Lead Validation
What is Lead Validation?
Not all leads are created equal.
Some hold genuine interest in your product or service, while others may be irrelevant or simply a waste of time. This is where lead validation comes in.
Lead validation is the process of assessing the quality of a potential customer lead. It involves verifying the information provided by the lead and determining whether they represent a good fit for your business. Think of it as a quality check to ensure you're focusing your sales efforts on the most promising prospects.
Why is Lead Validation Important?
Lead validation is a crucial step in the sales and marketing funnel. There are several compelling reasons to integrate lead validation into your sales and marketing strategy:
Improved sales efficiency
By focusing on qualified leads, your sales team can spend their valuable time nurturing genuine prospects.
Rather than focusing on quantity and what I like to call 'ego numbers', you can streamline your time and your team's time, instead focusing on real leads that can be converted into paying customers.
Enhanced customer targeting
Accurate lead validation allows you to target your marketing efforts towards a more precise audience, leading to a more engaged customer base.
Once you start validating leads, you will start to notice patterns that highlight which types of people are worth chasing after and which ones are not worth your marketing team spending budget on.
Streamlined sales process
Validated leads enter the sales funnel with accurate information, streamlining the sales process and reducing the time it takes to close deals.
Once you start to convert a lead with specific characteristics, you can start to tailor your sales process to cut out the aspects they're not interested, making your sales teams more effective with their time.
Better data quality
Lead validation helps maintain clean and accurate data within your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, improving overall data integrity.
The lead quality of your marketing list directly impacts your email marketing and sales efforts, as a bunch of low quality leads can significantly hamper the performance of your campaigns.
How to Validate Leads
There are various methods and techniques you can employ to validate your leads:
Contact information verification
Confirm the accuracy of the lead's name, email address, phone number, and company information.
My personal preference is to implement a double-opt in approach on a client's website. Understandably, many clients are reluctant at first as it gives customers or potential leads another opportunity to reject marketing communications, but it ultimately acts as a highly effective lead verification process, leaving you with only your high quality leads that truly want to receive communications.
Lead scoring
Assign points based on pre-defined criteria like demographics, interests, and engagement with your marketing materials. Higher scores indicate a more qualified lead.
For many CRM systems, you can then split campaigns based on these points systems, tailoring content and contact frequency to suit each group, keeping your email domain healthy and away from the spam box.
Website behaviour analysis
Another way to segment leads can be via their website activity. Track website activity of the lead to understand their browsing patterns and interest in specific products or services.
If you notice a pattern between which products get browsed and the quality of lead that comes from that action, you can use that to tailor your email marketing outreach programs accordingly.
Confirmation calls
Lastly, you could schedule calls with qualified leads to further discuss their needs, confirm their interest, and gauge their buying stage.
This is certainly a time-consuming approach, but if you have the ability to do so in an ever-increasing digital world, that little personal touch can go a long way!
Lead Validation Tools and Techniques
Several tools and techniques can assist you in the lead validation process:
CRM software: Many CRM systems offer features to manage and validate lead data, allowing you to quickly and easily separate them into necessary categories for retargeting.
Email verification services: These services verify the validity of email addresses to avoid bounces and ensure deliverability. This is important as high bounce rates and low open rate percentages can lead to your company's email address getting blacklisted, making it almost impossible to email any contacts.
Data enrichment tools: These tools can enrich lead data with additional information gathered from various sources. The more information you have on a lead, the easier it is to categorize them accordingly.
Lead scoring software: Such is the importance of lead validation, that there is specific software can automate lead scoring based on pre-defined criteria. This let's you categorize leads based on specific criteria, without any manual input.