What constitutes a qualified lead and how do you best implement this
Online to offline is increasingly becoming a key format, especially in the financial sales space. Leads are collected online and then followed up by the offline sales teams who contact the leads, most often by phone. A key format when running such campaigns is payment per quality lead rather than just by every lead. There are many reasons for this including the time it can take to complete the whole sales cycle, extended offline tracking issues and more. Be that as it may, it of course begs the question: What constitutes a quality lead and how do you implement a setup that allows you to pay only per quality lead.
How do you measure quality?
So how do you go about qualifying a lead? There are definitely some minimum requirements:
The lead has to have submitted viable contact information
They have to be reachable
They have to have an actual interest in the product on sale.
This is the minimum level for a viable, qualified lead. If a lead meets the requirements, the sales team will need to record this in a CRM system. This can then be used to validate the leads. We touch on this last process in more details in our article on CPS vs CPA in financial online to offline campaigns.
Can we be pickier?
However, additional requirements can also be added. One way is to ask additional questions on the lead form that would further qualify the lead. This could be with regards to demographics, income and other information that can help further narrow the lead pool. They can also be included as terms. Whether such additional requirements are added needs to be carefully considered. Such can easily result in the elimination of what could otherwise be good leads and potentially future customers. Similarly, it can significantly reduce the distribution of the campaign.
Does this guarantee the quality?
Following the above outline allows you to specify what you are looking for and validate it internally. This constitutes the first level of quality control with your campaign. However, in order to ensure the quality of your leads, you should always also monitor the conversion of leads into sales over time. This is true for any channel you decide to utilize. It foes not matter if it is search traffic, social traffic, affiliate traffic or any other source. This often serves as the ultimate check on channel quality.
Depending on what the data show, you may have to make adjustments from time to time. This will ensure that your campaigns provides with the ROI that you need. However, it may also serve to show that the sales team is beginning to underperform. As such, it is important to look into where ths drop happens. Is it a drop across all channels or one channel or source in particular.
The Verdict
What constitutes a qualified lead varies a bit by campaign but in general, it constitutes a lead from a person genuinely interested in the product for the right reasons (not e.g. a competitor gathering data). Through requirements and validation, you can further measure and control the quality of the leads you receive. However, the ultimate control per channel will always manifest in the data over time.
Are you looking to run online to offline lead campaigns using the affiliate channel? Then get in touch with us at Lodestar Marketing.