Leads VS Sales Prospects

Sales Leads VS Sales Prospects

Although often used interchangeably, the marketing terms 'leads' and 'sales prospects' are different. They are labels that describe how close those interacting with your business are to buying, ie how far they have advanced through the sales funnel.

Sales Prospects

Sales prospects (aka suspects, contacts or qualified leads) are closer to buying than leads. They are potential customers because they generally qualify as such in the following ways.

• Sales prospects fit the target market profile
• Sales prospects have the wherewithal to buy, which usually means sufficient
• money
• knowledge and understanding. Technical products often require some knowledge of what is required.
• anything required to buying your particular product or service. If you are selling car window visors, the prospect will need to have the right car make and model.
• Sales prospects have the authority to make the buying decision

Leads

Leads are unqualified contacts. They do not qualify in all of the abovementioned ways to become a potential buying customer or 'sales prospect'. For instance, you may create an entry in your CRM because your sales rep casually heard that a customer's neighbor might need your product. Since that is almost nearly all the information you have, you can not yet qualify the person and can only label his account as a 'lead'.  

Prospecting, Sensible Prospecting

Perhaps the term prospecting is partly responsible for the confusion regarding the 2 terms. Prospecting refers to the task of finding leads and then converting them into sales prospects. This often involves finding leads through advertising, lists and so on. 

ALWAYS qualify leads before spending much time and effort on your sales process. This commonly involves profile generating contact forms in the earlier stage of autoresponse email campaigns that allows you to segment leads and prospects. You may then invest time and effort with customer relationship management (CRM) (using tools like HubSpot which may also help you to deal appropriately, even with the leads).

CONTENT RELATED TO SALES LEADS AND SALES PROSPECTS

• Know how to convert leads into sales prospects through a sales funnel
• Design landing pages that help to motivate leads to become sales prospects.
• Autoresponse email campaigns are ideal for qualifying leads into sales prospects. Specifically, earlier emails can encourage leads to complete a profile generating contact form.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are particularly useful for enchancing closing rates (ie the rate at which sales prospects finally buy).
• See how to allow leads to book qualifying meetings with HubSpot CRM
• Consider the uniqueness of your sales pipeline. In some cases, you may prefer to making further classifications as follows. Ultimately, your sales team ought to agree on the definitions of each stage so your CRM is updated appropriately and all members can respond appropriately.
  
  
• Leads are interested and can benefit from your offering.
• Prospects are qualified leads that are both willing and able to commit
• Opportunities are prospects who have expressly agreed to commit. When a contact reaches this point, marketers often create a deal in the CRM.
• Prospects are often classified further as follows
• new prospects are persons whose level of buying intention is still unclear to you. You engage them to better understand their buying intent.
• hot prospects are persons who have a sense of urgency and ready to buy within the immediate term
• warm prospects are persons, although interested, can not proceed immediately for some reason, often because of financial constraints, contractual commitments to other brands and so on
• cold prospects are person who may buy at a later date in the future
• closed prospects wants you to lose their name and email address permanently because they will never buy from you