Lead

What is a lead?

In sales, we speak of a lead when a new contact has been established with a potential customer. This means that the customer has already shown interest in your company, your service or your product. To actually count as a lead, it is important that the prospect provides his contact information for further dialog.

The 4 categories of a lead

Since high quality contacts are immensely important in the field of new customer acquisition, they are divided into different categories according to their conversion probability:

The contact becomes a lead after the initial contact is made. This may have come about in a number of ways:

• Online through whitepapers, social media, emails, webinars, newsletters, online magazines
• Offline through participation in trade fairs, promotional booths or cooperations
• Print through advertisements in regional or national journals or magazines

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a contact who shows interest in working with you. You have generated this lead through the initial contact. It fulfills requirements such as the right contact person or an opportunity for collaboration.

The Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) is a former MQL where a cooperation is possible. Likewise, the contact is also the person in the company who can make decisions and the budget is sufficient for collaboration.

Opportunities are close to finalizing the contract. All conditions have been discussed, so only the last step is missing.

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is the process by which the prospect is targeted to receive exactly the information that interests them at the current stage of the buying decision. The difference to classic marketing is that the information is no longer actively sent to the customer (e.g. via a newsletter), but is instead provided on the website in the form of an e-book or whitepaper, for example.
The more attractive and informative the content, the greater the likelihood that users will disclose their data, such as name, e-mail address, etc.

What does a lead cost?

The cost of acquiring new customers is easy to calculate. To do this, you divide the cost of lead generation by the number of leads received:

Only if you know your CPL, you can evaluate your marketing measures and optimize them accordingly. There is no standard value for the average CPL, as this depends heavily on the industry, the target customer and the competition. In marketing, all costs for strategy development and optimization are also incurred. There are also costs for creating landing pages and for promotion such as Facebook and Instagram ads. To use your marketing budget effectively, you should identify channels with low costs and target them aggressively. The more evenly you allocate your marketing budget to low-cost channels, the more customers you will attract per fixed budget amount.