As a sales professional, your number-one goal is to onboard new customers and increase revenue for your company. In order to do so, you need to close qualified leads that are a good fit for your product or service. Unfortunately, time and nurturing are required to truly weed out the unqualified leads from the qualified.
In order to find quality leads, your team needs to list of bermuda consumer email establish lifecycle stages. This helps organize all of your company contacts based on their stage in your sales cycle: lead, marketing-qualified lead, sales-qualified lead, etc. At some point in a lead’s lifecycle, marketing will hand it off to sales.
But, if marketing is handing lead after lead to sales, your representatives will begin to experience a backlog of sales-qualified leads requiring contact. In today’s two-part post, we will walk through how to prioritize your sales-qualified leads based on lifecycle stages and lead scoring.
What are lifecycle stages?
As stated above, lifecycle stages help your team organize your contacts based on where they are in your sales cycle. In order to effectively nurture leads, your team should leverage lifecycle stages to dictate its interactions with contacts.
The three most common lifecycle stages are (via HubSpot):
Lead: Leads show more interest than those who opt to hear from you every now and again (blog subscribers, email subscribers, etc.). Typically a lead has filled a form with more than just an email address, often for some sort of content-based offer on your website.
Marketing-Qualified Lead: Marketing-qualified leads, commonly known as MQLs, are those people who have raised their hands (metaphorically speaking) and identified themselves as more deeply engaged, sales-ready contacts than your usual leads.
Sales-Qualified Lead: Sales-qualified leads are those who your sales team has accepted as worthy of a direct follow up.