What’s the Best Way to Pre-Qualify Leads Before a Sales Call?
We’ve all experienced the frustration of reaching out to a lead, spending time on a sales call, putting together a proposal, and then waiting patiently for a response…
Only to get ghosted, or turned down because your product or service isn’t what they’re looking for.
Why is wasting time on sales calls such a common problem for businesses?
Often, it’s because they’re talking to low-quality leads
The key to closing more deals is to ensure leads are ready to buy…before they even get on a call.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the most effective ways to pre-qualify leads before a sales conversation so you can maximize your time AND conversions – and how ScoreApp can help you do it all.
Why pre-qualifying leads before a sales call matters
Pre-qualifying leads brings a range of benefits to your business:
Reduces time wasted on unqualified leads
A diary full of sales calls can seem like a good thing. But if those leads aren’t converting, the reality is you have a diary packed with hours of wasted time.
When a lead isn’t the right fit, they either won’t buy from you or will be a difficult client when they do.
It’s not just the time on the sales call you lose. Research shows that it takes around 23 minutes to get your concentration back after an interruption.
Add all of this up, and it’s clear that this time is much better spent talking to high-quality leads who have given you clear signals that they are ready to buy.
Improves sales conversion rates
The average sales call conversion rate is lower than you think.
Across B2C industries, it can be as little as 1-3%. For B2B businesses, it’s slightly better – but still only 2-5%.
Research shows that pre-qualifying your leads can increase this conversion rate to 22.5%.
Pre-qualifying your leads before your sales calls massively improves lead quality: sometimes, by up to 200%.
When your sales team speaks to prospects who are actually interested in your products or services, they will:
- Close more people on calls
- Shorten your sales cycle
- Gain valuable insights that can improve your sales and marketing strategies.
As a result, your conversion rate and marketing ROI will increase!
Creates a better customer experience
Pre-qualifying your calls doesn’t just benefit you: it’s better for your leads, too.
The only way to effectively pre-qualify your leads is to gain insights about them:
- Who they are
- What they want/need
- And how you can help.
Once you have this information, you can personalize the sales call experience, to make it valuable and relevant to each person you speak to. Equipping your sales team with personal insights about each prospect helps them to build immediate rapport and trust.
One of the best ways to improve customer experience is to collect these insights through a ScoreApp quiz!
Best ways to pre-qualify leads before a sales call
Here’s how:
1. Use a pre-call assessment quiz
One of the easiest ways to pre-qualify leads before a sales call… is to let your leads qualify themselves!
A short pre-call quiz or assessment helps you gather essential pre-qualification information and identify lead quality in a fun and interactive way.
With a few strategic pre-qualifying questions, your leads will voluntarily tell you a lot about themselves.
These insights are invaluable. You can use them to identify who is ready for a sales call and to tailor your marketing, sales process, and customer experience to each person’s requirements.
What to ask: Keep your pre-qualifying questions hyper-targeted – you don’t want to put people off.
Pre-qualifying questions should be around 10% of your total quiz.
These questions need to cover:
- Pain points
- Goals
- Budget
- Timeline
For example, if you run a financial services business, you could set up a Profit Booster Scorecard and ask the following questions:
- Pain points: “What are the biggest financial challenges for your business?”
- Goals: “In which areas would you like to reduce your business expenses?”
- Budget: “What is your current budget for working with a financial advisor?”
- Timeline: “Are you interested in further support to optimize your business finances?”
How ScoreApp helps: ScoreApp automatically scores and segments leads based on their quiz responses, so only the most relevant leads progress to a call.
Our in-depth analytics feature allows you to track quiz responses down to the most granular detail, including category scores, individual answers, and time spent on each question.
You can then use this information to send personalized outreach messages to your highest-potential leads, inviting them onto a sales call.
Going back to our financial services business example, your outreach message could look something like this:
Hey [FIRST NAME]
Thanks for completing the Profit Booster Quiz. I noticed you scored highly in the Operational Expenses section, but your low score in Marketing indicates that this is an area where you could reduce costs and increase your profit.
I would love to give you some personalized advice. Would you have time to jump on a call this week?
Thanks,
[FIRST NAME]
That’s much more likely to get a positive response than a generic copy-and-paste email, isn’t it?
2. Create a strategic booking form
Instead of an open booking system – where anyone can book a call with you, regardless of their intent to buy – set up a structured booking form that helps you filter leads.
This will help you spend far less time on calls with people who are looking for free advice, shopping around for the lowest price, or simply don’t align with your values.
What to ask: Within your sales call booking form, include mandatory questions around:
- Business size
- Needs
- Budget
- Urgency (when they would like to get started)
- How they heard about you
This information will help you build a picture of WHY someone is booking a call with you.
Plus, anyone who isn’t genuinely interested will drop off before they even complete the form!
