Give Your Salespeople the Qualified Prospects They Can't Wait to Meet!

By Barry Lieberman
Advantage Plus Marketing Group

Your sales manager is disappointed. "This is just another waste of time," he fumed as he looked over the leads that had recently been provided to him.

"There has to be a better way," he thought, knowing that his sales people weren't likely to follow up on very many of them. Not only were they "just a list of names"—there was very little qualifying data. Most of them are probably dead ends, he sighed as he dumped them back in his inbox.

"I want leads my sales team won't consider a waste of time, prospects they will be excited to work with!"

Successful salespeople welcome the opportunity to work with serious prospects for a sale. The more they know about what the potential buyer wants to achieve, the more enthusiastically they will work on developing that relationship. But they can't be expected to qualify their own leads—their time is too valuable and expensive. They'll get better results if you can give them prospects that have already been pre-qualified and re-contacted more than once to explore the depth of their interest in your product or service. They want and need Prospects that meet your requirement for budget, authority, need and timing (BANT).

This article is the first of many in which I will describe how you can provide your sales force with leads they'll want to get to work on right away.

Develop better leads using a "Prospecting Engine©

If your present demand/lead generation efforts are not delivering solid bottom-line sales results, perhaps you need to mine the "gold" in the "leads" you get from your marketing department's campaigns and programs with an on-going business practice that I call a "Prospecting Engine©"—it's a series of steps intended to bridge the gap between simple inquiries and suspects (often mislabeled "leads") and delivering "Qualified Prospects" to the sales team.

The Prospecting Engine© delivers more qualified leads with a higher close rate because it emphasizes on-going communication with your best prospects, using very targeted tactics that appeal to their needs.

Suspects and Inquiries enter, cycle through, and exit as Qualified Prospects

A successful lead/demand generation program that includes a Prospecting Engine© has five distinct steps:

1. A marketing campaign, tradeshow exhibit, Internet campaign or other marketing effort generates a list of "inquiries" or "suspects"—these contacts are the fuel for your prospecting engine.
2. These contacts enter a systematic process that goes beyond follow-up qualification telephoning. Your aim is to turn your Suspects and Inquiries into better qualified leads, i.e. Qualified Prospects. An individual, or department in your organization, an outside marketing firm or both are charged with managing this business process.
3. Those Suspects and Inquiries are being consistently Touched, Educated and Nurtured using targeted 1 to 1 marketing methods. This can continue until they become Qualified Prospects.
4. Only after they have been touched and attempted to be contacted several times (looping step 3) do you disqualify them and they exit the process. Extremely important to this process is the capture of all information, touches, history into the Marketing Database.
5. Next all Qualified Prospects sent to Sales must be tracked through a Sales Lead Management system to ensure measurement of return on investment.

A sure thing

Direct marketing is all about hitting your target. Think of the Prospecting Engine© as an opportunity to keep shooting arrows at that target over and over again, in meaningful ways that will help turn good inquiries and suspects into satisfied customers.