Tag: Sales-Ready Leads

ConvergeHub and Kixie Power Dialer: A Match Made for Powerful Sales Communication 

While ConvergeHub conducts the grand sales opera, Kixie Power Dialer takes center stage as the star soloist. This cloud-based platform of outbound calls transforms cold calls into warm conversations.

In the cutthroat world of sales, every edge counts. The recent partnership between ConvergeHub and Kixie, the renowned cloud-based dialer intends to take the sales communication to the next level. This partnership is going to redefine the game of sales communication for both ConvergeHub and Kixie customers. It is going to empower businesses to dial up their success like never before.

ConvergeHub: The Powerhouse of Customer Relationships

The top-notch CRM platform streamlines workflow across  sales, marketing, billing and customer service. ConvergeHub is an all-in-one CRM platform more than just a digital rolodex; it’s a symphony of features designed to harmonize your customer interactions. From nurturing leads with laser-sharp scoring to crafting winning proposals, ConvergeHub orchestrates every stage of the customer journey with meticulous precision.

Kixie Power Dialer: The Master of Outbound Calls

While ConvergeHub conducts the grand sales opera, Kixie Power Dialer takes center stage as the star soloist. This cloud-based platform of outbound calls transforms cold calls into warm conversations. It comes with  predictive dialing features  that keeps your sales reps on a roll, automatic call recording for invaluable coaching opportunities, and even call transcription that turns spoken words into actionable insights.

A Symphony of Benefits: Why This Partnership Matters

The mere mention of “integration” often evokes images of clunky Frankensteinian monsters. But not this time. ConvergeHub and Kixie Power Dialer match in perfect harmony, creating a seamless experience that amplifies the strengths of both platforms. Here’s how your business can bask in the melodious benefits:

  • Sales on Steroids: Kixie’s predictive dialing keeps your reps at peak efficiency, squeezing more dials and conversations into every workday. This translates to a dramatic surge in sales conversions, turning prospects into loyal customers with the flick of a virtual baton.
  • Quality Control, Amplified: Every note played in your sales calls deserves to be heard. Kixie’s automatic call recording ensures you never miss a beat, allowing you to coach reps, identify areas for improvement, and celebrate victories. Call transcription adds another layer of finesse, transforming fleeting conversations into actionable data that fuels future success.
  • Data-Driven Decisions, Not Just Gut Feelings: Sales isn’t just about charm and hustle; it’s about understanding your customers and tailoring your approach accordingly. The combined data prowess of ConvergeHub and Kixie paints a vivid picture of your sales performance, revealing hidden trends and patterns that would elude even the most seasoned sales sleuth. Use these insights to refine your strategies, target the right audience, and watch your sales numbers soar.
  • Seamless Information Flow: Gone are the days of juggling multiple platforms and wrestling with data silos. ConvergeHub and Kixie join forces to create a unified sales ecosystem, where information flows effortlessly between platforms, streamlining workflows and boosting overall efficiency. Your sales team can focus on what they do best – building relationships and closing deals – without getting bogged down in tech headaches.

Who Should Tune In?

This isn’t just for tech-savvy sales giants; the ConvergeHub and Kixie Power Dialer duet caters to businesses of all sizes and industries. Whether you are a scrappy startup or a seasoned enterprise, this partnership injects a powerful dose of sales communication magic into your operations. It’s particularly beneficial for businesses that:

  • Make a high volume of outbound calls
  • Struggle with sales productivity and efficiency
  • Crave deeper customer insights to fuel strategic decisions
  • Seek a unified and streamlined sales workflow

For the MCA business  in  particular, this is going to be a game changer. 

Ready to Conduct Your Sales Masterpiece?

It’s time for a new era of sales communication. ConvergeHub and Kixie Power Dialer are more than just supporting instruments; they’re the conductors, the entire orchestra, ready to help your business compose a sales masterpiece. So, grab your baton, step onto the virtual stage, and let the symphony of success begin!

Don’t just take our word for it:

  • Sign up for a free trial of both ConvergeHub and enjoy its powerful integration with Kixie.
  • Explore the comprehensive resources offered by both platforms, including documentation, training videos, and live chat support.
  • Dive deeper into the individual features of ConvergeHub and Kixie Power and make the most of the integration.

Remember, in the competitive world of sales, every note counts. With ConvergeHub and Kixie Power Dialer, your business can orchestrate a sales performance that will leave your customers breathless. 

