What on Earth could be more rewarding than qualifying and closing leads? Disqualifying them! The moment you 
learn to STOP marketing to stale leads and move on with your sales process is a definitive step toward reaching your marketing goals. Aggressively disqualifying leads empowers your team and sales process to be more effective, while making time to focus on the leads at the bottom of the funnel.
In this quick guide, you will learn the necessary steps in disqualifying stale leads that fail to take the next action in your sales funnel.
Why It’s Necessary to Disqualify
Simply put, you cannot close an unqualified lead. Not everyone who shows an interest in your business is ready to become a real buyer. Some prospects require more persuasion than others. The only way to find out who is ready to make that leap is to ask qualifying questions. Using marketing automation software, we is able to create checkpoints where leads disqualify themselves once they are ‘stuck’ in the funnel for too long. The only way to get them moving again is to send a series of lead nurturing emails to answer any lingering questions that may be the cause of the delay.
How & When to Disqualify a Lead
Regardless of how many lead nurturing emails you send, some prospects will never convert. Who knows why they came to your website in the first place. Maybe they found a better solution from another company. Whatever the reason, letting go is still a hard thing to do. We get it. Your team worked hard to generate fresh leads using every inbound trick in the book. When you think about the ad spend and time invested in nurturing leads that have now gone stale, it makes you sick to your stomach. This is an unfortunate part of marketing, but take comfort in knowing you’re not alone. Every marketer must come to grips with this inevitability, but there’s no sense in crying over spilt milk. It’s time to act, but how? Similar to being sent to the ‘corner’ for quiet time in preschool, the Quiet List is where cold leads go for time out and subsequent disqualification.
3 Signs It’s Time to Disqualify
- No Response to Offers
A lot of time and money goes to creating content and paying for marketing automation software. So, when a lead consistently ignores the attempts your business makes to answer their research questions with engaging content, it’s time to stop wasting time and move on to leads with potential.
- No Budget
Let’s say you have a lead that looks promising through every stage of the sales funnel. Once you turn them over to the sales team, you learn their budget will not cover the cost of your product or services. What do you do? Don’t hang up the phone and delete their contact information from your list. Their budget situation could change over night, so instead of cutting them off completely, simply move them to the quiet list, so you won’t get blocked or marked as spam, and reengage when the time seems appropriate.
- Inaccurate Information
There are many ways a company can acquire inaccurate contact information for a lead. It could be human error or perhaps a system failure. Either way, the absence of contact information makes it impossible (or either very time consuming) for the sales team to close the lead. Whether it’s a wrong phone number or a general company email address (info@marketing.com), if you cannot get to the bottom of it, you must disqualify the lead.
There are many other reasons you should disqualify a lead, but we’ve provided you with the top three. It’s important that you take the reigns and prioritize leads based on their temperature. Some are hot and ready to move on to the sales team. Others are luke warm and draining valuable resources. Knowing the when, how, and why to disqualify stale leads creates more time for your team can focus on nurturing warm leads and closing hot ones!
