Are your B2B leads not turning into appointments? Here's how you can achieve appointment rates of 40-50% in lead qualification.

Does this sound familiar? You generate leads in marketing with a lot of effort and enormous costs. Then you pass them on to the sales team with high hopes. And then? You hear nothing more. Why is that? Sales employees in B2B companies are usually used to processing a small number of very specific inquiries. They maintain their personal customer contacts, and the new leads are often already highly interested because they actively approach the sales department themselves.
If you are successful in digital B2B marketing, you will present your sales team with significantly more leads, but these will often only be superficially interested at first. Sales reps are now faced with a large pile of prospects of varying quality without any personal point of contact. This is unfamiliar and uncomfortable for them and means significantly more communication than usual. They get annoyed about the dead leads and “maybes” clogging up their sales pipeline. It’s no surprise that many sales reps then prefer to focus on their usual customers.
Your leads disappear somewhere in the CRM without any chance of a reasonable ROI. You are constantly busy following up in sales – and in the end, you may even be asked if you are really doing a good job when you seem to be delivering only bad leads. That’s frustrating.
Experience shows that applying pressure doesn’t help much. Never change a running system! Let your sales team do what they do best: turn high-quality leads into customers. The best thing you can do is support your sales team by providing them with pre-qualified appointments.

A widespread goal in B2B marketing when it comes to lead qualification is maximum automation and minimization of effort. This certainly makes sense for very low order or customer values below EUR 3,000.

In the B2B sector, however, order values are often in the five to six-digit range. In these dimensions, even a single ADDITIONAL order often means a multiple payback in relation to the monthly or even annual salary of a pre-sales agent. In other words, we are talking about a return on investment in lead qualification with a factor of 10 or more.

For this reason, in the B2B sector, the most economically sensible goal is generally not to “minimize effort” but to “maximize the closing rate.” This means that if it increases the probability of closing a deal, it is essential to invest in manual resources for lead qualification.

Automation is, of course, still desirable – but only if it does not have a significant negative impact on the closing rate (e.g., by reducing it to fully automated email nurturing). Nevertheless, automation can and should be used as much as possible to increase response speed and reduce errors and effort. And in most cases, intelligently designed automation even has a significant positive effect on the closing rate.

Would you like an evaluation of your lead qualification process? Feel free to contact us.

So far, we have only discussed “direct” leads via web and social media forms. However, there is hidden potential that hardly any advertisers are exploiting: social touchpoints such as likes, etc. Where does this potential lie? Well, one definition of a ‘lead’ could be: “Someone who has shown interest and left their contact details.” Then every like is a lead!

And that’s exactly how it should be treated. Because when someone responds to your paid ad on social media, the ball is already in your court, so to speak. This is your chance: every like and every comment is a good opportunity to send a personal LinkedIn contact request offering further information. This will accelerate the growth of your network exponentially and you will gain 50 to 150 percent more leads and 10-30% more appointments.

The reason why most companies still don’t take advantage of this huge potential is usually due to limited sales resources. Systematic, (partially) automated processes can help here, which we create for customers with Teamfluence, for example, a software that automatically collects all social touchpoints.

Want to learn more about social lead qualification? Read our expert article on the topic.

Leads can now be qualified in Teamfluence either manually, with AI support, or fully automatically—not by your sales team, but by a separate team, which can also be provided by us if desired. Once a lead has been marked as positive, it is pushed to your CRM. We have also developed a standardized process with an interface and automation templates for different CRMs, which makes it very easy to transfer them to the CRM and create the corresponding contacts, companies, deals, and tasks.

The leads can now be contacted by the separate team (“I saw that you liked the article by my colleague XY – what did you find interesting about it? Would you be interested in a quick chat with him about it?”). Direct calendar access allows you to schedule an appointment with the relevant sales representative and, of course, document it in the CRM, including the relevant background information.

If you do not have dedicated internal resources for qualifying social touchpoints, we can offer to take over the entire process of establishing contact and scheduling appointments completely externally.