Blog

We’ve discussed the advantages of setting up a dedicated lead qualification process to help connect with and qualify inbound leads and leads generated from various marketing programs like events, conferences, whitepaper downloads etc. and a recent sequence of events here at the ReadyContacts brought to light another advantage of having a strong lead qualification process in place. 

Your lead qualification process can be your first source of marketing and lead generation campaign effectiveness feedback if you have strong communication between those qualifying leads and those driving the lead generation campaigns. While it may not appear like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, believe it or not, your lead qualifcation team is in one of the best positions to view the effectiveness of the lead generation campaigns that have been executed. 

We were doing a lead qualification campaign for a large, well known technology company who are constantly running a variety of lead generation efforts by sponsoring events, participating in tradeshows and conferences. The leads collected by exchanging cards, registering for conferences, demos and so on go through a qualification process which helps identify the genuine leads which need to be expedited to sales, the cold leads which need to be weeded out and the leads which can be nurtured. A marketing or sales professional working on lead qualification is often the first person to connect with the leads after they are generated and in a position to get a feel of how the leads are reacting to the event which they attended and also get a feel of how they respond to a call from the company. This also puts them in the best position to guage how effective the event or campaign was in generating awareness and also generating high quality responses. On this particular occasion we discovered the leads were not very aware about the event, most were not very qualified at all and the response pointed out there was something amiss. 

The feedback to marketing however revealed that this particular event didn’t work out quite as planned and the turn out / quality of leads wasn’t up to the mark either. The communication between lead qualification and marketing heleped them come to a decision to not spend too much time on that set of leads and also to avoid using that event for future campaigns as it would simply be a waste. This communication between the two sides can really help bring valuable feedback to the table and help improve the lead generation process by detecting what works and what doesn’t at a much earlier stage. These kind of mistakes can be valuable in learning and fine tuning the lead generation machine as long as there is learning and something good comes out of it. Right?