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We know, managing your leads is no easy feat, you’re scared you’re going to miss opportunities, you don’t want to waste time on leads that are not a good fit, and you need to ensure that all of your prospects have been properly qualified.
When we talk about lead qualification, it’s in the context of a prospecting campaign, which means, it should be at the heart of your sales process.
Take this example where we’re reactivating only the people who are not in our LinkedIn contact lists and we’re trying to approach them to present a solution.
This multi-channel sequence is quite simple. Basically, we start with LinkedIn and then fall back on email if the lead doesn’t accept me on there.
Once the leads have been identified, we want to qualify them as quickly and as accurately as possible This is the most used lead scoring method out there.
This is where we get to the heart of this article: How do you qualify leads in La Growth Machine? And why is so important for your sales results to do it?
Qualify more Leads, effortlessly!
When you get a reply, 90% of the time, the lead is either Interested, Not Interested, Already Equipped, OOO, or the wrong target.
Good news: La Growth Machine let’s you qualify your lead using this exact same list, to better understand what works and what doesn’t.
The prospecting stages in La Growth Machine
Once you’ve launched your campaign, you’ll find all the stages of the conversion tunnel in the Analytics interface:
- The number of leads in the campaign
- The number of leads actually contacted (some will be excluded because they’re already connections of ours for instance)
- Leads who accepted my connection request
- Leads who replied to my message(s)
- Then you’ll see a “Won” and a “Lost” tab
Here we can see that we’ve already qualified some of the leads as either won or lost.
And in the slightly more condensed tunnel, you find the conversion rate from one stage to the next, regardless of whether they’ve been won or lost.
The importance of lead qualification to generate better results
Once you’re done qualifying your leads, you’ll find yourself with far more refined data that will allow you to better understand your campaign and its true effectiveness.
Example 🔍
On social media, we often see people bragging about having a 25% reply rate.
Except that a 25% reply rate doesn’t mean I acquired 25% of the leads I want.
So what really interests me, as B2B salesperson, a Growth Hacker, or whoever is in between, is the “won” section.
And it’s extremely important to qualify these leads because, again, a response rate is not indicative of how much business you’re getting.
Once you understand that, you need to maintain these leads “hot” by nurturing them through;
- Adding them to the newsletter
- Product news emails
- Content that might be interesting for them
- etc.
What are the lead qualifying options?
Before we get into the tutorial part, you need to know the different options you have for qualifying a lead in La Growth Machine!
As you can see here, when one or more leads need to be qualified, there’s a button that prompts us to do so. When you click it, the page reloads with only the leads that have a “To Qualify” lead tag.
When you scroll down, you’ll find all the leads in your campaign and you can filter them by “Lead Tag”:
Here you got different qualification options:
- Leads who haven’t yet been activated
- Those for whom we’ve started the campaign
- Leads whose profiles we’ve enriched
- Leads we’ve contacted
And so on until you get to the “To Qualify” tag. Unfortunately, you can’t do this automatically on LaGrowthMachine… yet. 😉
And so you need to choose how you want to qualify them based on their response (or non-response).
You can qualify them in all sorts of ways:
The “Replied” status:
This part is reserved for those leads that you consider neither won nor lost:
- Those who simply say it’s not the right time for them.
Quick Tip 💡
“It’s not the right time for me” is not a “No”!
It just means it’s not the right timing… For now.
So, in other words, think of it as “Get back to me later.”
- Those who are Out of Office: From whom you received an “absence message” such as: “I am currently out of the office until {{return date}}, I will get back to you after I return.”
New Feature Alert 🎉
We’re thrilled to announce that automatic Out Of Office detection is now available on LaGrowthMachine! 🥳
La Growth Machine will now automatically pause leads who are not available at the moment and add the “Out Of Office” tag.
Even better! LGM automatically detects the return date in the OOO message, and will automatically resume the campaign 3 days after your lead comes back to work!
If a prospect tells you they’ll be back on August 25th, we’ll resume the campaign for them on the 28th. If they say they’ll be back “the end of August“, we’ll restart on Sept. 3rd, etc.
Say goodbye to emails slipping through the cracks during leaves of absences!
