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Lead Research Meaning: What Goes Into a Qualified Lead?

Your company might offer the perfect product or service and have an incredible sales pitch, but the value of your outbound sales teams is only as good as the people they are calling upon. Lead research is critical for ensuring that the lists you are calling on are actually qualified towards your business, meaning more closes and more deals come from people who are genuinely interested in what your business has to offer.

What is the lead research meaning of the word, and how does it apply to your company? We explore how this practice influences our business.

Lead Research: Meaning and Methods

In the world of B2B lead generation, there are typically two methods employed for lead research: a dedicated lead researcher, or integrating lead research methodology into an existing sales team. A dedicated lead researcher is a role specifically designed to go through large lists, cleansing and enriching the data to keep all of the information therein relevant.

While we have provided this service to clients in the past, we prefer to integrate lead research methods directly into our teams. This ensures that the needs of a client aren’t siloed to a particular department – our SDRs and BDRs directly understand what a good lead is, and calibrate the lists themselves.

The process of lead research looks different to every B2B lead generation company, but the fundamentals are shared. What does sales prospecting research look like?

B2B Sales Prospecting Research

In order to net prospects, lead generation services typically purchase lists of leads. These lists can vary in quality, and are typically sorted by company, company size, position of contact, industry, location, and other variables. To determine the quality of these lists, they must be compared against your ideal buyer persona.

Once a list has been purchased, several techniques can be deployed to find the right contacts. We examine some of those methods below.

Data Cleansing

Typically, any purchased list of leads is already outdated by the time that it falls into your hands. This is the nature of list-purchasing – as time progresses, positions change, people enter and leave companies, and businesses fundamentally change their models to reflect an evolving economy.

To ensure that the right people are being contacted at all times, data cleansing weeds out outdated information

Data Enrichment

A list of leads can be quite large – to find the right groups to call upon, most companies use a process called data enrichment. This involves filling in missing gaps in a list of leads, and adds context to the data that is provided in the list.

Why Purchase Lists?

Why do we purchase lists instead of generating leads from research? In short: time and payoff. Doing all of the research by hand can provide extremely accurate leads, but comes at a tremendous cost in terms of resource usage and labor. Using lists and calibrating them to individual programs produces much better payout.

How Acquirent Approaches Lead Research & our Meaning of Lead Generation Success

Each of our teams includes salespeople that are dedicated to your account, as well as a manager who oversees operations and helps with reporting and strategy. Our lead research is done as part of our prospecting process, meaning that as we call upon more clients, we can understand the overall efficacy of a given list and adjust our strategy to determine a list’s efficacy.

The best way to determine the quality of leads on a list is to simply call in. We use a data subscription model that provides us with lists of contacts. From there, our SDRS, BDRs, and dedicated sales reps go about the task of cleansing and enriching data

The best lead generation services can’t simply buy a list of contacts and hope for the best – they must strategically go about the process of evaluating the data, and make sound decisions based on the information they have. At Acquirent, we understand that you can’t simply “hope for the best” but actively work towards calling on prospects that are interested in your services. Contact us today for more information about our services.

Depending on the target buyer persona, this task can be more arduous for some accounts. A product or service that is generally targeted towards a type of business might have significantly more qualified leads than one geographically targeted towards a specific region or unique type of business.