Small Business Brief

Sales

Your Guide to Qualifying Sales Leads With the FAINT Framework


Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels and not making traction with increasing your sales? The fact is, 73% of all leads sent from marketing to sales aren’t sales-ready. Are you wasting time with this vast majority of leads?

If so, then you will be able to save time and increase your conversion by focusing on the 27% of leads who are sales-ready. But how do you figure out which leads are ready to talk with your sales department? 

The answer is you need to qualify your sales. When you are qualifying a sales lead, you are determining if they can buy your product. There are several methods to do this, we like the FAINT method.

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with qualifying your sales, we’ll map out exactly what step you need to take and how you can automate the process to scale your efforts.

Not All Leads Are the Same

You run a successful business. You have a great product or service that people want and need. Sales are good, but they could be better. 

And you’ll never be able to scale without setting up a system to improve your conversions. The best way to do this is to qualify your leads before they ever move from your marketing funnel to your sales team.

You don’t need a thousand new leads. You need your marketing team and sales team working together to increase conversions with the leads you already have. And how do you do that? Through a qualification process.

How the FAINT Method Works 

With the FAINT process, you focus on five main qualifiers to develop your prospects into warm leads for your sales team. This process includes these five key points:

  1. Funds
  2. Authority
  3. Interest
  4. Need
  5. Time

Have you ever sat with a potential buyer going through all the key features and benefits of your product only to have them say in the end they can’t afford it? Don’t spend hours on end with leads who don’t have the funds to work with you. It doesn’t matter how much interest or need they have if the funds aren’t there.

If you’re in the B2B sector, you know that not every lead is qualified to make the purchasing decision. Verify this early on in the sales process and ensure that the person with the authority to buy is also sitting in on the sales conversation.

Additionally, it doesn’t matter if you’re sitting at the table with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company if they don’t have the interest, need, or time for what you’re selling. 

Before you move a potential prospect into your sales process, verify that they have an interest in your product or service.

Then confirm there is a need in their business for what you’re going to pitch in your sales call. 

And finally, establish a timeline for the needs of their business. 

As you qualify your leads, you might find out they are indeed interested, have the funds, and need your product. But, unfortunately, they aren’t slated to tackle this project until next quarter. Verify this and then set a time to follow up the month prior to their timeline.

Automate Your Process when Qualifying a Sales Lead

Nurturing your leads through automated marketing is the wave of the future for businesses who want to save time and increase sales. Studies show that businesses that use automated systems to qualify their leads experience a 451% increase in sales.

When you think of nurturing leads, you might picture methods such as back and forth phone calls, or sending emails that are never opened. But in today’s digital marketing environment, you can automate your sales funnel in a much more immediate fashion with chatbots.

The FAINT sales strategy can be seamlessly integrated into a chatbot that you place on your website. And with a system such as Clever Messenger, you can set up a chatbot without any coding experience.  

We have created a workflow that already follows the FAINT process to qualify your prospects right on your website. Don’t let potential customers navigate away from your website without engaging with them through a chatbot. 

Another great automation that will seamlessly move prospects from your marketing funnel to your sales team is that each of our workflows integrates with Google Sheets to populate the data into a CRM for your sales team to follow up with. You can also set up a Zapier to zap your prospect’s information to whatever CRM program you’re using.

Stop losing prospect information through manual workflows. Stop letting warm leads go cold waiting for a call from an overworked salesperson. And start automating your marketing and sales funnels with our workflows and chatbots.

When your sales team works with your marketing team to qualify leads in this manner you will see an increase in conversions, higher sales, and more team morale. 

Remove Roadblocks and Increase Conversions Today

You’ve now learned how vital it is for your business to ensure you’re qualifying your sales leads. And you’ve seen how imperative it is to nurture each prospect through this process to improve your sales conversions.

You’ve also seen how automating the process can help you scale your sales flow in real-time. Now it’s time to put this system into action and set up your workflow to qualify sales leads today.

Combine the tried and test FAINT process with new technology to bring your business to the next level.

For more great information about this topic, check out the rest of our articles on our blog.



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