Pre-sales surveys: How to focus on your best leads

Acquiring sales leads is an important part of running a successful business. However, qualifying those leads — determining which ones are mostly likely to turn into sales — is an equally important step that some businesses neglect. While any lead might turn out to be viable, it’s likely that a percentage of them won’t be the right target audience for your company.

Instead of having your sales team chase dead ends, you can qualify each lead by asking them a few key questions to determine if they’re worth pursuing. This is when a pre-sales survey comes in handy.

In this article, we cover what a pre-sales survey is, why it’s important, how to create an effective one, and the best software to use for the job.

The pre-sales survey — and why it’s important

Think of a pre-sales survey as a kind of quality assurance exercise for leads.

Used primarily in the B2B space, pre-sales surveys contain a few key questions about a lead’s challenges, needs, and background. A respondent’s answers can help your company determine whether that person falls into your target audience or not. Companies typically send the pre-sales survey to a lead prior to any meeting with a sales rep.

There are many reasons to use pre-sales surveys in your sales process. One of the main benefits of using them is that they can make your sales team more efficient. Regardless of where leads come from, a pre-sales survey can help your team prioritize them and gauge how likely each is to become a customer.

By including a pre-sales survey as part of the sales process, organizations can shorten their sales cycle by focusing exclusively on high-quality leads. This focus also increases the sales conversion rate and the average deal size for a company because sales teams can use the background knowledge on a lead to tailor their selling strategies before scheduling a meeting.

Best practices for creating a pre-sales survey

Want to develop a successful pre-sales survey that improves the overall quality of your inbound and outbound leads? Follow these tips.

• Keep it short but strategic. Choose questions that will provide the most value to your sales team. Don’t ask too many questions, and don’t be too intrusive. Ask only what you need to determine whether the lead is viable. Typically, questions focus on a lead’s budget, timing, purchasing authority, and needs.
• Get the timing right. You should send the pre-sales survey soon after you acquire the lead and before your sales team has a chance to meet with them. If your team has already met with the lead, the pre-sales survey is moot.
• Emphasize design and functionality. The pre-sales survey should have an eye-catching design and align with your company’s branding. Plus, it should be intuitive and easy to use — for both your leads and your sales team.
• Create urgency. Consider adding a countdown timer to the survey to encourage your audience to fill it out right away. This reduces the chance they’ll procrastinate and forget about it.
• Analyze the data. If you’re getting a lot of low-quality leads, you may want to rethink your lead generation processes. Tweak your marketing strategies in order to improve the overall quality of leads.

Jotform: Powerful software for pre-sales surveys

To craft the most effective pre-sales survey, you need the right software. Jotform is a great option for creating pre-sales surveys, thanks to its robust feature set. It has hundreds of sales form templates that will give your organization a head start, and you can easily customize the design and content based on your unique marketing needs and brand guidelines. 

Jotform offers multiple ways to share your pre-sales survey, like embedding it on a website or linking to it in your social media profiles. Jotform-powered surveys are also mobile-responsive, making it easy for leads to fill out the forms on the go. Plus, they integrate with many other sales and marketing platforms, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and OpenCRM, so your pre-sales survey can seamlessly become a part of your existing processes.