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What Is A Qualified Lead? How To Better Qualify A Lead? What Are The Best Leads?
One of the main things that sales decision-makers ask from a call center is "how many leads would I get from X hours of calling?" But often, they don’t ask how qualified those leads would be, which is the point of the whole lead generation and appointment setting program in the first place. Defining “qualified” is a primary cause of misunderstanding between the call center and its customer. It’s a matter of interpretation and for every sales decision-maker you meet, you’ll get a different take. To illustrate, here’s what several Sales and Marketing Executives wrote during a LinkedIn discussion: “a qualified lead first and foremost has stated an interest in your product or service and wants to be contacted. Plus the timeframe that they would consider purchasing your product or service is important” “a qualified lead is one that has a genuine pain…has an interest and a willingness to explore one of a number of value propositions” “an authorized buying employee that it is actively looking to add/replace the product/service being offered” “someone with budget, authority and need or desire” “someone with budget, authority, need, time and a project defined with an owner appointed to solve it” “a prospect who has committed to a follow-up call and/or appointment” …to quote a few. As you can see, there’s a broad variation depending on management needs and company culture. How to better qualify a lead? After many years of providing lead generation and appointment setting services, I’ve seen that no matter the industry, the best results were generated when we were properly qualifying the: 1. Contact: a decision maker or someone who carries authority in the field. 2.Company: it should be the right size, reasonably within the client’s geographic region, a consumption level or an infrastructure or condition that your products/services would be suitable for. 3. Opportunity/Situation: generally a company that has a need or desire for change and improvement. Qualifying the contact. Everybody knows that we have to talk to the right decision-maker, but clear direction is required to ensure we are targeting properly. For example: We were generating leads & appointments for workforce management software and were directed to speak with HR or Payroll Managers. After some trial, not to mention hitting a few brick walls, the payroll managers turned out NOT to be the decision makers and often feared how the software may affect their position and that of their co-workers. When we recommended that we speak with Finance Executives, we found that they were the ones who could really understand the fundamental financial advantages the software could bring to their company. Qualifying the company. Most of our clients ask us to call markets in which they are already established. This tends to generate better results, as our client brings a lot of experience and credibility. If these markets are largely saturated by the client, new markets are chosen. The success of our programs in new markets depends on the extent the client’s experience is applicable to each new market. Qualifying the opportunity/situation. To assess the potential we always try to find out: * What their current situation is? * Are they satisfied with their current situation? * Do they have any concerns? * Do they have any initiatives for improvement, such as: reducing costs, implementing higher standards, upgrades, and optimization? Once we have a contact with decision-making power that can not only answer these questions, but has shown an interest in your value proposition, there is a high likelihood that he/she will want to meet with you. What are the best leads? Everybody wants someone with a big problem, big budget and a short timeframe. If we do get in touch with a company with these criteria, more often than not they already have a vendor in mind. If they agree to meet with you, it’s often mainly to justify the decision they have already made. At the other end of the spectrum are those that think they might need your product one day, but don’t have anything specific in mind or problems to address. These tend to be of value mainly in situations where our client is introducing something largely new to the industry, or there is a need to get information into the market with a one-to-one personal introduction. I’ve found that our clients can make the most progress with leads that are somewhere in the middle - those that have a need for improvement, but haven't yet exactly defined what they need to change, how to do it and how much they need to budget. Even though the sales cycle is longer, the most potential comes from these leads because you have time to build a relationship and develop trust. Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com |
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