How to Ensure You’re Qualifying Outsourced Leads the Best Way

In any sales and marketing endeavor, simply adding more prospects to the sales funnel isn’t enough. It’s all too easy to make the mistake of simply adding more prospects to the pipeline without first making sure that they’re a good fit for the company’s products or services.

Medical sales marketing is not immune to this problem. And, it can go double for outsourced sales leads! This is one of the reasons why it’s important to thoroughly vet a contract sales organization (CSO) before hiring them.

What can companies in the medical and pharmaceutical sales industry do to qualify sales leads? How do you define prospects for medical sales efforts to ensure that you’re getting good leads?

What Is a Prospect for Medical Sales?

A prospect for medical sales is someone who has opted into receiving communications from the medical/pharmaceutical organization and has shown an interest in their products or services. The key here is that the prospect needs to opt in for further communications and, ideally, be willing to do business with the organization.

One of the challenges with outsourced sales leads, in particular, is that they aren’t always properly qualified. This means that the medical/pharmaceutical organization often needs to qualify accounts they receive from outsourced sales and lead generation efforts.

Qualifying Questions for Sales Leads

One of the keys to making sure that sales leads are qualified is asking the right qualifying questions of prospects in your company’s sales process. Asking leads from outsourced sales teams qualifying questions gives you the basic information you need to sort them into specific prospect qualification tiers (like marketing qualified, sales qualified, or your own custom tiers). Sorting leads using this information lets your sales team focus their efforts on the most valuable leads who are the most likely to close—optimizing your sales ROI.

There are many questions that you can ask outsourced sales leads. While some of the specific questions you use should vary depending on what you’re specifically looking for in a sales prospect, some basic things you might ask include:

• Questions about the Prospect’s Organization. Some qualifying questions include what kind of business the prospect is part of, how big their organization is, and possibly who the prospect reports to.
• Questions about the Prospect. What is the prospect’s job role? What is their contact information? What is it about your products and/or services that attracted them to your company? What challenges are they facing? This information helps you establish the prospect’s ability (and intention) to close a deal—and how you can best meet their needs to encourage them to do business.

When making questions, try to pare the list down as much as possible—being asked too many questions can be tiresome for sales leads and drive them away.

Coming Up With Your Criteria for Qualifying Outsourced Sales Leads

If you’re stuck on how to create specific qualifying questions for your sales prospects, take a look at your existing customer base and try to identify some trends. Who are your best customers? Not just the largest accounts, but the ones with the best cost-to-return ratio who bring in steady income with the least difficulty.

Taking a look at your existing customer base can be a great way to come up with the criteria you need to identify the best leads in your sales pipeline.

Another consideration to make when coming up with criteria for qualifying sales and marketing leads is your business’ specific goals. Are you looking to increase sales for a specific product or service? Then it might be a good idea to qualify leads with an eye towards the qualities and characteristics that would drive them to use that service.

How to Qualify Sales Leads

Now that you know some basic questions to ask leads and how to come up with criteria for qualifying them, how do you qualify your sales leads? Aside from asking basic questions, some things you can do to qualify sales leads include:

• Verifying That the Lead’s Needs Align With Your Product or Service. If your products or services cannot address the prospect’s needs, can you really call them a qualified lead? Probably not. It is very difficult to close a deal with someone who does not stand to benefit from the transaction. So, a basic part of qualifying leads is making sure their needs align with what you can offer.
• Use Lead Scoring Tools. How do leads engage with your brand? This can be a key indicator of a lead’s overall quality and potential value. Lead scoring, which HubSpot defines as “the process of assigning values, often in the form of numerical ‘points,’ to each lead you generate” is invaluable for prioritizing leads. Lead scoring tools can help you track online behaviors, email engagement, and more to automate the scoring process and identify high-quality leads that might have been missed otherwise.
• Investigate the Lead’s Company. If you ask about the lead’s company, be sure to check up on it! A quick search online in a search engine or on LinkedIn can often provide valuable information about an organization, such as their company size, industry, news articles about them, etc. Checking this information can help verify that a lead is actually in a position to close a deal—for example, if someone claims to be the CEO of a business, but isn’t mentioned on the business’ “Our Team” page or their LinkedIn profile, they may not be a legitimate lead. However, it’s also important to consider the possibility of other companies with similar names or companies with outdated information in their online profiles. Researching the lead’s organization can also help you customize your messaging for that lead to more directly address their biggest pain points.

Examples of Follow Up Sales Emails After Qualifying Leads

After qualifying a lead, it’s important to maintain contact with them to move them through your sales process. Lead nurturing emails (also called follow-up emails) can be a crucial communication tool.

Sending follow-up emails quickly after qualifying a lead can be important for keeping your organization “top of mind” with that lead—encouraging them to think of your company when they’re looking for a solution to their challenges. To this end, many marketers use a templated email that allows them to use personalization tokens (or just manually fill in the blanks) so they can send emails quickly.

A couple of examples of follow-up email templates a business in the medical sales industry could use include:

Example 1: A Simple Thank You

Subject Line: Thank You for Reaching out to [your.company], [customer.name]
Preview Text: We look forward to helping [customer.company] with [specific area of interest] soon.

Hello [customer.name],

Thank you for reaching out to our company. We know your time is valuable, and that you probably have a lot of questions about [customer’s specific indicated interest]. So, we would like to schedule a meeting as soon as possible to answer your questions and learn more about your needs.

[Schedule a Meeting Link]

Regards,

[Your email signature]

This template is short, simple, and easy to fill in with information using personalization tokens in a content management system—or it can be filled out manually if you have the prospect’s information in front of you.

Example 2: Additional Resources

Subject Line: Here Are Some Additional Resources About [customer’s indicated interest]
Preview Text: Want to know more about [customer’s indicated interest]? Here are a few extra resources for you.

Hello [customer.name],

Since you indicated that you were interested in [customer’s indicated interest], we assembled a few additional resources that you might find useful:

[bullet list of additional resources related to what the prospect was looking for, such as:]

• [Related blog articles with links]
• [Company-made eBooks, whitepapers, etc.]
• [Links to video resources about a topic the lead was interested in]

If you have any questions, please [contact.us].

Regards,

[Your email signature]

This template is also short, but requires some customization depending on what the prospect was inquiring about or indicated an interest in during previous interactions (and what resources you have available to share). For example, if the prospect was interested in a specific medicine, you might share trial data about that product, videos where sales reps and doctors discuss its efficacy, or even information about other medications commonly prescribed alongside the product.

In emails, prospects may often simply glance at the email for a few seconds before deciding to move on. According to statistics cited by Campaign Monitor, “121 business emails are sent and received each day” by the average person—which goes a long way to explain why people try to go through their emails as quickly as possible. So, it’s important to keep them short and to the point so you don’t lose your audience’s attention.

Creating a simple template that you can auto-fill with data from your customer relationship management (CRM) solution or fill in the blanks yourself can be a massive time-saver, even when you’re writing short emails.

Is your organization struggling with poor-quality leads that just don’t close? Axxelus can help! Our outsourced sales solution uses relationship-based sales to generate high-quality leads that generate strong ROI. Reach out to the Axxelus team today to start building your sales success!