By David Finkel –
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you have more leads than sales talent or capacity to effectively follow up with them all?
A few months ago that’s exactly what happened to my company, Maui Mastermind. We got a flood of new leads of book buyers who purchased a copy of the new 3rd edition of, Build a Business Not a Job.
Our team was swamped. In the past we had one person whose job it was to confirm that people got their books and were able to easily access the two dozen online tools that came with their purchase. It was our way of starting the relationship with these business owners. But we didn’t have the capacity to do it.
Now of course you are likely saying, “Good problem to have.” And it is.
Yet if you aren’t careful, and haven’t developed a way to triage your leads so that you pull your best leads to the top of the line, and invest your best sales talent and energy on these better leads, you’ll have wasted thousands of dollars in marketing dollars.
Here are my best three ideas to help you qualify and filter your sales leads so that you invest your limited sales capacity in the highest likelihood to buy prospects.
1. Quantitative qualifiers: What concrete numbers or characteristics do your best prospects all share?
Do they have a certain number of employees?
Or that they fall into a certain revenue range?
Or that they have a certain budget to work with or project size?
2. Qualitative qualifiers: What other, non-quantitative, common traits do you best leads share?
Do they have a specific job function or title?
Is it that they are in a specific niche or vertical?
Do they have a specific problem or pain point?
3. Decision Making Authority: Are you talking with a researcher, influencer, or decider?
Is this even a decision your prospect can make?
Or are they just one step in a longer decision making chain?
The closer they are to your decision maker, the higher the quality of lead.
4. Timeline Urgency: Do they have urgency to solve a problem and to make a buying solution?
How do you speed up the sales cycle? One powerful way is to qualify for timeline urgency.
When was your prospect hoping to find a solution? One a scale of 1-10, where 10 is they need a solution yesterday, what is the heat on their urgency?
The bottom line is that when you have too many leads to follow up with, triaging your leads and investing your best sales energy in your highest caliber leads is a critical step to take.