5 Common Challenges in Lead Qualification and How AI Can Help

You’re generating many prospects interested in your product thanks to your marketing efforts, congratulations! 🎉

But… are they translating into sales? What volume REALLY qualifies for what you’re selling? How many are ready to sign up right now? Are all the leads you’re generating with your campaigns truly opportunities for your business?

In today’s article, we’ll explore the 5 common challenges in lead qualification, how to tackle each one, and how using artificial intelligence could help you.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Challenge #1: Volume

If you have one or two salespeople on your team and are generating 1,000 leads per month… you’ve got a problem. If those same salespeople are also in charge of outreach to accounts you want to close, even worse.

Volume is one of the main issues in lead qualification. With a small team, it becomes nearly impossible to handle all the demand and understand if they are truly opportunities for your business.

What ends up happening? Inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and a lack of focus on high-quality leads.

Challenge #2: Determining Fit

Your salespeople are trying to talk to 500 people per month (imagine that on your personal WhatsApp 😱). Now think that for all those prospects, they need to determine if they are a fit for your product or service.

Understanding the pain points and needs of potential customers will allow you to know if there’s a match with your product or service. If there’s no fit (either because you can’t solve what the potential customer needs or don’t yet have that functionality available), then your salespeople are wasting time that could be better spent on those who do fit.

What could you ask?

1. What challenges are you currently facing in [AREA]?
2. What kind of features are you looking for in a product/service like ours?
3. How are you currently addressing these challenges?

Challenge #3: Interest and Urgency

Your salespeople are desperate; you have many leads that qualify for your product, but… they’re just exploring. That is, potential customers are interested in what you offer but are simply understanding what’s available in the market.

This isn’t necessarily bad; you have the data of people interested in your product. But since time and resources are limited, you want your salespeople to focus 100% on those who are interested and want to buy RIGHT NOW before they go to a potential competitor.

What could you ask?

1. How quickly do you need to resolve [CHALLENGE]?
2. Have you considered or evaluated other options to resolve it?
3. What concerns or doubts do you have about implementing a solution like ours?

Challenge #4: Decision Makers

Often, there’s a fit, the interest is real, and they’re ready to buy. However, the person talking to your salespeople isn’t the one making the purchasing decision.

This can be a problem. The person talking to your salesperson needs to align with the decision-maker before buying, and several issues can arise that negatively impact closing the sale.

What could you ask?

1. Are you the one who would make the purchasing decision?
2. Is there anyone else involved in the purchasing decision process?
3. What does a typical purchasing process look like for your company for a product/service like ours?

Challenge #5: Incomplete or Inaccurate Data

While your salespeople are overwhelmed, trying to figure out if the leads qualify, you’re asking them to find out what company they’re from, their role, what technology they use, the industry they belong to, update the CRM, etc. Imagine…

Incomplete or inaccurate data usually means you won’t fully understand if the lead has high potential for closing. This leads to, at best, meetings that only confirm the leads are not the target for your product or service. In the worst case… you don’t even get a meeting because you couldn’t attend to them or they were deprioritized due to lack of data.

How Could AI Help You?

All these challenges mentioned can be solved with AI. Of course, it’s not a magical solution; it requires a good understanding of the potential customer’s journey, what questions to ask, how to respond, what to integrate with, and when to refer to a sales representative.

Let’s go through each challenge and see how AI could help:

1. Volume: Salespeople are exhausted, can’t respond to all the demand, and lose focus on the most important accounts. Additionally, they have working hours, so much demand remains unattended for hours (or days). An AI can respond 24/7, without interruptions, and handle all that volume, leaving only the highest potential leads for the salespeople.
2. Determining Fit: It’s feasible, with today’s tools, to create an agent that asks the necessary questions to understand if the customer is a fit for the product or service. It can even delve deeper into some issues that you consider important.
3. Interest and Urgency: Related to the previous point, an agent could ask about the interest and urgency with which the lead wants to solve the specific problem they are looking to address.
4. Decision Makers: An agent could not only ask if the person speaking is the decision-maker but also understand who the right person would be, what a typical purchasing process is like for the company looking to hire, etc.
5. Incomplete or Inaccurate Data: The days of manually entering data are over. An agent can gather data from the three previous points (and other tools that help complement the lead’s information) and automatically update the CRM. This means your reports will be better, and you’ll know exactly the type of potential customers you’re attracting.
6. [BONUS] Scheduling a Meeting: If the customer meets the necessary qualification score (ideally, you have a lead scoring matrix), the agent can send a link to your salesperson’s calendar or automatically schedule based on their availability.

Template for Thinking About the Customer Journey with an AI Agent

David Grandes, CEO of Patagon AI, created a template to help think about how an AI agent could be integrated into the lead qualification process. Make a copy for yourself 😉

At Patagon AI, we’re developing a solution that allows the use of artificial intelligence to qualify leads. If you’re interested, you can contact Mariano Rey. If you need more information, you can visit our website.

To Sum Up

The marketing team may be generating a lot of leads with their campaigns, but if your company can’t manage it and fully understand the type of potential customers being generated, inefficiencies will arise, you’ll miss out on valuable opportunities, and your salespeople won’t be focused on the highest potential accounts.

Using AI to assist salespeople in this process can significantly increase productivity and results, freeing up time for them to qualify leads and giving them more time to sit down and talk with the most important accounts.