The Hidden Cost of Not Pre-Qualifying Leads

Whether you work in marketing, sales, or run your own business, you have one key objective: generating leads. 

However, not all leads are created equal. When you focus too much on lead quantity, you forget about lead quality. 

This means that many businesses spend valuable time, money, and resources chasing leads without assessing whether they are the right fit for the products or services they offer. 

Without lead pre-qualification, both your sales and marketing teams will put effort into converting prospects who are unlikely to buy, which has a ripple effect across the performance of every department in your business. 

ScoreApp helps you reduce the time you spend on low-quality leads with data-driven quizzes and assessments that help you build an instant picture of where someone is in your sales funnel – and how good a fit they are for your business. 

In this blog post, we uncover the hidden financial and operational costs of failing to pre-qualify your leads, and explain how ScoreApp can optimize the process. 

What happens when you don’t pre-qualify leads?

Here are some of the consequences of not pre-qualifying your leads:

Inefficient use of sales and marketing resources

Every lead will be at a different stage of the customer journey. Some will be ready to convert, some will require nurturing, and some aren’t likely to buy at all. 

Your sales and marketing teams need to tailor their approach to each group to gain maximum conversions – which means pre-qualifying the right people, and disqualifying wrong-fit prospects.

For example:

Marketing-qualified leads are interested in your products or services, but aren’t quite ready to buy. 

You can nurture the relationship through marketing content, such as personalised email marketing journeys with educational content and special offers.

On the other hand, sales-qualified leads are primed to buy. They may have attended a webinar, booked a product demonstration, or previously had a free trial. These leads should be passed over to your sales team as quickly as possible.

When you qualify your leads – for example, with a ScoreApp assessment or quiz – you can build a detailed picture of how likely each person is to buy based on their responses to each question. 

This information helps your sales and marketing teams to maximize the use of their time and resources. 

Low conversion rates and wasted time on unqualified prospects

We all know how frustrating it can be to spend hours on a call with a prospect and even longer following up… only for them to ghost you without buying.

Low conversion rates usually come down to your products or services not being a good fit for the people you’re talking to. 

Incorporating an effective pre-qualification strategy into your lead generation efforts can improve lead quality by up to 200%. 

By pre-qualifying your leads, you ensure your most valuable asset – time – is spent on people genuinely interested in what you offer and (with the right messaging and incentives) will be ready to buy. 

Higher acquisition costs with little return

Your cost per lead will depend on your industry and the channels you use to market your products or services. 

However, one thing that all businesses have in common is that your cost per lead doesn’t change whether your leads are high-quality or low-quality. 

If you cast a wide net and try to bring as many leads into your business as possible without pre-qualifying them, you spend a lot of money and get very little return. 

Improving lead qualification can reduce your cost-per lead by up to 70%. This helps your marketing budget stretch further and generates more profit for your business – which is what everybody wants, right?

Damage to brand reputation when prospects feel mismatched

If your conversion rates are low and you aren’t pre-qualifying leads, it is easy for your sales team to start trying to convince the wrong people to buy, just to make the sale.

This will cause financial issues, such as cancellations and refund requests. But it is even more damaging to your brand reputation, as customers will feel negatively about the experience of working with you. 

When your prospects align with the products and services you offer, you build much stronger relationships, have a smoother sales process, and improve customer retention rates.

The hidden costs of poor lead qualification

It might seem harmless to allow anyone and everyone to send a customer inquiry or book a sales call, but in reality, it leads to these hidden costs that impact business growth: 

1. Wasted sales time and lower productivity

If you don’t pre-qualify leads, your sales team can waste hours chasing low-quality leads while high-potential prospects look elsewhere. 

Unqualified leads can also cause a disconnect between your sales and marketing teams. If you haven’t unified what a high-quality lead looks like, each department could be looking for completely different things.

The result is missed opportunities, longer sales cycles, and lost revenue.

The key to maximizing the productivity and time of your sales team is collecting data on your prospects. 

The more you know about every lead, the clearer the picture you gain of how beneficial your product or services could be for them – and how likely they are to buy. 

When you collect data on your leads, you can paint a full picture of how beneficial your products or services will be for them. 

How ScoreApp helps: With ScoreApp, you can easily identify your best-fit prospects, as every lead is automatically scored and segmented into the most relevant customer group.

For example, you could get leads to complete a quiz with pre-qualifying questions to gauge their interest in your business.

Your pre-qualifying questions could include:

• “What is your budget for [PRODUCT OR SERVICE]?”
• “Have you tried a solution for [PROBLEM] in the past?”
• “When would you like to get started?”

You can then take the information – alongside other insights from your quiz – of those who seem ready to buy and give it to your sales team so they can reach out with a personalized message and sales pitch that matches what each prospect needs. 

