Lead Qualification: Send the Tire Kickers to the Low Ballers

As salespeople we all know nothing is worse than wasting time with prospects who are not ready to buy. The highest performing salespeople are closing deals at rates of over 40%. With our best clients, we’ve been closing at over 60%. This is possible if marketing is targeted and you’re qualifying leads.

Qualifying a lead. Let’s define terms. First a “lead”: process wise, it’s the culmination of marketing. When someone gives you their contact information or a call, you have a lead. “Qualifying” a lead is the first step in the sales process, but attracting qualified leads is the responsibility of marketing. At Salespeople On Demand your coach can work with your salespeople or ours. Together you and the coach work to make your marketing resonate with your most desired customers. Our coaches and salespeople specialize in your industry and work exclusively in it. Typically our clients do not have marketing departments but rely on their coach to help them target their marketing. Targeted marketing is important to the efficient operation of your sales department and minimizes the time spent qualifying leads. Qualifying a lead for our clients’ businesses is done over the phone by the salesperson. That phone call is the first opportunity for us to establish trust while scoring the lead. By scoring I don’t mean closing the deal or anything else…;) it means to give a number to the prospect’s level of engagement.

We ask questions that help calculate a potential customer’s interest in your company’s product or service and gauge level of engagement. Doing this prior to the salesperson making a trip out to the property can save a lot of time. Not to give away all of our secrets but the questions we ask are along the lines of; how did you hear about our company, have you been on the company’s website, the blog or any of the company’s social media. What is the project you have in mind? Have you hired a firm doing similar work to ours in the past, etc.? Our mindset is not to chase down the lead and get a commitment. Our intent for this call is to focus on the person, get a reading on their level of engagement, create a trusting connection and to see if we can help. If the lead’s engagement score is below a certain threshold we have a variety of options including giving price shoppers to a more appropriate service provider. If marketing is well targeted this happens infrequently. Lead qualification is an important step that ensures that your salespeople are not wasting their time with tire kickers and is vital to achieving close rates of over 50%.