Are Your Qualified Leads Up for Sale? Learn How to Make the Call

Not all leads you are acquiring everyday are converted. As per MarketingSherpa’s findings, a significant 61% of B2B marketers forward all their leads to the sales team, despite the fact that only 27% of these are sales qualified leads. Additionally, a study conducted by the TAS Group indicates that sales representatives disregard approximately 50% of the marketing leads. This piece talks about how to identify your sales qualified leads.

There runs a blame game between the marketing and sales team when it comes to the question of Qualified Leads.  While the sales team believes the marketing team merely shared contacts (read: unqualified leads), the marketing team blames the sales team for failing to convert the potential leads they sent along.

Quite familiar it sounds, Right?

As per Marketing Sherpa’s findings, a significant 61% of B2B marketers forward all their leads to the sales team, despite the fact that only 27% of these leads meet the qualification criteria. Additionally, a study conducted by the TAS Group indicates that sales representatives disregard approximately 50% of the marketing leads.

You must be wondering why the percentage is so high?

Due to a lack of clarity regarding the criteria for a qualified lead, various teams have formulated their own definitions. This divergence not only leads to confusion but also results in frustration and financial setbacks.

In this blog, we will talk about your sales-ready leads and  how they fit into the buyer’s journey, how to rate the leads, and more. 

MQL Vs. SQL: Key Differences

One of the primary reasons marketers waste time on unqualified leads who don’t want to be sold is a lack of knowledge of the distinction.

MQLs exhibit consistent interest in your website content (but not necessarily in your products or services) and are likely to become customers. Simply put, they have become your potential client pool’s hand-raisers. Remember, MQLs aren’t ready to buy yet, but they will respond to deliberate nurturing.

SQLs, on the other hand, are further along in the buying journey and are ready to make a deal. They correspond to your buyer persona profiles and are likely to speak with a sales representative.

One of the key distinctions between these two is their willingness to buy. An MQL is unlikely to be ready to buy your product right away, whereas a SQL is a qualified lead that may be approached by your sales team right away.

Pro Tip: Transitioning from MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is a time-critical process, and as a marketer, it’s crucial not to overlook this timeframe. Gaining a comprehensive grasp of the buyer’s journey and the qualification cycle enables you to assess the stage at which leads currently reside and subsequently relay them to the sales team.

How the Qualification of the Leads Fit in Your Buyers’ Journey

There’s three stages in the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. And a SQL passes through each of these stages before being a SQL.

It starts with the awareness stage. If you are dealing with a lead at this level, it means your lead begins to consider your product. They have progressed to MQLs. Finally, when leads begin to consider your product/service as a solution to their pain areas, they become a sales qualified lead and are ready to be approached by your sales team.

So, what is your first step in determining when to advise your salesperson if a lead is sales qualified?

Sync Sales & Marketing  for Better Results

According to a Marketo Research, when Sales and Marketing are synced they yield better results in terms of closing deals.

For a comprehensive analysis of the MQL to SQL conversion, it’s crucial to have a robust connection of sales and marketing teams. Sharing insights regarding target markets, customer profiles, and behavioral patterns enables a more accurate identification of leads that require further nurturing and those poised for advancement through the sales pipeline.

This collaborative effort seeks answers to key questions:

1. What are the characteristics of an ideal lead?

2. Why do certain leads become disqualified during the final stages?

3. Which content assets, and in what quantity, have successful leads engaged with?

4. Which referral sources exhibit the highest closing rates?

These inquiries naturally lead us to the next question: How can this collective knowledge be effectively leveraged to enhance conversion rates, thereby optimizing resource utilization?

Lead Scoring Metrics

Let’s get one thing clear. Not every lead is ready for sale. Leads, on the other hand, can be developed.

If your marketing staff begins forwarding every query to the sales team, you will just waste your sales team’s time, resulting in a less-than-satisfactory customer experience. Sometimes those leads are simply kids who need to read your ebook for an assignment or to prepare for an exam. Sometimes they are job searchers who are hurriedly gathering as much information as possible.

As a result, it is critical to carefully examine each lead’s intent. And, in order to discern this intent, you must have an effective behavioral yardstick—specific lead score measures.

As previously said, MQLs are the hand-raisers among the leads. They are more engaged, but not yet ready to buy or speak with a salesperson. As a result, you should exercise caution when selecting the basis, and only high-interest behaviours should trigger a change from lead to MQLs. For example, returning to the product/services specification page, the pricing page, reading the majority of your emails, leaving goods in the cart, and so on.

While the majority of your time will be spent developing accurate metrics for MQLs, the shift from MQL to SQL will be easier to recognise. It may look like signing up for free trials or scheduling a discovery call with sales representatives, or anything similar.

