David DiGiammarino and Paymaun Rezai, Client Advocates at Pardot, team up to share their best practices advice on lead generation in their new blog series. This post is part two of three on lead generation strategies.
Last week, we discussed attracting a high-volume of leads. While volume is important, ultimately, quality beats quantity. The number of leads doesn’t matter as much as the revenue generated. Since high-quality leads will drive more revenue, how do you ensure that the vast majority of your prospects are high quality?
Fortunately, lead qualification is a core functionality of marketing automation. It allows you to automatically move quality prospects one step closer to generating a sales opportunity.
Below are some client-approved and highly successful Pardot strategies for distinguishing the “winning” prospects from the rest of the pack:
Personalize Content.
To gather a high-volume of prospects, we talked about knowing your audience. To qualify your leads, create content specific to your target buyers. In today’s world, with ever-increasing content, you need to be on point with highly customized messaging. Give each prospect the sense that you are exclusively catering to them.
Learn more with:
- Why Dynamic Content Is Marketing’s Secret Weapon
- Personalization with Automation: The Complete Guide
- 2 Cool Ways to Start Using Dynamic Content Today
Assume prospects are “ready to buy” and then work backwards.
While there are many ways to engage prospects with email campaigns, one of the most foundational techniques is the 3-2-1 (Hot, Warm, Cold) method as envisioned by our Principle of Marketing Insights at Salesforce, Mathew Sweezey.
This strategy has you set up a lead generation email campaign with the assumption that prospects are “ready to buy.” Then, you work backwards (via sets of emails) to those who are just starting to conduct research on your product. This method works well because it ensures that your hot leads won’t cool off waiting for the ever-important “call- to-action” email!
Learn more with:
- Getting Started with Nurturing: The 3-2-1 Strategy (an oldie but a goodie)
Define what marketing-qualified lead (MQL) means for your company. Then use scoring and grading to drive the right customers to sales at the right time.
When marketing and sales are aligned, the entire buying process becomes smoother. Top-performing businesses have both departments identify what qualifies a lead to move from marketing to sales (aka marketing-qualified leads).
Marketing automation makes this handoff seamless through scoring and grading. These invaluable lead qualification tools help to determine whether your prospects are ready to be handed off to the sales team.
Learn more with:
- Lead Qualifications Tips
- How to Develop Your Ideal Buyer Personas: A Case Study
- Lead Scoring 101: How to Build a Hierarchy [Infographic]
In next week’s post, we will be concluding our series with a must-read piece on how to deepen your existing relationships with clients. We’ll be sharing some highly-effective tips and tricks, so be sure to come back next week for more!