If you like raspberries, you know it’s best to eat them while they are fresh, since they don’t keep real well. After just a few days, they’re usually squishy and sometimes even moldy.
Sales leads aren’t much different. They need to be “consumed” quickly, because after some relatively brief amount of time, they tend to lose their promise. The potential prospects may have begun looking at competitor offerings, or maybe decided to do the development work in-house rather than go with an ISV…because they didn’t quickly appreciate the benefits of your offerings.
Sales leads can come in via any number of sources. They can come over the transom, like through your web site, they can come from webinars, or they can come from prospects having read your posted brochures and white papers…among other places.
However they come in, though, they need to be quickly qualified. Qualifying a lead means determining where in the buying cycle the prospect is. Obviously, you want to find the leads that are closest to making a buying decision, and are still open to hearing about your product.
But beyond the likelihood of turning a lead into a customer, there’s another reason you want to act quickly: By accurately qualifying all the leads that come in, you gain important intelligence about the value of your various marketing initiatives.
You may find that leads coming in from a trade show, for example, are more promising overall than leads coming in over the transom. Or it could be that leads coming in from prospects having read your white papers and brochures, while fewer in number than what you pick up at a trade show, yield a higher percentage of “warm” leads than the trade show, and thus result in higher revenues.
The key point here is that you don’t know which lead sources are most promising if you aren’t quickly qualifying all leads.
Over time, as you learn that one or two particular lead sources are more valuable than others, you may well decide to qualify those most productive sources before you handle the also-rans. The bottom line is you will enhance your company’s bottom line.