To eliminate all “guesswork” from the cycle, you must sit down with both sides and sketch the lead score measures. You may use your marketing automation software to create a lead scoring system that assigns a monetary value to each activity. These actions could include website visits, downloads, email activity, or social media engagements.

When a lead meets a predetermined threshold, it should be automatically allocated to the sales team.

Despite the fact that settling on a threshold may seem apparent, 46% of B2B marketers have NOT established a lead score threshold that will automatically alert or route leads to sales. Isn’t it strange?

While your lead scoring system will primarily consist of adding up scores, including negative scoring for specific activities (as seen in the figure above) will greatly assist you. For instance, if a qualified lead stops interacting with your product after signing up for a trial and does not react to any emails.

Here are some factors to consider while qualifying leads at each level:

Organizational level: At the organizational level, you are asking essential questions such as if the lead fits within the buyer profiles you have built.****

Opportunity level: This is critical for properly qualifying leads.

You’re probably wondering at this point:

  • If the potential lead needs your product or service,
  • Whether or not the lead can actually purchase and use
  • Whether your product can alleviate your leads’ pain points.
  • Involvement level: You are asking questions concerning BANT (budget, authority, need, and time) at this level.

Stakeholder level: At this level, you raise questions about BANT (budget, authority, need, and time).

Wrapping Up

You should be able to notify your salesperson if a lead is sales qualified by now.

Everyone is pleased when leads are correctly and strategically qualified. Customers believe you understand them, marketing teams believe their qualified leads were contacted effectively, and sales teams are pleased with lead quality since they closed the deal.

Finally, it prevents you from selling to folks who do not want to buy.

When should you inform your salesperson that the lead has sales qualification? Which of the following is one of the most essential lead metrics? Let’s discuss it in the comments area.

5 Key Factors Of Successful Lead Scoring

The inbound marketing bug has already bitten most of the modern day marketers. Therefore, once your inbound marketing is running successfully and you are generating a high volume of fresh leads, you need to score those leads for further actions. Successful lead scoring aligns marketing and sales automatically. When it comes to lead scoring, we have some good and some bad news for the readers of this blog. Disclosing the bad news first it is, that only 23% of salespeople say that the marketing department delivers sales-ready leads. However, the good news is that this does not have to be the case. Lead scoring that provides sales-ready leads is easier than you can think, as long as you comprehend your buyers and build a lead scoring process around their behaviors and interests.

The inbound marketing bug has already bitten most of the modern day marketers. Therefore, once your inbound marketing is running successfully and you are generating a high volume of fresh leads, you need to score those leads for further actions. Successful lead scoring aligns marketing and sales automatically.

Only 23% of salespeople say that the marketing department delivers sales-ready leads- Data2CRM Click To Tweet

When it comes to lead scoring, we have some good and some bad news for the readers of this blog. Disclosing the bad news first it is, that only 23% of salespeople say that the marketing department delivers sales-ready leads. However, the good news is that this does not have to be the case.

Lead scoring that provides sales-ready leads is easier than you can think, as long as you comprehend your buyers and build a lead scoring process around their behaviors and interests.

Comprehending your leads

A well-performing lead scoring machine can align marketing and sales efforts and do wonders for your pipeline. The most efficient lead scoring sees two main aspects of a lead’s journey with your brand: Behavioral aspects and Demographic aspects

Behavioral aspects

The behavioral aspect of your prospective customer’s interaction with your product or service includes the way they purchase, where they like to interact (web, phone, social media, email) and what they find most interesting about your brand. Web analytics are a powerful way to understand the lead’s interests in tracking how many web pages a lead visits on your brand’s website, which pages they like to view more and for how long. Are they opening the emails in one of your particular campaigns or responding particularly well to an SMS message about a new product or service?
All these are behavioral aspects of a lead.

Demographic aspects

The demographic aspects of any lead identify common characteristics of your prospective customers. Especially main characteristics such as company size, location, the range of the revenue. On an individual level, the demographic aspects include categories such as job titles, age group, gender, income level and others.
However, the most vital demographic aspect of the lead scoring process depends on the particular business on an organizational and individual level.

The critical harmonious balance for the lead scoring technique is where the behavior and demography intersect. Once you identify that intersection, it is time to build the lead scoring system for your brand.

5 Key Factors Of Successful Lead Scoring

Which are the factors that you apply for setting up your lead scoring process completely depends on your business model, but these building blocks of the lead scoring system are the same for all small and medium businesses.

