Lead qualification is an essential component to managing any business, regardless of size. Ultimately, your goal is to convert as many prospective leads into actual sales as possible and increase your revenue in the process. But what happens if you encounter one or a few bad leads along the way? Unfortunately, bad leads in business are pretty much a fact of life.
From duplicates to invalid or incomplete listings, bad leads can have a detrimental impact on your business for several reasons. Here, we outline five of the most damaging effects that bad leads can have on your business and why you should try to eliminate them from your database.
Bad Leads Are a Waste of Your Employees’ Time
Your employees’ time is extremely valuable, so you don’t want them wasting time toiling away and trying to fruitlessly chase impossible or unlikely leads. In fact, the longer employees spend trying to onboard certain seemingly elusive leads, the less likely you are to convert that lead.
Understandably, this can be incredibly frustrating for your employees who are working very hard to meet and even exceed their sales goals. The prospect of potentially wasting their time on a lead is devastating. Oftentimes, these leads have no intention of making a purchase and will spend long periods of time interacting with your employees or sales team via phone, email, live chat, or in person just to ask them inane questions.
This leads to the next point.
Bad Leads Diminish Employee Morale
Constantly hearing “no”, getting a lack of response from customers, or failing to keep them engaged on a regular basis can diminish overall employee morale at your organization. Dedicated employees work hard and spend a lot of time completing projects, perfecting sales pitches, and setting up phone or in person meetings with clients to try to make a sale.
These tasks take a great deal of planning and effort. When employees are constantly being shot down left, right, and center because they’re dealing with a plethora of unqualified leads, this can weaken their confidence and make it impossible for them to catch a break. This total lack of confidence in their skills can transfer over to interactions with qualified leads as well.
Proper lead qualification ensures that only the most qualified and ready-to-buy leads or prospective customers will be put in contact with your sales team, giving them the leg up and vote of confidence they need to close more sales and increase your overall revenue. Essentially, lead qualification is a pre-screening process for potential clients or customers that weeds out the unlikeliest candidates for you.
Without access to highly qualified leads from the get-go, your employees are less likely to meet their sales targets. Even the most experienced and successful salespeople can stand to benefit from lead qualification because it reduces the amount of grunt work they have to do to reach out to customers.
Bad Leads Reduce Employee Productivity
Employees will inevitably end up spending an excessive amount of time pursuing dead or uninterested leads, which reduces their productivity and progress level significantly. This is time they could be devoting to actually making sales and pursuing more worthwhile leads that are actually likely to convert into real clients.
The other problem associated with this is that constantly pursuing disinterested leads is exhausting and can result in massive employee burnout. Employees are desperately grasping at straws trying to close a sale that simply isn’t going to happen and they expend a great deal of time and energy when it could be put to much better use.
Bad Leads Increase Your Marketing Budget
Wasting time pursuing bad leads that aren’t going to convert to customers can inadvertently drive up your marketing budget simply because you’re not focusing enough or at all on leads that are actually viable. Marketers spend the bulk of their time, money, and resources collecting important data about potential leads. If that data is incomplete, invalid, or simply wrong then it’s completely useless to your sales team.
And this can be incredibly frustrating for your sales team who are working hard to meet their targets and increase your bottom line. Customer acquisition and pursuing uncertain leads actually costs more money than cultivating and strengthening existing customer relationships. Chasing unqualified leads is also bad for employee morale and can increase your turnaround rate.
Qualifying leads and providing your employees with prospects that have a greater likelihood of converting increases their chances of making more sales, which in turn boosts morale, motivation, and work ethic as well.
Bad Leads Devalue Your Brand Reputation
A lack of lead qualification can exponentially devalue your brand reputation on a large scale. Oftentimes, customers are too polite to tell salespeople outright that they’re not interested in a certain product or service and will sometimes play a game of conversational cat and mouse. Salespeople can also have the tendency to be a little too pushy when they’re desperate for a sale.
This is problematic because you’re almost never going to get a straight answer out of those customers. Eventually, this game of cat and mouse gets frustrating for your employees and their leads. Employees get frustrated because they’re working very hard for very little payback and leads get irritated because they don’t want to be coerced into a sale.
A good salesperson knows when it’s time to throw in the towel and call it a day if a lead is showing blatant signs that they’re truly not interested. If by the second or third interaction, they still haven’t given you a straight answer and signed on the dotted line, then it’s time to call it quits and just let go of that lead altogether.
3C Contact Services is one of the leading lead qualification and customer service companies in Canada. We’ve helped countless businesses successfully build their brands, cultivate strong customer relationships, and provide excellent customer service. Contact us today to learn more.
