How to Prioritize Your Top B2B Leads

Although I hate to break the news, most B2B leads won't turn into sales.

Others might not be ready for purchase, others could lose out to the competition, and some might need solutions that don't fit their needs. This is not an uncommon struggle. Only 12% of B2B marketers are satisfied with their lead-conversion initiatives.

B2B marketers must assess your prospects to determine which characteristics and behaviors make them good leads. Leads must be qualified based on their potential lifetime worth (LTV), or the expected net profit that a customer will make by doing business with you company.

In order to maximize your revenue, your costs should be proportional to what your customers spend. How can you determine LTV and convert potential before the sale? It all boils down to lead qualification.

The Key Takeaways

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  Instead of committing to every lead that comes along, create a lead qualification strategy that works for your team.
  
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  You can adapt the techniques to your needs.
  
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  Let go of leads that don't convert and optimize your time.
  

The Evolution of Qualifying Leads

After identifying potential leads, it is time to decide which leads are worth following up on and when. There are many ways to determine which leads are best for your marketing team, including the BANT (budget. authority. need and timing) as well as the CHAMP (challenges. authority. money. and prioritization).

BANT and CHAMP are two traditional lead qualification methods. They form a system that you can use to assess the “quality” of a lead.

Digital marketing technologies allow for modern methods of qualifying leads. You can now use data from your CRM system to create a lead scoring system that will help you identify potential customers.

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Modern lead scoring allows you to assign points to every new lead you receive, based on their behavior and demographic information. This total score can then be used to rank your prospects and measure their interest in your brand.

Scoring criteria today include a wider range of attributes. But that doesn't mean traditional methods such as BANT or CHAMP are ineffective. You can actually use their basic principles to create a lead scoring system that suits your business model.

You can assign points to B2B leads based on the CHAMP or BANT frameworks. However, you can also include other criteria or values such as how a lead responded to your sales activities. This will give you a better understanding of the lead's intentions.

Are you prioritizing your leads well enough?

While lead scoring can be tedious due to the many data points involved, you will gain a greater understanding of your prospects. You can also identify them as ideal customers and increase your sales and marketing efforts.

It doesn't make sense to ignore data-driven lead management strategies for your campaigns.

If you don't prioritize B2B leads, you might not be properly directing your efforts. Sales reps spend 40% of their time searching for the right lead to call.

Your team should be focusing on the most potential leads for sales conversion. This will allow you to reduce time spent calling everyone on your list and save time.

There are likely to be two results if you call everyone on your contact list.

First, at the end of your call you discover that there was no sales opportunity with your lead.

It takes more time to ensure that prospects meet the criteria for high-potential leads. You lose valuable time that could have been used more efficiently.

Qualifying leads can also have its downside. Sales people might cringe at the thought of disqualifying them. However, disqualifying a dead-end leads will allow you to optimize your time and not be seen as a wasteful person.

Statistics show that prioritized lists resulted in 20% more actions per lead for salespeople. This means they could make more contact attempts and increase their engagement time. These actions together can lead to higher productivity and better opportunities for you to engage your top prospects.

Studies show that 83% of companies who do not have a lead priority system reported lower conversion rates than the average. Implementing a lead qualification system is essential if your brand wants to be competitive.

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Do more with less

A perfect sales situation is one that converts every B2B lead on your list. However, this is not realistic. Your customers may be at different stages in their buying cycles and have unique circumstances that make them stand out from others.

You can use a custom lead scoring system to help you decide which leads you should prioritize and invest in, so you can turn them into high-value customers.

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