Corporate Communications Prequalifying Sales Leads

To the uninitiated, a sales lead is always something to be chased. But that’s not how things work in the real world. There are no concrete numbers, but a large percentage of the leads we get and dutifully forward to our sales reps are either literature collectors or semiautomatic submissions from any number of contact databases. Because there’s no color-coded alert level on the leads we receive, the only info provided to the reps is name, address, phone and email and occasionally the product(s) of interest.

On a normal day, chasing down every one of these unqualified leads (especially after a trade show) is a daunting task for anyone. When you consider that sales reps may be inundated with many, many leads from every vendor they work with, the task becomes overwhelming. If reps spend hours calling these leads only to find out that many just want a brochure or don’t even remember requesting information, then it becomes frustrating. Now, is it easy to understand why every lead coming through the gates isn’t followed or chased?

YCA’s Corporate Communications has taken this dilemma to heart and has initiated a new Sales Lead Response Action. Kaye [*] is bottlenecking the incoming leads to prequalify them before sending the contact info on to the local reps. In the short time the Action has been operating, Kaye has discovered a few "hot" leads—meaning the customer was in immediate need of contact by a rep or inside sales person. She has also made significant progress in weeding out the "literature librarians" and the "I don’t remember requesting anything" dead-end leads.

The process is simple enough: leads are retrieved daily, weekly and monthly from various sources, as well as during trade shows. Kaye makes calls and/or emails the potential leads to ferret out the requester's area of interest (or lack thereof) and determine the timeliness of their inquiry. Once a lead has been qualified as "needs immediate attention", "genuinely interested", "just wants a brochure" or "why are you calling me?" the appropriate action is taken: forward the lead or don’t. In dealing with the daily influx, Kaye reports that most leads fall into the two latter categories.

In circumstances where the lead is truly a "hot" one, Kaye asks if the customer (note the transition from "lead" to "customer") has any questions that can be answered immediately by our inside sales people, thus accelerating the customer buy-in process and further qualifying the lead for the sales reps.