Successfully Qualify Leads and Turn them into Customers
Marketers know that sales conversions are dependent on how well the marketing and sales teams work together to nurture leads throughout the buyer’s journey. From the moment a website visitor completes a web form, to the time they participate in a sales demo, to the time they become a new customer, that lead needs to be nurtured and refined throughout every step of the buyer’s journey.
As we all know, leads don’t turn into customers instantly (bummer!). You have to warm up a lead first, and methodically build a relationship with them before they will be ready to purchase. One way to learn more about your leads is to conduct a lead follow-up survey. A lead follow-up survey is a great way to better qualify your new leads and learn more about the information they want to receive throughout their individualized buyer’s journey. If done properly, lead follow-up surveys can prove to be a very valuable B2B sales tool. Here’s how you can include a lead follow-up survey in your everyday business practices.
Know your participants
Understanding the behavior of your lead survey participants is essential to creating a successful survey.
Key things to keep in mind:
- Will this lead respond to your survey?
- When does this person typically open emails? Do they use email?
- How much time does this person have to respond to a survey?
Depending on the behavior of your leads, they may not have time to sit through a long survey. If you insist on a longer survey, highlight only some questions as mandatory and the rest optional. This will help to limit survey completion time.
Design the survey
Design your survey to maximize feedback. First, and most important, you’ll want to identify how you intend to use the results of your survey. For marketing and sales, your ultimate goal is likely to generate high-quality leads and to share data with others in your organization that may benefit from such useful information — lead characteristics and demographics, purchasing power, what their challenges are, how they see their industry changing, and what changes they would like to see take place in the future.
To qualify leads, design survey questions directed at understanding their pain points, and their capability and need to act upon those pain points. This feedback will help you match leads with their ideal customer profile, identify the information they need, and help nurture them through the buyer’s journey.
Plan and administer the survey
- Build your list of leads. This can easily be generated from your CRM system or other customer information management system. It’s most valuable for leads at the top of your funnel to complete the survey. This way you can move and filter qualified and unqualified leads through your pipeline.
- As with typical surveys, you’d want to set a target response rate by selecting a desired number of completed responses. However, a lead follow-up survey will be administered sporadically, whenever a visitor becomes a lead.
- Review the draft of survey questions. Send the draft survey to others in your organization for input. It’s helpful for others to look over the survey. They can provide helpful feedback into question structure and answer options.
- Choose a medium for distributing your survey. For most B2B organizations, your leads will come through your website, so an online survey sent via email will likely be the most useful medium.
- Collect and track responses.
- Nurture your leads through several touch-points. Aim for three touch points.
- Invitation to participate.
- Reminder to complete survey.
- Second reminder and last opportunity to participate before closing the survey.
Follow-up and nurture your leads
Completed lead follow-up surveys will yield better qualified leads. This is just the beginning of the buyer’s journey. It’s now your job to nurture those leads. Provide them with useful information, answer their questions, share case studies, and successfully lead them through the buyer’s journey. Lead follow-up surveys will provide you with information you need to reach out in a targeted manner.
