account is behaving. ABM offers a unique opportunity to blend both sales and marketing outreach with the goal of creating the highest quality of leads.

Enrich Your Data

Once you generate a lead, it can feel like whatever happens next is mostly out of your control. You can’t change how the sales team chooses to follow up on the leads you provide. A great way to increase the quality of each sales lead generated is with data enrichment.

This can come in the form of a software-based or even a manual effort, but the main goal is to expand the information you have for each contact. Some great starting points for this are:

• Competitive intel
• Funding history
• Persona behaviors
• Content engagement
• Social media insights

A lot of CRMs will allow for custom spaces to be filled in, and this is where you can bolster your contacts with valuable data points.

Measure Your Leads

This may seem like an arbitrary term to some. In most cases, you’re measuring the leads you generate through various marketing analytics. However, really digging into what each of those stats mean can help you improve the quality of the leads you generate.

A good lead measurement process should answer these questions:

• How many leads do I need to generate and in what timeframe?
• What are the key points of conversion where the lead became a sales qualified lead?
• What is the lead-to-opportunity timeframe?
• What marketing efforts are yielding the highest ROI? Why?

The name of the game with lead measurement is creating a streamlined process of sales lead generation and conversion. By understanding the key points of each of your marketing campaigns, you can focus on drilling down into a specific strategy.

Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

If your marketing and sales teams have bought into what the other is doing, the chances of you generating leads that hit the sales team’s qualifications go up exponentially. The problem, according to a study recently conducted by DemandScience, is that 58% of marketing leaders say that marketing sources higher quality leads, but only 14% of sales leaders agreed.

If you’re not having regular conversations with your sales team, then you will probably always be misunderstanding their needs. Creating a strong alignment program that relies on regular meetings, joint planning, and revenue visibility can help increase the quality of the sales leads you generate.

Building Stronger Leads through DemandScience

As you look at creating a variety of lead generation campaigns, it might be worth taking a look atwhat outside support could look like. DemandScience offers scalable lead generation solutions centered around various use cases. Whether you need to generate leads for the sales team, expand your database, or provide a boost to your marketing funnel, DemandScience has a solution to help. Through utilizing predictive intent data and a segmented network of over 150 million buyers, there’s a strong chance we can help create successful campaigns that increase your sales lead quality.

If you’re fed up with getting leads that don’t match your target customers, check out how to activate and engage your in-market buyers. We offer a variety of solutions that can help you overcome some regular challenges.