As a business owner, you know how crucial marketing leads are for your efforts. However, getting them is only half the battle–successfully managing leads in marketing is where your skills and research really become necessary.
That’s why we’re here to help. Read on to learn how to generate, classify, and convert your marketing leads into customers for life.
Spoiler alert! We already have a solution to your needs! Speed to lead is critical in today’s fast-paced market, and Podium offers an unparalleled advantage by ensuring businesses engage with leads within a couple of minutes—guaranteed. Podium’s conversational AI is outcome-driven – it doesn’t just respond to inbound leads it guides conversations toward a specific goal, such as a sale or booking. Unlike other AI systems that focus on providing correct responses, Podium aims to drive specific customer actions to grow your business. Podium’s AI Employee guarantees your business engages with leads within a couple of minutes; during peak hours, off hours, and every hour in between.
Transform your business with Podium’s AI Employee. Get a Demo Today.
What Are Leads in Marketing?
A marketing lead refers to a potential customer or prospect who has shown interest in your product or service. No matter your industry, generating and managing leads is a critical part of the sales and marketing process.
Of course, not all leads are equal. Here are a few types of leads and how they fit into each stage of your marketing strategy:
- Cold Leads: These are individuals or businesses who have shown little to no prior interest in your company’s products or services. Cold leads are at the beginning of the sales funnel and may need more awareness and information to move them toward a purchasing decision.
- Warm Leads: Warm leads have shown some interest or engagement with your company’s offerings but may not be ready to make a purchase immediately. They are typically further along in the sales funnel compared to cold leads but may still require additional nurturing and information before converting into customers.
- BOF (Bottom of the Funnel): “Bottom of the funnel” refers to leads that are near the end of the buying process and are close to making a purchase decision. BOF leads are often considered “hot leads” because they have shown a high level of interest or engaged with specific product details. They just need a final push or incentive to convert.
- TOF (Top of the Funnel): “Top of the funnel” refers to the early stages of the customer journey. Leads at the TOF stage are typically in the awareness phase, where they are introduced to your brand or product for the first time. (Also, they may not be actively looking to make a purchase yet.)
Understanding where leads are in your funnel helps you tailor your marketing and sales strategies to effectively nurture and guide them through the decision-making process.
Marketing Qualified Leads vs. Sales Qualified Leads
Now that we’ve talked about types, what’s the difference between MQLs and SQLs? We’re glad you asked. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are two distinct stages in the lead qualification process that represent different levels of engagement and readiness to make a purchase. Here are a few key differences to distinguish them from one another:
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) | Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) |
| Definition: MQLs are leads that have been identified by your marketing team as having a higher likelihood of becoming customers based on their engagement with your marketing efforts. | Definition: SQLs are leads that have been vetted and deemed ready for direct sales engagement. These leads have demonstrated a higher level of interest and are considered more likely to make a purchase. |
| Criteria: These are leads who’ve taken actions such as downloading a whitepaper, attending a webinar, or repeatedly engaging with marketing content. | Criteria: The criteria for classifying a lead as an SQL often involve specific behaviors that indicate a readiness to buy such as requesting a product demo or pricing information or showing a clear intent to purchase. |
| Focus: MQLs are in the early to middle stages of your sales funnel. Your marketing team aims to nurture and educate these leads further before passing them on to your sales team for the final pitch. | Focus: SQLs are in the later stages of the sales funnel. Your sales team takes over at this point, working to understand the lead’s specific needs, address any concerns, and guide them through the final steps of the purchasing process. |
Understanding the difference between leads, prospects, and customers is also helpful in ensuring you send the right communications at the right times.
- Leads are potential customers who have shown initial interest in you (or your communications).
- Prospects are leads that have progressed further in the sales process and are more likely to convert.
- Customers are individuals or businesses who have completed a purchase and entered into a transactional relationship with you. (Congrats!)
Leads Qualification and Classification
Of course, it’s important to remember that generating a lead doesn’t equal closing a deal. The process of qualifying leads involves assessing and categorizing potential customers based on their likelihood to make a purchase. This objective includes extensive collection and analysis of customer data and hitting the right moves at the right times: namely, when the iron is hot.
Part of classifying includes numerical scoring. Lead scoring involves assigning numerical values to leads based on predefined criteria. Criteria for categorizing leads can include actions like downloading a whitepaper, visiting specific product pages, or filling out a contact form. As engagement of a particular lead increases, and the lead hits different benchmarks, they move forward through different stages of nurturing and ultimately reach conversion.
Pro Tip: World-class CRMs, such as Podium’s, can help you collect and analyze data to strike the right chord with your lead at every stage of the funnel.
3 Ways to Generate More Leads
Ready to generate more high-quality leads? There are thousands of inbound and outbound strategies to do so–email marketing, content marketing, referrals, SEO optimization, LinkedIn outreach, and more. But here are a few of our favorite, hand-picked lead-generation strategies that have proven most successful across the board.
1. Gather customer reviews.
You’ve probably heard it a million times, but we’ll say it again: There’s nothing like social proof. Did you know that reviews influence a whopping 88% of consumers in discovering a local business? And most consumers have read a review within the last week. Gathering and maintaining customer reviews online is a massive lead-generating goldmine. And with Podium’s AI Response Generator, you can immediately generate a response to every review, making sure no one slips through the cracks.
2. Improve engagement speed.
Want to see every single conversation you have with every lead and customer in one place? With Podium Inbox, you harness the power of multichannel messaging. Every text, review, chat, Facebook message, Google message, phone call, social media message, and more come into a single thread where you can respond, significantly improving your engagement speed. And with the right automation tools, you can boost your conversion rate by increasing how quickly you send a follow-up.
3. Add Webchat to your site.
Want to generate up to 11x more inbound leads from your website? Want to qualify them and make engagement go through the roof? Introducing: Webchat, the king of inbound marketing. This text-based solution vets your leads, collecting valuable contact information directly from your landing page and connecting you to your leads through text. This way, the conversation can move from desktop to mobile and back again.
Get Started
Having the right tools at your disposal is a major part of generating leads, empowering every prospective customer, and achieving success. And we’ve engineered one specifically for lead generation that will help you drive your numbers through the roof.
Podium’s new LeadDrive tool allows you to manage every single lead, no matter the source, from one place, ensuring no opportunity slips through the crack. Every single inquiry, from CarGurus, Angie’s, and Thumbtack to your own website, funnels into the same inbox. This empowers you to quickly and automatically engage–responding to every inquiry, beating the competition, and converting more prospects into customers who come back for more.
Don’t let your competition beat you to new leads. Try Podium’s AI Employee today.
