Qualified roofing leads are the most likely to bring new customers to your business. But for many roofers, the phrase qualified roofing lead is ambiguous at best. Every roofing company understands what a lead is, but each lead’s value can range from nominal to outstanding.
For example, shared leads are often less valuable because the broker sells the customer’s information to multiple companies. An exclusive lead, in contrast, is more expensive because it converts more frequently.
But what if there was a way to further increase the conversion rates on exclusive leads? If you are willing to invest in a customer qualification process and delegate the tasks to your marketing agency, there is a way.
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What Are Qualified Roofing Leads?
A qualified roofing lead is a prospect your marketing team thoroughly vets before passing through to the sales team. The chain of command may vary depending on whether you employ a 3rd party marketing agency or have your own in-house marketing staff.
How Marketing Teams Qualify Roofing Leads
Marketing experts understand promotional channels like websites, social media networks, and business listings. The best marketers can also distinguish the validity of an inquiry and filter out spam and empty leads.
For example, suppose a roofing contractor messages your company through its Facebook Business Page. In that case, the marketing team can determine whether the message comes from a legitimate roofing company or a spam profile.
The same tactics apply to customer inquiries via a website contact form submission or a cold email. Again, the marketing team should look for sincerity, urgency, and credibility indicators before passing the lead to sales.
Why Are Qualified Leads Important for Roofers?
Qualifying leads is essential because it increases the conversion rate of sales teams. When salespeople close the marketing department’s vetted leads, their overall conversion rate should skyrocket.
Take a look at a complete list of the benefits below:
Efficiency
When you have a good list of roofing qualified leads, your sales team won’t have to hunt down cold leads and spend time and effort moving them along the initial stages of the sales funnel.
Instead, a qualified roof lead will allow your sales team to focus on leads more likely to convert and spend their time more efficiently.
Customer Service
While many prospects don’t necessarily like being pitched to, consumers who already know they are ready for roofing service are looking for as much information as possible. As a result, you get a clearer picture of the buyer’s persona or the consumer’s preferred service with qualified leads.
Then, the sales team can present them with offers and information that pertain to what they are interested in instead of hearing a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with their roofing needs.
Believe it or not, customers remember this kind of personalized service, so qualified leads help with customer retention.
Market Research
Roofing qualified leads will also inform you what marketing efforts are working and which of your services the public covets most. Finally, as discussed earlier, a qualified roofing lead will directly relate to your inbound and outbound marketing efforts.
You will know where the qualified lead came from (social media marketing, search engine marketing, cold-calling, PPC ads, etc.).
Once you accumulate a steady stream of qualified roofing leads, you will likely be able to determine a pattern. This pattern will probably tell you which of your marketing efforts are the most effective and which of your services people pay for the most.
Tips for Qualifying Roofer Leads in 2023
Now that you understand qualified leads better and why they’re essential, it’s time to start cultivating more for your roofing business. Here are some tips:
Align Marketing and Sales
An essential stage in the lead qualification process is an agreement between sales and marketing. The marketing team will present the sales team with qualified leads, but the sales team needs to agree and confirm that the leads are likely to convert.
This means open and effective communication between your marketing and sales team and vital information. Again, we highly recommend using a CRM software suite to streamline communication and lead profiling.
Define Qualifications
Your sales and marketing team will need to work together to determine what exactly qualifies a lead. For example, should the lead interact with a particular content type?
Should they have visited certain pages of your website? Should they have clicked on an ad? These are all questions that should be discussed to create qualified lead definitions.
Don’t Be Afraid to Pivot
The roofing market changes. The needs of your customers change. Even the weather can affect roofing market changes. So, it would help if you revisited your qualification definitions regularly after they have been established to reflect these changes.
In-House Marketing vs. Agency for Lead Qualification
Your first instinct might be to lean towards in-house marketing departments as an ideal solution for lead qualification. After all, they have every motive to qualify the lead for your sales team properly.
In contrast, a marketing agency could have the incentive to push through leads that aren’t legitimate to meet a quota or highlight the impact of their campaigns. However, the comparison is more complex than you realize.
In-House Marketers
In-house marketers may be incentivized to withhold low-value leads from your sales team, but they also might act in bad faith to amplify their marketing skills. It could be easier for them to blame the sales team for failing to convert leads than to take responsibility for not getting enough inquiries.
Digital Marketing Agencies
On the other hand, a digital marketing agency may have the same political incentive to make themselves look better but provide less access to the process. Still, some marketing agencies are better at producing high-quality leads and don’t have to take those measures to prove their worth.
Ultimately, it comes down to who you hire, whether in-house or externally. A competent marketing agency will produce high-quality roofing leads and vet them to the fullest extent. The same applies to in-house marketers who lack oversized egos or political aspirations.
The bottom line is this. You must trust whoever passes your qualified roofing leads to the sales team.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, qualified leads are prospects that meet pre-determined benchmarks of conversion rate probability. Creating a lead qualification system lets your sales team quickly vet leads and project their lifetime value to your roofing company.
Some roofers outsource this process to 3rd party marketing agencies with experience vetting prospects from various lead sources like websites, business listings, and social media profiles. Other companies rely on an in-house marketing team to complete these tasks.
Each company will have a unique qualification system, but the successful ones share certain principles in common. For example, all successful systems correctly identify the conversion rate probability in their specific market and industry niche.
