Best Strategies to Run a Successful HQL Sales Campaign

Best Practices to Run a Successful HQL Sales Campaign

By Binary Demand - Last Updated on August 29, 2022

No matter how you go about with a B2B lead generation company, most marketers aim to generate highly qualified leads with a focus more on delivering a large number for their sales team so that they do not miss out on turning prospects into customers. 

But often, the sales teams have a difficult time with bad contact lists. A lot of their time is consumed sifting through large numbers of poor quality leads from Market Qualified Leads (MQLs) and building rapport with customers who do not meet the ideal customer profile.

The number of leads actually does not matter if they’re not the right fit for your business. Unfortunately, most marketers struggle as their focus is more on lead quantity than lead quality. A major reason for this is that they ignore the sales funnel at the early stages.

This is why marketers must focus more on HQL sales campaigns. It’s also essential for the marketing and the sales teams to work in tandem to collectively identify the right metrics that can help qualify a lead. 

Together, they must also work towards developing a B2B demand generation strategy that can help generate leads that are more likely to convert into high paying customers.

But how exactly do we define a lead or a B2B sales-qualified lead? But how do we generate high-quality leads? Read on to gain some interesting insights into this.

All About High-Quality Leads

The best HQLs’ in a sales campaign are classified as those prospects that fit into your ideal customer profile, and the chances of them being converted into high-paying customers are very high. A better quality lead is well-versed with the products, or services being offered by your company and is in the final stages of buying.

Attributing values to their characteristics or actions – such as job title, budget authority, and interest in marketing content – is an excellent way to categorize them as high quality.

Now a genuine question may flow: How can B2B marketers convert leads into potential prospects who know about the business problem, the solutions, and the products offered by you?

Here we bring you a list of HQL sales campaign strategies to help improve the lead quality. 

Strategies to Boost Lead Quality and Improve Sales

  • Map your ideal customer profile

One of the first toward determining an ideal buyer is to ask: Who should be targeted?

Establishing an ideal buyer persona is crucial in accurately defining a high-quality lead within your company’s sales campaign. They help you understand your target audience and gauge the kind of leads that are most likely to convert.

To create a buyer persona, start by conducting surveys about your customers. Find out the most relevant attributes of their needs that best define their desired online behavior. This will help you establish the factors that can help you qualify and target more leads of a similar kind.

Demographic, firmographic, and technographic information such as revenue, location, job title, company size, and authority are key attributes that can aid your journey to create buyer personas.

Once the ideal B2B buyer personas have been created, use them to generate targeted content that will sieve just the right kinds of leads.

Two aspects must be kept in mind while strategizing a lead magnet: It should be considered valuable by your target audience and ensure it’s relevant to your product or service.

If a prospect visits your website and downloads brochures, they are likely interested in the products or services you offer. That’s what you call acquiring a high-quality lead directly into the sales funnel.

Now it’s up to you to engage them. Offer them attractive discount offers or freebies and convert them into paying customers.

Other types of lead magnets are also widely used by B2B businesses for high-quality lead generation. Some of them include case studies, guides on relevant industry topics, templates, resource libraries et al.

  • Use intent data to improve lead quality

Having built a buyer’s persona, power it with intent data to add missing information to your ideal buyer for quality lead generation.

Intent data uses behavioral information to classify a lead active in the sales cycle and one that is looking for exactly the same product or service as yours.

It can even be used to know the exact position of a lead in the sales cycle. Based on this information, you can strategize your marketing efforts.

In an HQL sales campaign, intent data can be used to generate quality leads in numerous ways: It can fuel Account-based Marketing (ABM) solutions by ensuring you target only high-quality accounts. It can also be used to identify the information that’s most engaging to your ideal customers.

  • Create targeted email marketing campaigns

Email campaigns are one of the best cost-effective ways to gather information about potential customers on time. But personalization is at the heart of a successful email marketing lead generation strategy – it helps identify and nurture high quality leads.

At the core of any marketing strategy is to reach the right people with the right message at the right time.

Offer them content and solutions that interest them, which can be best achieved by dividing them into subsets based on shared characteristics. Make them feel important by using their name when you speak to them.

Additionally, your emails must be clean and concise. The subject lines must be creative enough to generate curiosity. CTAs play a crucial role; they must be clear and compelling enough to draw the readers’ attention and encourage them to follow through.

It’s a wrap

Improving lead quality is an extensive and ongoing endeavor. It requires patience, as identifying the most effective strategies for a successful HQL sales campaign often involves a process of trial and error. 

A pro tip is to categorize your HQL & BANT campaigns based on how well they have resounded with your target audience and resulted in conversations. 

Don’t let your sales reps and SDRs waste their time. If you have questions about lead qualification, lead scoring, or targeted prospecting, contact Binary Demand today.