Here are the five key factors for setting up an effective and robust lead scoring process that can automatically align both your marketing and sales efforts. 


  1. Define your criteria

Even before you start your lead scoring rules, brainstorm with your sales team for identifying your brand’s ideal customer. This is the basic criteria for building your lead scoring system. There may be different types of customer personas for your ideal customer, if it is so, find out where do those buyers overlap.


  1. Recognize your Target Audience (TA)

Once your ideal customer conditions are finalized, the next step is to identify your TA (Target Audience). The questions that you should ask your marketing team to find out your TA may include:

  • Are you TA based in Europe, North America, Middle East, or are they spread across the globe?
  • Which income group is the TA inclined towards?
  • Is your TA composed of mid-level management or top-level managerial staffs?

Although your sales team may help you to find information about your target audience, your marketing team is best equipped to answer these queries on your TA.


  1. Define your brand’s unique customer journey

Find out what the steps in your customer journey are, and how these steps should be scored? Once you have the characteristics of your leads well defined, focus on your lead’s behavior with your brand. List out all the possible touch points through which your prospective customers engage with your brand before they become your loyal customers. Over here, some behaviors may be more important than others. Make a list and assign score points to empathize each step’s importance. These mentioned steps may include:

  • A lead opening an email
  • A lead visits and signs up on your website’s signup page
  • A lead registers for a webinar etc.

The points allocated for each of these actions taken by the leads may vary from business to business.


  1. Structure a system and assign scores

After the behavior and characteristic aspects have been identified, define your lead scoring structure. For example, if you focus on the North American market, then you give leads from North America a positive score versus a lead from China or India (or this might also be the other way around). Another instance is when you allot a negative score to any lead coming to your brand’s job page because those leads are concerned for working in your organization and are not anxious about buying your product.

Once your lead generation process is ready for operation, you need to deal out a particular number or score to every touch points of your leads, which should be based on the priority that you have set for each aspect.

Do you want to provide higher scores to leads visiting your brand’s pricing page than leads visiting your career page?

Do you want to give a higher score to leads coming from private companies than those are from government institutions?

All these decisions should be incorporated into your lead scoring system.


  1. Track and Tweak

The last key factor to this lead scoring building blocks to make a good lead scoring system is to continuously track and tweak the lead scoring process.

Do not be surprised if you discover new aspects of your lead’s behavior that are crucial to defining a buy-ready lead.

For example, if you find that leads that are visiting your blog page are converting more than who are visiting your webinars, you should revise your lead scoring points for webinar visits and increase the ranking for the blog visits of your prospective leads.

Conclusion

Most silo marketing automation systems and easy to use CRM that have inbuilt marketing automation platforms, provide some sort of lead scoring functionality. However, it is essential to choose the one that exactly syncs with the model of your business.

Moreover, lead scoring for small and medium business is different from what it is for large enterprises. Therefore, always discuss with your sales and marketing team to improve your implemented lead scoring process.

5 Approaches To Get Your Hands On New Sales-Ready Leads

What is the most effective and best way to generate fresh sales-ready leads? Well, we have spoken to some people over the years that swear by social media, while there are also others that prefer a more traditional approach. Nevertheless, one thing is for certain that like many other sales tactics, the just cannot be one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to lead generation strategy. However, if we are to consider all the answers and reactions that we got from people on what works the best, these would be the most popular top 5 approaches (in no particular order).

What is the most effective and best way to generate fresh sales-ready leads?

Well, we have spoken to some people over the years that swear by social media, while there are also others that prefer a more traditional approach.

Nevertheless, one thing is for certain that like many other sales tactics, the just cannot be one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to lead generation strategy.

ConvergeHub Free Lead Generation tool ranks within 20 Google Chrome extensions in Small Biz Trends website. Click To Tweet

However, if we are to consider all the answers and reactions that we got from people on what works the best, these would be the most popular top 5 approaches (in no particular order).

# 1. Search Marketing

Search engines, more specifically Google, are most often the primary place people go when they seek information. Depending as to where a person is in the sales cycle, they can search for information about any product or service, or they can also look for user feedback and reviews.

Does your brand show up when people search for you? Search marketing is one of the most valuable digital tactics, which can provide you with a plethora of inbound leads.

Search marketing includes Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEM is commonly described as Paid Search or Pay-per-Click (PPC).

For those you are new to search marketing tactics, SEO is more of a long-term strategy, for it takes a long time to establish your brand’s online presence as an SEO-friendly website.  Hence, do not expect your website to show up on the first page of the organic search results by just changing or adding few keywords to your website.