2. Increased marketing costs

When trying to generate leads, it’s easy to measure success by the total number of leads you attract. 

Using quantity as a benchmark can lead businesses to overspend on ads and content… only to attract leads that will either be difficult clients, or people who won’t convert.

Selling products and services online is becoming more expensive. The market has become more saturated, and customer acquisition costs have increased by around 60% in the last five years. 

Effectively, this means you’re spending more money to acquire the same number of customers – so if your leads are low-quality, you will be generating very little Return on Investment (ROI).

The key to keeping your marketing spend down is having a clear focus on your ideal client profile(s) and creating lead magnets and content that will attract these people to your products or services. 

The good news is that with ScoreApp, you can attract the right audience upfront using quiz-based lead segmentation. 

ScoreApp automatically scores every lead based on their quiz answers. You can then connect your quiz or assessment to your email marketing software and create distinct groups based on quiz answers. 

Once your segments are set up, nurture your relationships with personalized email marketing sequences full of educational content and incentives that will appeal to each group. 

The information you gather from your quiz can also help you gather valuable customer information that improves your marketing efforts. 

For example, you could send a survey to your existing prospects to gather more information about their situation, with an incentive to thank them for participating.

This helps to further pre-qualify your leads, and you can use the information you gather to tweak your messaging and optimize your wider marketing activity. 

3. Poor customer experience

When you spend money and time trying to convert the wrong leads, you ultimately aren’t delivering the solution they actually need. 

This mismatch leads to higher customer churn rates for your business, as people are unlikely to buy again if they realize your product or service isn’t right for them. 

Not only that, but failing to pre-qualify leads creates a poor customer experience and a negative impression of your brand. 

Around 77% of people are more likely to buy a product or service when it is recommended by a friend. Imagine what happens when someone they trust tells them not to buy from you…

The key to improving your conversion rate – and providing a great customer experience – is to learn as much as possible about your prospects before trying to sell to them. 

Utilizing personalized marketing is key to creating a brilliant customer experience! There’s a reason why 83% of customers are happy to share their information with a company if it results in a more personalized experience.

How ScoreApp helps: With ScoreApp, personalization at scale is a breeze! 

A quiz is, at its essence, completely customized to every lead. 

With a ScoreApp assessment, each prospect receives a personalized Scorecard that breaks down their current situation and challenges. 

This gives them clarity over where they are and where they want to be – and effectively gets your leads to prequalify themselves for you!

By providing high-value and relevant interactions from the first touchpoint you have with a lead, you build trust, and people understand exactly how you can help them. 

You can then use this information to segment your leads and send customized communications that are packed full of sales enablement content directly related to each person’s situation, such as:

• Blog posts
• Case studies
• Testimonials
• Product demonstrations
• Competitor-comparison content
• Tailored offers

4. Lost revenue opportunities

The more time you spend talking to the wrong leads, the more likely you will miss out on high-value customers who are a better fit for your products and services. 

By the time you contact your highest-quality leads, competitors with better pre-qualification processes may have converted them instead. 

When you pre-qualify your leads effectively, you ensure you send the highest-potential people to your sales team as quickly as possible. 

Combine this with personal insight on each lead, and your sales team immediately becomes more productive and profitable because they have the information they need to reach out, start the conversation, and make the sale. 

How ScoreApp helps: ScoreApp uses data-driven insights to pinpoint the best prospects and maximize your potential conversions. 

Our robust analytics help you track key quiz engagement metrics, including:

• Quiz completion rates
• Category scores
• Individual answers for each question 
• Time spent on each question
• Geolocation 

Combine this data with interactions with your website, email marketing, and social media, and you have a goldmine of information to create a customized, engaging, and personal sales pitch. 

ScoreApp makes lead pre-qualification easy

• Interactive quizzes & scorecards: We have dozens of ready-to-use templates, and our AI quiz-building software enables you to get your quiz up and running in as little as three minutes
• Automated lead scoring: Leads are segmented automatically based on quiz results, so you can prioritize your highest-potential leads to improve conversion rates
• Seamless CRM integrations: ScoreApp can be connected with all major CRMs and email marketing platforms, alongside an additional 3000 apps and tools via Zapier

Reduce lead qualification costs and increase conversions with ScoreApp

Hopefully by now, pre-qualifying your leads feels like a business no-brainer! 

Businesses that pre-qualify their leads don’t just save time, money, and resources. They also have better conversion rates, build stronger customer relationships, and close more sales.

The result? A much more efficient and profitable business. 

When you use ScoreApp to pre-qualify your leads, you identify perfect-fit clients from the first touchpoint, send them relevant and personalized content to build trust in your brand, and contact them at the right time to ensure a smooth sales process. 

Discover how easy pre-qualifying, nurturing, and converting your leads can be when you try ScoreApp today for FREE.