5 Ways to Use Interactive Content To Prequalify Leads

Lead qualification is often one of the hardest jobs a marketer has. In fact, research shows that only 27% of leads forwarded to sales are actually qualified.

In this article, we’re going to look at how you, in sales, can help solve those problems and improve the quality of your leads with interactive content.

What Is Interactive Content?

Let’s start with the basics. How does interactive content differ from static content? It’s the same as the difference between a dialogue and a monologue.

What is interactive content? Essentially, it’s any content that lets people interact with it:

  • Interactive calculators
  • Quizzes
  • Chatbots
  • Assessments
  • Recommendations
  • Polls
  • Giveaways
  • Forms/surveys

Interactive content creates a more dynamic, two-way street — it requires active engagement from its consumers. The consumer has a greater voice, offers more information, and gets some benefit in return.

Because it can’t be viewed passively, interactive content is inherently more engaging and memorable, making it a valuable tool for lead generation, customer engagement, lead segmentation, and data capturing, among other things.

What is most important for us, though, is that it can help your business prequalify your prospects — making it especially useful for sales teams.

What Is Involved in Prequalifying Leads, and Why Should You Do It?

Prequalifying a lead is the act of verifying that a person who has expressed an interest in your product or service meets your general criteria. Someone who doesn’t fit your criteria and is looking for something else will only waste their time and yours.

Prequalifying a lead helps your team focus their energy on potential clients who are most likely to purchase, offering you the best ROI on your invested time and effort.

It also reduces the daily grind of research and heavy account mapping.

Source

The job of prequalifying often falls primarily on marketing, but statistics show that 61% of B2B marketers send all their leads directly to sales while only 27% of those leads are qualified.

Now the question arises, how can you use interactive content to prequalify leads? Let’s take a look.

Using Interactive Content To Prequalify Leads

You can prequalify leads in a variety of ways. For instance, you can use their needs, preferences, budget, time frame, etc., to see how well that lead matches your companies offering.

RELATED: How to Qualify a Prospect (And 6 Common Mistakes to Avoid)

Remember, though, most leads are not going to be qualified. So when you’re creating content, you need to develop it to answer the five essential prequalification questions:

  1. Do you have what the prospect needs?
  2. Are they the right person to talk to?
  3. Do their budget needs match yours?
  4. How soon do they need a solution?
  5. Do they fulfill your basic criteria

Now, let’s look at each of these questions and the interactive content that works well for each of them.

1. Do You Have What the Prospect Needs?

How do you turn a lead into a customer? By providing a solution to their problem. As such, it is crucial to understand the kind of solution they are looking for, and if it is something you can provide.

You don’t want to offer a OnePlus phone to someone looking for an iPhone. (Trust us, they won’t be happy.) This is why it’s important to first identify the client’s problem and needs.

RELATED: So You’ve Qualified Your Prospect (Here’s What NOT to Do)

Quizzes, calculators, and surveys can all do this wonderfully.

For example, suppose you are a digital marketing company. You offer marketing solutions to clients, and you want to figure out what kind of marketing tool would satisfy their needs.

Here is an interactive quiz titled “Which Marketing Tool Is Perfect For You?” This quiz directly asks what the client’s main objective is and what tools they’ve used in the past.

 

This information is gold, and what’s even better is that the client is telling you directly. You’re not having to tease an answer out of a mountain of data and metrics, guessing at the information you need.

Now, all you need to do is determine if you can offer the client what they are looking for.

2. Are They the Right Person to Talk To?

While dealing with a prospect, it’s important to determine if they actually have decision making authority within their organization. Luckily, you can use just about any kind of interactive content to gather this information.

RELATED: 5 Ways to Cut Through the Noise With Buyer Enablement

A good example is Mulesoft’s Integration Value Calculator.

The lead generation form of this calculator has a separate, mandatory section for “Job Role.” It’s only after you provide this information that you receive the results of the calculator.

 

This helps ensure that you’re reaching out to the right person instead of wasting your time on being directed to one. You can also make sure that you’re reaching out to people from the right industry and the right profile.

For instance, if you want to enter a marketing collaboration with a company, the right person to contact would be someone like the Marketing Head, or a Project Manager, rather than a Sales Executive.

3. Do Their Budget Needs Match Yours?

Budget is probably the number one thing a client cares about, after the quality of the solution you provide. But before entering into a venture with a company, it’s important for you to know if they can afford to spend enough for the product or service you’re providing.

Figuring this out early will help you both save time. And a good way to do that is with a calculator.

Suppose you work for a construction company. If you have a client who has expressed interest in building a house, you can send them a House Construction Quote calculator. This calculator asks for all of the client’s needs and preferences, and, most importantly, it gives them an estimated budget. If the budget is over or under what you can offer, you don’t need to waste time pursuing them.

Here’s an example of an ad-spend calculator by Hubspot. This gives Hubspot’s clients a good idea of most of the possible expenses that will come up when running digital ads.

 

This kind of a tool puts both Hubspot and the client on the same page before they ever enter talks. The client knows about how much they can expect to pay, and Hubspot knows if this is a deal that’s worth it to them.

What’s more, they also leverage their free ad management tools after this calculator.

4. How Soon Do They Need A Solution?

Timeline is something that’s often overlooked, but it can be very important. The timeline of when you can provide a solution needs to match the client’s needs. If not, you need to know that as soon as possible.

You should be able to offer them your solution exactly when they want it and need it. You can’t spend time and effort converting them only to discover that they needed the solution yesterday.

Chatbots are a great way to determine when a prospect needs your services. Just have your chatbot ask them when they’re starting a new project or how soon they need a solution.

This prevents you from taking time working with clients whose timelines don’t match up with yours.

This strategy works great for any projects with a defined end date — weddings, construction, etc.

5. Do They Fulfill Your Basic Criteria?

Many times it’s less about if you can meet the customer’s needs, and more about if they can meet your criteria. Interactive content is a great way for determining that.

Assessments are particularly good for this role.

Here’s an example of GMR Transcription, a company that provides transcription and translation solutions for all your projects. They created a quiz called “Are You A Good Fit?” for their hiring process.

It asks questions about a person’s skills and personality, which helps them quickly eliminate leads that aren’t a good fit.

This is specifically for hiring, but something similar could easily be used to screen prospects and potential customers as well.

Key Takeaways

Interactive content can help you collect a lot of valuable information about the people who engage with it. This, in turn, can help you prequalify your leads.

You can use interactive content to learn what your prospects need — if their budget and timings match yours, and if they fulfill your ideal buyer persona.

Thereafter, you can use interactive content to segment your leads and send them targeted offers.

Interactive content has been around for a long time, but with new advances in chatbot and AI technology, the possibilities are greater than ever before.

Experiment, test, and learn how your company can use interactive content to prequalify and sort leads to increase your bottom line.

Sneha Dominic is a B2B Sales Executive and Product Adoption Specialist at Outgrow. In her free time, she enjoys catching up with TV shows and playing with her pet dog, Peppy.

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