Want to learn more? Here’s our Founder and CEO explaining the feature in detail.
The “Won” status:
When the lead answers, we’re usually more interested in the “Won” category. That said, there are different levels of “winning a lead” in B2B:
- Interested: The lead is intrigued and seems interested
- Call booked: We book a call with the lead in order to give more information
- Negotiating: We’re negotiating the details
- Ready to buy: We’ve reached an agreement and they’re ready to buy. However, they haven’t yet signed!
- Converted: The lead signed the deal 💵
The “Lost” status:
Then you have the dreaded “Lost” leads. Similarly to the other statuses, they also go through different levels:
- Not Interested: Obvious response, the lead is simply not interested
- Wrong target: They’re not the right target. If I have a lot of this type of response, my segmentation needs to be reviewed.
- Already equipped: They already have an equivalent/competitor solution in place.
Quick Tip 💡
This represents a great opportunity for when you announce a new and/or unique feature. It will get your leads thinking about switching solutions.
- Cannot contact: The email bounced, I unsubscribed the lead or they did it themselves, etc.
What are the 3 ways to qualify leads in LaGrowthMachine?
We’re finally here! How do you actually qualify your leads on La Growth Machine?
1. From the campaign tab
The first way is on the same campaign results page, now that you got unqualified leads, you have two things to do:
1. Hover the last response you got from the lead: Simply move your mouse to the replied column corresponding to the specific lead:
This way, you can see what kind of response you got from the lead: Positive? Negative? Neutral?
Example 🔍
In the case of the screenshot, the lead is clearly not interested.
They were very short and to the point, a simple “No” was all it took.
2. Qualify the lead: Move your mouse to the right to qualify the lead as you judge from their response:
Once you assign the appropriate tag to the lead, the page will automatically update the list to exclude the lead you just qualified.
Let’s take another example:
Example 🔍
In the screenshot below, the message reads: “Thanks for the suggestion, it’s very interesting, but unfortunately, we don’t have enough bandwidth at the moment to take it up.
However, if you can contact us again for the next session, we’d love to hear from you!”
The lead is clearly interested! However, it’s simply not the right timing for them.
So, I’ll qualify them as “Wrong Timing” for now, and they’re to be reactivated in the next round of outreach!
It’s quite painstaking to do it this way, don’t you think? So, we made it even easier for you!
2. From the Inbox tab
What you can do is click on ‘Reply Now’ to go directly to the LGM Inbox to find all the leads in your campaign.
And in the Inbox, you’ll find these three familiar little buttons:
So now, not only can you see the specific lead you want to reply to, but all the people in the campaign that you need to qualify.
Simply filter the list by the “Replied” status, and from there, you can quickly qualify your leads as you read their answer on the LGM Inbox.
3. From the lead box
Up till now, we’ve shown you two locations where you can qualify your lead, there’s a third available throughout the app:
- Whether in the Inbox tab here, where you can click to change the status of the lead:
- Or in the Leads tab:
In said tab, you choose to search for the specific lead you want to qualify if you know their full name. Or you can use the filters at your disposal:
- Pick which audience you put the lead in and filter it by “Replied” to get the list of people who answered your message(s)
- You can even filter by the “To Qualify” tag.
So as you can see, LGM makes it incredibly accessible for you to qualify leads.
Qualify more leads with less effort!
When you get a reply, 90% of the time, the lead is Interested, Not Interested, Already Equipped, OOO or the wrong target.
Good news: La Growth Machine let’s you qualify your lead using this exact same list, to better understand what works, and don’t.
Final Thoughts
A reply is just the beginning.
It takes a lead a lot of steps in the B2B sales funnel in order to go from Interested to Converted. Probably a whole lot of sales calls as well.
That’s why lead qualification is so important; it helps you better understand where your leads actually stand, so you can focus on the right ones and have a clearer understanding of what results your campaigns are generating.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on our product updates! We’re working really hard on these specific features for now:
- Automatic detection of “Interested” and “Not Interested” messages
- Automatic lead qualification process
In the meantime, let us know if you’ve tried these steps on La Growth Machine yourself!
And if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?
Feel free to sign up or request a product demo, we promise it will change your whole sales view! 😉
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