How ScoreApp helps: With ScoreApp, you can create custom booking forms that qualify leads before they book a call.
Alongside those pre-qualifying questions, you can even set up your quiz to offer different lengths of calls to different prospects, based on their buying intent.
How?
With our new 1-2-1 strategy session quiz template!
This template has been designed to help service providers waste less time on unqualified sales calls.
Through your quiz questions, you can identify the quality of every lead, and allocate them a specific strategy call length as a result.
Regardless of call length, every lead receives a personalized Scorecard after completing the quiz.
This will include a breakdown of what they are doing well and where improvements can be made. But you can also go one step further and send a personalized follow-up message telling them about the profile they match, how long their call will be, and what they need to do to prepare.
This way, every lead jumps on a call with a brilliant first impression of your business – and you have collected incredible insights that can steer the conversation.
3. Offer a self-serve lead magnet first
Not everyone will be ready to buy immediately. In fact, it can take eight touchpoints with your business to create a qualified lead.
Your goal needs to be offering every lead the right next step.
For some, this is jumping straight into a conversation with a member of your team.
Others might have misconceptions or apprehensions holding them back, so they will need more information about your products or services before they are ready to buy.
Luckily, you can overcome objections and build trust through strategic content marketing.
Solution: Create a self-serve lead magnet – such as a free guide, video training, or profile quiz – to analyze buying intent and provide more value to every lead.
This is a form of assignment selling – when you give a lead a ‘task’ to complete before they jump on a call, so you can understand how interested they are in your products or services.
Completing this task or engaging with your content indicates interest in your product or service. As a result, you can filter out low-intent leads before they ever speak to your sales team.
How ScoreApp helps: With ScoreApp, businesses can create interactive sales enablement content to nurture and qualify leads before inviting them to a call.
For example, if you are a business coach, you could send a video mini-course that covers increasing profit, attracting high-quality leads, and becoming an industry thought leader.
(We have a business coach mini-course template that can help!)
A video mini course provides an engaging, yet bite-sized way to get to know you and your business.
Offering this kind of value for free is rare, so you establish yourself as a trustworthy expert at scale, without spending time jumping on sales call after sales call.
Use email sequences to further qualify leads
By now, you’ve identified the people ready to buy immediately and those who likely never will.
Don’t forget the people who have sent you positive signals… but aren’t ready to speak to your sales team YET.
How do you keep the latter group engaged? Well, setting up segmented email marketing journeys can improve your open rate by 30% and your click-through rate by 50%.
And thanks to the work you’ve done so far, you are sitting on a goldmine of information to set up personalized email marketing sequences that build trust in your business, knowledge in your offering, and belief that you are the solution your leads have been looking for.
What to send: Set up email drip campaigns that filter out unqualified prospects (or people who aren’t ready to buy yet) before they reach your sales team.
You can set up different email marketing journeys for different people based on where they are in the customer journey, and send them useful content based on their needs.
The kind of content you feature in these email marketing journeys could include:
- Educational blog and video content
- Customer case studies
- Whitepapers
- Testimonials
Then, at the end of this nurturing sequence, you can offer a final CTA for those ready to book a call.
How ScoreApp helps: One of ScoreApp’s key features is that you can automate personalized email sequences based on quiz responses and lead scores.
Our quiz marketing software directly integrates with all major email marketing platforms and CRMs, including Mailchimp, Hubspot, and ActiveCampaign.
You can also connect your quiz to over 3000 other marketing tools using Zapier.
How ScoreApp helps businesses pre-qualify leads for sales calls
- Automates lead scoring: Set your own lead criteria so you can see at a glance who is more likely to buy, and ensure only the best leads can book a call.
- Captures key data points: Collect and analyze in-depth information about your leads to personalize every sales conversation.
- Nurtures colder leads with interactive content: Create tailored email marketing journeys full of valuable content, so you can build strong relationships with your prospects before they speak to sales.
Stop wasting time on unqualified calls and pre-qualify leads with ScoreApp
Filtering leads to identify top prospects BEFORE you speak to them is a win-win for your business and prospective customers.
When you effectively pre-qualify your leads, you improve the efficiency of your sales team, increase your conversion rate, and create a seamless customer experience.
Quizzes, booking forms, lead magnets, and email marketing all provide you with a valuable and engaging way to do it.
Your leads won’t even know they’re being screened!
With ScoreApp, pre-qualifying leads couldn’t be easier.
You can set up interactive quiz lead magnets in minutes using our ready-to-use templates and AI quiz-building software, with strategic questions to identify your highest-quality leads.
From here, your leads are scored and segmented automatically, ready to nurture with personalized email sequences and content to encourage more conversions.
By the time your high-potential prospects speak to your sales team, they won’t be able to resist becoming your next customer!
Try ScoreApp for free to pre-qualify leads before your next sales call.