This is where SEM comes into play- as it is a great add-on to leverage your brand’s name in the search results as you continue working on your website’s SEO.

PPC and SEM allow the users to bid on long-tail phrases and keywords that are relevant to your business. Therefore, if someone looks for a keyword that you want to bid on, your brand’s advertisements may show up (depending on a couple of factors) on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) that increases the likelihood of receiving more leads as your target audience finds your products and services online.

#2. Word of Mouth

This remains to be another most effective lead generation strategy for customer acquisition. Do you want to know why? It is simply because people trust their peers and friends more than they can trust an online advertisement or any other marketing collateral developed by the company itself. Moreover, now with the advent of social media, it has become easier than ever to spread the news as to how awesome your product and service is, compared to other brands in the market.

Here are 4 golden points by which you can increase your customer referrals:

  • Offer great support.
  • Treat your customers well and get engaged with them on the social channels like Twitter and Facebook.
  • Always provide your customers with the information they want, not what you like.
  • Create a formal referral program for your brand.

#3. Content Marketing

By content marketing, we do not mean developing junk load sales-y contents that push the online audience to purchase your products and services. Rather by contentment marketing strategy, we mean developing contents that are authentic and helpful for your prospects.

You can always think, “I am not doing business to circulate valuable information for free”. Maybe you are right. However, in today’s world earning the trust and respect of your consumers is an utterly powerful thing that pays its dividends in the end.

According to IDG and Google, B2B consumers go through anywhere between 10 to 14 pieces of content (on an average), before making any purchase. Therefore, developing the right kind of content that can help guide your consumers towards educating them for making a perfect purchase decision can be the crucial difference between getting a sale, or losing the opportunity to your competitors.

Some of the most useful content types that help inform buyers to make their purchase decisions are:

  • Blogs
  • Whitepapers
  • How-to videos
  • eBooks
  • Webinars
  • Product demos
  • Case studies

#4. Event Networking

Attending, conferences, industry events, and trade-shows are all excellent ways to generate leads. Even better than just visiting these networking events, actually speaking in such events brings in results that are more positive. There are many events where you have “calls-for-speakers” and there you can propose someone, as well as yourself, to speak on a topic of your liking to the conference attendees. Hence, this can be an excellent way to build thought leadership and therefore gain visibility for your brand.

#5. Social Media

Before you land on social media platforms for generating leads, remember not every social media channel are right for all businesses. For example, if you are an owner of a local restaurant and is looking for right patrons, you may find more success leveraging social media channel like Facebook rather than LinkedIn. But, if you are into B2B marketing, LinkedIn may prove to be a more valuable channel to get your brand in front of the relevant audience.

Here are some tips that can help you to extend your reach on LinkedIn and other social media websites:

  • Publish content:

LinkedIn nowadays allows users to publish their contents, such as blogs and articles on the LinkedIn website. Hence, when your posts find traction among your networks, you may even be lucky enough to earn more visibility on the social media website, which can eventually help you in generating new leads.

ConvergeHub Free Lead Generation tool ranks within 20 Google Chrome extensions by SmallBizTrends website.

Actually, this absolutely free “social lead generator” captures contacts from the popular social channels including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus and more.

Hence, this free lead generator tool helps you to add captured contacts to your CRM database with just one click for easy prospecting.

Here is how it works:

-Primarily navigate to Chrome Extensions in your browser. (You can also access this by clicking on the Chrome menu on the top right side of the Omnibox, hovering over ‘More Tools’ and selecting ‘Get more Extensions’.)

-In the Chrome Web Store, type ConvergeHub Lead Generator in the Search bar.

-Once you find the ConvergeHub Lead Generator, click on Add to Chrome and complete the installation.

– After successful installation of the extension, which appears on the side of the address bar, open any of the social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus) and view the desired profile that you want to target for your lead.

-Once the profile is open, clicking on the lead generator will extract all the necessary information of that profile and save it in the browser.

-You can even edit the saved data on the lead generator window by typing additional information regarding the lead.

-If you are a user of ConvergeHub CRM, you can save the information automatically into the CRM database for email campaigning and nurture of the lead.

-If not, you can copy the information from the lead capture form and manually enter the data into your CRM’s database.

Conclusion:

Of course, this is not the end or an all-inclusive list of lead generation processes. Here are some other tactics, which you can also use for harvesting your leads:

  • Reseller programs
  • Affiliate marketing
  • PR/media relations
  • Guest blogging

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what your biggest takeaway was!