July 19, 2024 - 7 min read

Qualify your leads automatically with SMS OTP

Introduction

Lead qualification is the technique that enables a company to focus on the right prospects to develop its business. It's an essential step in your marketing strategy.

In the digital age, when competition is fierce and consumers are increasingly solicited, it's essential to implement effective methods to capture the attention of your target audience.

While the lead generation process is the key to business success, it's not enough to simply arouse the interest of your prospects! You need to qualify them , then convert them to achieve your goal: selling your products and/or services.

smsmode^© tells you everything you need to know about lead qualification unique technique for automatically qualifying leads from a form. 💡

Definitions

What is a lead?

A "lead" (or prospect) is a term commonly used in marketing and sales to designate any entity (natural or legal person) that has expressed an interest in a company's products or services. In other words, a lead is someone who could potentially become a customer.

Leads can be classified into different categories according to their level of interest in your product/service and their proximity to the purchase decision:

Cold lead: the prospect has shown initial interest, but has not yet interacted much with the company.
Hot lead: the prospect has shown significant interest and is more likely to become a customer than the cold lead.
Qualified lead: the prospect has been evaluated and deemed ready for a direct sales approach.

What is lead qualification?

Lead qualification is the process of determining which contacts are most likely to be converted into customers. This is a crucial step, enabling your sales and marketing teams to focus their efforts on the most promising prospects for your business.

This allows you to optimize resources and increase your conversion rate.

With a certain budget, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and marketing automation solutions often play a key role in the process of qualifying your prospects, by automating data collection, scoring and nurturing actions. They ensure more efficient and systematic management of the people you need to convert.

Why do I need to qualify my prospects?

According to Hubspot's "State of marketing report 2024"*, 61% of marketing experts see lead generation as their biggest challenge.

Lead qualification will enable you and your team to determine which group of contacts is the most promising and will lead straight to sales. It will also enable you to set up more precise and effective communication based on their expectations and needs.

Above all, qualifying your prospects enables you to manage the use of your resources, both in terms of time and money. You'll be able to weed out uninterested leads more quickly, passing on the most mature contacts to your sales force and focusing more attention on the most promising opportunities. In short, you gain in performance and increase your sales.

Pre-qualification strategies

Preliminary work: defining the buyer persona

Before you start qualifying or generating leads, you need to define your buyer personas. The buyer persona is the profile of the ideal buyer for your solution, product or service.

Have you ever asked yourself, "Who is my ideal customer?", "What do they want from my/our product/service?" Then you've already done the work. The buyer persona is the person who will buy your products or services. He's your target.

Define two or three target personas. Their characteristics and behaviors will determine the expectations they have of your products/services. This will enable you to effectively qualify and nurture your leads, turning them into ambassadors.

This work is essential, since it's at the very heart of your marketing strategy. Once you know exactly who you're going to address, it's time to generate your first leads.

Lead generation before qualification

Leads can be generated by various means, such as landing pages and online forms. When someone fills in a form on your website to download a white paper, for example, or subscribes to your newsletter, or requests further information on a particular product or service, you're collecting data (and effective CTAs will be your best allies). Events such as participation in trade shows, webinars or other events where participants leave their contact details can complete your harvest. As can online advertising, which involves generating clicks on paid ads via search engines (Google Ads) or social networks on which you can sponsor certain content (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter). Or SEO: visits to your website from natural search results.

Of course, the only limit is your imagination. Be creative!

Lead qualification: the theory

The notion of the qualified lead was theorized as early as the 1960s by a B-to-B sales technique known as the BANT method. This lead qualification technique is used to evaluate the lead's potential and priority.

BANT is an acronym for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. The prospect is evaluated on these 4 aspects to determine whether a buying decision is possible.

Budget : Does the prospect have the financial resources to buy your product or service? How much is the prospect willing to invest? Is their budget in line with your price?

Authority : Does the person (lead) with whom you're negotiating have decision-making power? Or should other company players take part in the negotiation?

Need : Does your product or service meet the prospect's specific need? Does it solve an important problem for the prospect, to the point of justifying the purchase?

Timeline : What's the timeframe for the buying decision? Knowing when the prospect plans to make a decision helps you plan your sales process and prioritize your efforts.

