If you work in the financial services industry, you know the importance of connecting with the best leads and contacts. As you move your business forward with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you want to invest time in lead routing that converts.
Did you know that web forms can serve as a tool to help you qualify and prioritize better leads? In this blog post, we’re sharing a few best practices for how to drive successful journeys with financial services customers.
The Importance of Qualifying
Lead routing and qualification are essential. If you’re already utilizing Marketing Cloud on your Financial Services team, you’re probably in the habit of qualifying future customers whether you realize it or not. According to Hubspot, lead qualification is the process of determining whether a new lead is worth the investment of time, effort, and resources.
Qualification is vital because it enables your team to allot the most valuable resources and assets toward the best potential opportunities. Having a clear understanding of what your ideal financial services customer looks like provides a basic lens through which to filter incoming leads. Lead qualification allows you and your sales or marketing team to pursue the opportunities that promise the highest return on investment.
Beginner Tips for Lead Form Questions
An intuitive, Salesforce Marketing Cloud-integrated web form solution such as FormAssembly can serve as a powerful tool in the first line of lead qualification. From a marketing standpoint, web forms are effective in gathering leads because they are typically one of the first elements a user encounters when exploring resources or pursuing contact. In financial services, prospects may want to download marketing resources, browse account options, or get in touch with a sales contact for more information before making a major investment.
You can combine the data gained through web forms with data gathered by other tools for even faster, more informed qualification. If you’re new to generating leads with web forms, there are a few basic principles you can follow to ensure success.
- Ask the right questions in order to fill in all the information gaps you need about a potential customer or client.
- Keep your web forms concise and engaging to ensure a high completion rate.
- Use follow-up or conditional questions to gather additional information in one stop.
Integral Form Questions for Prospects
Chances are, you’ve probably encountered lead routing and qualification questions on download or contact forms without realizing it. Companies use these key questions to determine information about a future customer that they need to know to determine how and when to follow up in the sales process. When you’re in the driver’s seat in the form creation process, these are the questions you should be asking.
- General contact information. Of course, you should always start by collecting basic personal information, including name, phone number, and email address. This information is used to create a contact record in Salesforce and allows a sales representative to reach out.
- Industry and role/title. Along with gathering the prospect’s company name, it’s also valuable to gather their industry and title. This information helps determine whether or not they are in a decision-making role, and if not, to help you get in touch with the person who is.
- The number of employees. The size of the prospect’s company may also be an indication of their needs. In B2B, it also helps you determine whether your financial services organization is the best match.
- Projected budget. Asking a question about budget ties directly into lead qualification. Are your services at the high or low end of their spending potential? If you work in a particular financial services niche, can you even offer a feasible option? A budgetary question can help easily eliminate prospects that are not a good match for your services.
- Biggest challenge. When you understand someone’s needs and pain points, you’re able to better nurture the relationship. Lead capture forms are the perfect place to start learning more about your potential customers and why they need a new solution. For instance, if you work at a financial advising firm, you may want to know what your potential customers’ biggest financial challenges and goals are so you can tailor your nurturing strategy to their needs.
Why Should You Prioritize Leads?
While Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful CRM platform for automation and personalization in the lead capture process, it’s still vital to have time-saving systems in place. This is where lead prioritization comes into play for working one-on-one with new clients.
Once you have critical information from your lead capture forms, you can organize that information with scoring techniques. Lead scoring is the process of assigning points values to certain qualities that generate successful conversion and sales. For example, if your web form asks the job title, you may discover that more conversions happen with Directors as opposed to Managers. As a result, you can assign a higher score to leads with Director titles and prioritize those leads accordingly. Marketing tools are available that offer both rule-based and predictive lead scoring, ensuring more timely marketing-sales handoffs.
How Does Lead Routing Help?
Lead routing is the process of creating automatic lead assignments for various sales reps; this process can be automated within Salesforce. An effective lead routing process can be simple (such as an alphabetical or ‘next-in-line’ distribution) or complex (based on sales territories and industries). Either way, lead routing helps channel the information gathered from lead capture forms to the individuals who can best nurture and convert.
Lead routing is an effective method for capitalizing on time. In the financial services realm, potential customers are searching for solutions, and they may have immediate needs. Proper routing ensures a time-sensitive connection and allows a dedicated team member to get to know and understand the needs of each assigned lead.
Bringing it Together
As you can see, web forms are an essential piece to making the lead capture and conversion process flow smoothly. Without basic information and the building blocks for a relationship, it’s impossible to move leads through the sales funnel. With web form best practices, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and additional sales productivity solutions, you can help your financial services organization reach more interested prospects and expand into new opportunities.
Looking for even more comprehensive resources on FormAssembly and financial services? Download our free eBook, FormAssembly + Salesforce Financial Services Cloud.
