Lead Qualification Challenges for Startup and Expansion-Stage Companies

Lead management can be a different game with different sets of lead qualification challenges depending on the growth stage of your company.

When it comes to startups, John Barrows, Co-owner and Managing Partner of sales consultancy Kensei Partners, acknowledges that lead management is mostly a quantity game. Sales teams are scrambling to determine what their messaging is, who their targets are, and how they can gain as much traction in as short an amount of time as possible. For the most part, it’s a valid approach because it’s necessary.

The danger with the quantity game, however, is that in the race for more, documentation can fall to the wayside, and the result as far as productive information goes can actually be less. Startups need to make sure the sales team is learning from all that activity, Barrows advises. That’s the only way they can hone in on effective messaging and determine what approaches are working and what targets are in fact their ideal customers.

When companies come to the expansion-stage, it’s crucial for them to shift their lead management to the quality game.

If — and Barrows stresses it’s a big “if” — up to that point sales teams have kept the integrity of their CRM and built on the information they’ve collected appropriately they can now focus on segmentation and further tweaking and refining their approach for each lead, resulting in higher conversion rates, a steadier pipeline, and solid growth.