If your contact meets these 4 criteria, then he or she qualifies as a genuine potential customer. With the BANT method, salespeople can better target their efforts, save time and maximize the chances of closing sales.

Lead qualification in practice

SMS OTP: automatic and ultra-efficient

Lead qualification and the use of SMS OTP (One-Time Password) are basically two separate concepts, but can be used together to automatically qualify a lead and improve the effectiveness of marketing and sales campaigns.

The OTP is a one-time password sent by SMS to verify a user's identity.

It is widely used to strengthen your security for high-risk operations such as transactions, connections or verifications.

The password sent to the user's cell phone is entered to confirm identity. This adds an extra layer of control, particularly useful for preventing fraud and securing personal data. What's more, SMS OTP is universal. Who doesn't own a cell phone?

Integrate Lead Qualification by SMS OTP into your marketing strategy

Lead validation :

The SMS OTP can be used to verify the authenticity of leads at the time of registration or following a request for information form. This step enables you to ensure that the contact details provided are valid and that your leads are genuine. This drastically reduces the risk of falsification (potentially false leads or leads automated by bots).

Lead engagement:

Confirm your leads' registrations when they interact with your content (downloads, newsletter subscriptions, etc.) Sending a SMS OTP can be automated to confirm the lead's action. Once again, this procedure increases the commitment and reliability of the data collected. In fact, if a prospect agrees to give you their telephone number, they're not just curious - they're ready to take action.

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Once the lead number is in your pocket, you can always use SMS to send out important updates or special offers, with the assurance that the messages will reach the leads directly.

GOING FURTHER

Examples of SMS notification

Discover the many applications of SMS in notification and get inspired right from your first messages.

Effective post lead qualification strategies :

Lead nurturing

Your leads are qualified, it's time to bring them to maturity. According to Hubspot's annual report*, 83% of prospects/customers surveyed are in favor of sharing their data in order to access a personalized experience.

Now's the time to implement a nurturing strategy to help your leads mature. Lead nurturing consists of nurturing and engaging your prospects throughout their journey, so as to gradually guide them towards a decision to buy your product or service.

What's more, you now have your prospects' phone numbers. Being able to contact prospects/customers via SMS or WhatsApp messaging gives you a strategic advantage. Automated marketing campaigns via SMS can increase your conversions by 21%! (Hubspot - State of Marketing Report).

The use of SMS is therefore not limited to SMS OTP, but can be extended to include SMS marketingwhich increases your chances of delivering the right message at the right time!

GOING FURTHER

Examples of SMS marketing

Discover the templates that convert your leads into customers.

Customize your prospecting to your personas

Offer your prospects personalized content tailored to their needs. Tailor your message to different media (e-mail, phone calls) to highlight your expertise. Your content, blogs, articles and white papers, which answer your leads' most frequently asked questions and provide valuable information, can help bring about that long-awaited conversion!

This content can be shared via automated e-mail or SMS workflows, triggered by a specific action on the part of your prospect/lead, or directly by your sales team during the closing.

Lead scoring

A feature offered by certain CRM or marketing automation tools, lead scoring enables you to assign points to your contacts based on their interactions with your company. Lead scoring will enable your sales teams to focus their efforts on high-scoring leads, as these are the ones closest to converting and should be given priority by your teams.

Campaigns to re-engage dormant leads

Some leads are inactive? To encourage them to come back to you, don't hesitate to program re-engagement campaigns. Push special offers or free trials to attract the attention of less engaged prospects.

Analyze and adjust your strategies

Keep in mind that it's regular analysis of the performance of your nurturing campaigns that will enable you to identify what's working well, and what still needs to be improved. Adjust your strategies according to the data and feedback you gather, to maximize the effectiveness of your nurturing efforts.

Conclusion

The success of your business depends on the implementation of a number of methods, which must be skilfully coordinated to achieve your objectives.

By integrating qualification via SMS OTP with your existing levers (forms, landing pages, referencing...), your marketing/sales strategy is enriched and the quality of your leads is significantly improved. Not only can you verify the authenticity of leads in real time, but you can also reinforce data security and facilitate the engagement of potential customers. By remaining attentive to the needs and behaviors of your leads, you can move them forward in their purchasing journey and increase their chances of becoming loyal customers or even brand ambassadors.

* Source :

Hubspot State of Marketing 2024.

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