4 Benefits for Outsourcing Lead Nurturing & Qualification
Discover the numerous benefits of outsourcing your lead nurturing and qualification process, helping you to optimise your sales potential with minimal hassle.
1. Free up your sales team to focus on selling
When it comes to managing business development and sales pipelines, many companies opt to keep everything in-house, from lead generation to lead qualification, customer nurturing and sales.
However, there’s no reason why it all has to be done in-house. There are various elements of sales pipeline management, particularly lead qualification and nurturing that can be effectively managed by a third party.
In the vast majority of cases, we believe that the lower part of the sales cycle sits best with the in-house sales team. These final stages; responding to request for quotes (RFQs), preparing proposals and costs, and then closing the sale, require industry specialists who have an in-depth understanding of the customer’s issues and challenges as well as the products and services on offer.
Sales is a numbers game, but that doesn’t mean that every lead generated represents an equal opportunity to sell - far from it. Statistics show that sales leaders think only half the prospects they speak with are a good fit for the product or service they’re selling.
This means that salespeople often spend a large portion of their time sorting through unqualified leads to establish the ones with revenue potential - wasting valuable time that could be spent selling.
And that sorting and qualifying process is less reliant on technical knowledge, relying more on communication skills, tenacity and focus. Prospects earlier in their sales journey are often harder to reach and the level of tenacity needed to start an engaged dialogue is often unrealistic for a sales manager with targets to reach this month.
This is where adding a qualification step to the sales cycle can be really effective. And it is neither complicated nor expensive to outsource. The implementation of an outsourced lead qualification service would mean that only qualified leads go to sales, freeing them up to focus purely on qualified prospects with clear signs of interest.
As well as identifying those who meet the required sales lead criteria and can be passed to sales, the qualification process can identify those prospects who are early in their journey, and who are viable prospects but who are not yet ready to buy. These can be treated as a subsidiary pipeline that would benefit from nurturing so that, when they are ready to buy, there is already a strong relationship and a propensity to buy your product. This step too can be outsourced with ease.
2. More resource flexibility
Saving time and money aren’t the only advantages though.
Whether you’re looking to expand your business, or you need a flexible workforce to handle the seasonal peaks and troughs of your marketing calendar, outsourcing could be the solution.
With the option to dial resources up or down to suit your needs at any given time, outsourcing lead qualification and nurturing offers exceptional flexibility and avoids the challenges and restrictions often associated with increasing headcount.
Working with an outsourced partner also affords you the flexibility to trial new marketing and sales campaigns, without having to commit to employing permanent staff. Whatever the source of marketing qualified leads – webinar delegates, trade show booth scans or those who have downloaded gated content - this level of flexibility can be the key to a more efficient and effective sales lead qualification process.
3. Opening global doors
Not all organisations that sell globally have a sales team with multilingual capability, and outsourcing to the right lead qualification service can increase engagement and lead numbers.
Whilst it may be true that English is the international language of business, and that many clients can speak English, they are inevitably more relaxed and more receptive to communications in their native language.
If a prospect has seen your products and decided they want to buy, then, yes, they will almost certainly be willing to take a call in English or to negotiate with an English sales manager.
But what about someone who is just at the beginning of their sales journey? Or someone who is mildly dissatisfied with the equipment they are currently using? How about those who are not completely happy with their current supplier but who have not yet decided to actively seek alternate suppliers? They will respond much more favourably if they are contacted, and courted, in their native language. So, in the same way that many organisations now have multiple language versions of their website, ideally, they should have multilingual lead qualification and nurturing.
It’s also worth noting that while business leaders in other countries do often speak great English, it is often the case that their switchboard operators, automated answering systems, receptionists, assistants and administrators very often don’t. And so by using a lead qualification service with a multilingual capability, you vastly increase the number of opportunities to really engage early in the sales cycle and thus the number of qualified leads
4. Deliver better return on investment (ROI)
By employing a professional lead qualification and nurturing service, you can often enjoy a better return on the investment you’ve made in lead generation.
Trained to recognise specific customer behaviours, experienced lead qualification specialists have the right skillset to efficiently filter through prospective leads.
Using tried-and-tested qualification frameworks, like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline), they can carry out an efficient triage process to ensure only fully qualified leads are passed over to sales.
The result is a consistent source of high-quality leads that are genuinely interested in your products or services, which typically means better conversion rates.
Outsourcing lead nurturing and qualification has many advantages for boosting the effectiveness of your sales cycle. If you’d like to know more about how it can work for your business, we’re here to help.
Offering a broad selection of lead qualification and customer nurturing services in 20 languages, TCB provides solutions that improve ROI and deliver business impact. Get in touch today to tell us more about your project needs.