How a No-Code Agency Solved the Unqualified Leads Problem with Make
Unqualified leads are a huge waste of time, and anyone in sales knows how frustrating it is to jump on a call with a lead that isn’t a good fit and won’t ever convert.
The frustration is so palpable that we’re now seeing articles on how to politely get unqualified leads off the phone - but this isn’t really a solution, is it?
As a matter of fact, it’s a palliative measure that won’t stop unqualified leads from making their way into the sales team’s CRM, much like popping a painkiller when your body is trying to fight off an infection.
The pain will go away for a moment, but the problem will persist.
While unqualified leads can be a problem for just about any industry, it’s the B2B space that suffers the most from them.
Companies selling products and services that are more complicated, technical, or niche than the average offering - a great example is SaaS companies - are particularly affected by bad fits, and lose valuable resources as the problem persists.
This was the case of Minimum, an automation agency focused on building faster, better products for their customers using no-code tools.
After launching the agency in 2020 and finding initial success in delivering high-quality solutions for the first customers, word got out and they soon became overwhelmed by new leads.
Lacking a lead qualification system, they found themselves losing hundreds of hours on sterile calls, dedicating time to projects that were never gonna see the light of day for one reason or another.
But instead of learning how to say “no” in a polite way, they came up with an automated lead qualification system that attacked the root of the problem, effectively solving it once and for all.
Before we jump into the solution, let’s take a deeper look at unqualified leads, and how their influence can bring highly functional sales teams to a stall when left unattended.
What are unqualified leads and how do they affect your business?
An unqualified lead is a person or company that has shown interest in your product or service, but that does not fit what you are offering for one or more reasons, such as:
Your product or service does not solve the problem they’re facing
Your product or service is not offered/supported in their region
They can’t afford your product or service
There can be other reasons as well, but it all boils down to compelling reasons that make your product a bad fit for the interested party.
As for effects, there are both short and long term consequences of dealing with unqualified leads on a regular basis.
First of all, it’s a huge waste of time and money when measured in work hours. Let’s imagine that a small sales team spends 100 hours every month dealing with unqualified leads.
Taking the average sales rep salary as a reference, that effort would result in a recurring loss of $2,900/mo, or $34,800/year, and we’re not even counting the missed opportunities with qualified leads here.
Second, letting unqualified leads reach the sales team is the perfect recipe for a toxic work environment. Sales reps will get increasingly frustrated by these, and lash out on the team that’s responsible for lead generation and qualification (that’s usually marketing).
Now that we have a full understanding of the unqualified leads problem, let’s take a look at what Minimum did to solve it.
A new way of qualifying leads
At this point, you might have realized that the problem is not about lead qualification per se; it’s about who does it, and how effective it is.
In other words, it’s about the process.
A poor lead qualification process usually meets the following criteria:
It drains resources from the company
It’s done manually by one or more people in one or more teams
This was the problem Minimum faced. As a nascent company, they had one of their key people qualifying leads manually - a task that consumed 32 hours a month on average.
After realizing that this was a process problem (and not a staffing one), they decided to put their expertise to test and create an automated, no-code lead qualification system to weed out good fits from bad ones without any human intervention, and in record time.
A lead qualification system anyone can build with Make
Minimum approached the problem of unqualified leads the same way they approach their customers’ problems: By understanding the process, talking to the stakeholders, and checking their tech stack.
After gathering all the necessary information and requirements, they developed a simple, and yet incredibly effective solution that pre-qualified leads before sending them the sales team way.
It all starts with the form in the agency’s homepage.
Once a lead submits a form, the automated lead qualification system performs the following actions:
Creates a record with the lead’s data in the company’s CRM (Pipedrive)
Creates a requirements form
Sends the form back to the lead via email
Notifies the agency stakeholders via Telegram and Slack
And yes, all of this happens automatically, but it doesn’t stop there.
After the lead completes and sends the second form (the one with the requirements), the lead qualification system resumes from where it stopped and:
Creates a Google Drive folder for that lead
Creates a Google Doc with all the answers/requirements stated by the lead
Updates the lead’s record in Pipedrive
Sends a Slack notification to the agency stakeholders
With this information, the Minimum team can determine whether to keep pursuing the lead or not.
If everything looks good and the lead has done the homework, the third stage of the automated process is set in motion: The lead receives an automated email with a Calendly link to schedule a meeting with a sales rep.
To conclude, Minimum was able to build this in just a couple of days using Make.
If they had to code their way through the process, we’d be looking at a far more complicated and expensive endeavor. With Make, a single scenario takes care of it all:
Final thoughts
With their automated lead qualification system, Minimum saves 400+ hours of work per year.
Nowadays, there’s no need to wait for a sales rep to determine if there’s a fit or not, and the endless back-and-forths over email are a thing of the past.
They have time to manage more leads than ever before, and to address their needs faster than ever.
In the words of the company CEO- Jorge Lana, there was a before and after Make:
“Before using Make and automating the whole process we spent our days answering emails to try to pre-qualify our leads, this manual process was exhausting. Now we have our inbound and referral leads process automated and our customer experience is much better, and our sales team is much more efficient dealing with our leads. This is allowing us to work on quality deals and increase our sales.”
Last but not least, Minimum ate their own dog food by creating this solution for their internal teams.
They proved to themselves that their approach to validate hypotheses without code and implement digital product and marketing solutions based on data to solve real-world business problems is functional, efficient, and cost-effective.
The lesson is simple: Strive for a good process, and bring it to reality with Make.
