Qualifying inbound leads for building services

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An inbound lead is when a prospect comes to you, showing interest in your products or your services. They've come and they're like, I want to talk to somebody right now. So they're going to a contact form, a demo form, something that is basically saying, I'm very interested in what it is that you have to offer right now. I would like to speak to somebody. Half of sales is trying to get people interested enough to meet with you through outbound efforts. So when someone comes to you and already has interest in what you offer, they're worth paying special attention to. So if you get an inbound lead, the first thing you want to focus on is speed to lead. You want to make sure you're reaching out to that prospect in a quick manner. The faster you can respond to the lead, the higher has chance to convert. Don't put it off at all. I hear things like, oh, you have to respond within the first hour, first five minutes. Whatever it is, drop what you're doing. Respond to these folks. The first person or company product to reach out to an inbound lead, uh, those are usually the ones that close. So timing is everything when it comes to inbound lead. Chances are they're looking at other people as well. You're not the only person that sells what it is that you are selling. Here's the thing about urgency. If you don't follow up. You have the potential to lose twice. First, you obviously miss out on that customer, which is harmful in and of itself for your bottom line. But you also have the potential for them to run into that opposition, that competitor of yours, have a great experience. They become a referral of theirs, and now you've lost one, maybe two, or three, or more customers. You want to be the one setting the tone. You want to be the one defining the category, defining the problem in a way that points them to your product or services. You want approach to solving the problem. Ideally, you have something that is routing that lead to you quickly and saying this person filled out your demo form. And for me, I'm reaching out instantly over an email. I'm shooting them a call. I'm typically I'm adding them on LinkedIn, like a Chili Piper, like we send them straight to an AE. We let them book a time with them. Get to those leads quickly, before your competitors can get to them or they cool off. But some leads might inquire and then never get back to you. That's why it's important to follow up and stay top of mind. So if a lead came to me, I reached out and I didn't hear a response, that entire week I would really prioritize that lead because the interest is so fresh. I would make sure to call them and prioritize getting in touch with them each day. I'm like, hey, like I saw you requested a demo too, and then I have the value prop of my company. And then I have a screenshot of like the stuff they're doing. And then the screenshot of like how we help them. And then I'll be like, Hey, like, does it make sense to connect on this? Still, obviously they're interested for a reason to be honest. They probably just forgot why they were interested. So you have to remind these hot leads why they're interested. If they're ignoring you for any reason, really just be top of mind because they filled out that demo form. So there was some interest. But they also get busy, so I'm not messaging them every single day. But if somebody fills out that form, I will be messaging them once or twice a week for a couple weeks if had a couple months. And so my goal is I'm gonna reach out until I either get them to book that meeting again, or I get a, Hey, you know, right now's not a good time, but I want to get an answer. But we can't assume all inbound leads are a. You need to ask some questions to make sure that they're a fit for you and you're a fit for them. Now the other piece of it is you want to make sure that that lead is qualified. Every company is different but your company should have some qualifications in order to determine if a lead is good or not. That could be if they're in the right industry, if they're the right size, employee size, or revenue size. Do they have the right technology stack in place? Is there an active project or budget in place? I'm not just going to reach out to some random person who wouldn't benefit from my service. When you're qualifying, these questions need to center around their process. And you likely for your product or service to be valuable to people need them to meet certain requirements. If I know that I sell an enterprise product, right? But the value prop resonated with this person who's got, um, You know, a 10 to 50 person company. I just say that to them, right? I tried to tell my reps to think about themselves as if they were librarians. Librarians haven't read every book in the library. However, they know where to find the information. And so when you're dealing with someone who is an inbound lead, you have the opportunity to ask them, what are you looking for? What solution are you interested in? What problems have you navigated or do you feel you anticipate navigating? Those sorts of questions qualify in and of themselves because you start to see They're intrigued, their level of interest. We reached out to the lead, made sure they were qualified, and we booked in an intro call with them as soon as we could. Now you just need to make sure they actually show up to that meeting. What I would recommend to avoid no-shows is reaching out to that person a day before the meeting with a brief agenda. It doesn't have to be anything crazy, but offer them a brief agenda and ask them for their feedback and what they would want to add to that agenda. That way it's a low friction ask. You're just getting a response, and if you get a response. It's a higher probability that they will be attending the meeting. What is a clear outcome for the meeting? So agenda, yes, that's the vague, broad way of saying that. But I think outcomes, tangible outcomes is what will help the person attend the meeting. Incentivize them to get on the call because if there's no incentive and no contacts, they're not going to join the call. Send reminders. Like it's a. Seems so simple, but there's a lot of people not doing it. You know, we send a reminder an hour before and even a minute before. They'll have a link to the Zoom, put reschedule links in there as well. A lot of people, things come up and they're not able to make it. And if you don't have a rescheduling, they may just ghost you completely. We did all that and I think I'm still being no showed. Then help what do I do you book a meeting you show up to the discovery call that's been booked You're waiting in the zoom room and a few minutes have passed. You're curious to see this person's even gonna show her now I give them five minutes grace period before I email them and say hey I'm on the line at and the zoom link that way it's super easy for them to click the link and join the zoom Call from there. I wait an additional five minutes. So ten minutes total if they do not show I will exit the zoom room I will not wait any longer And then I will follow up with them and or call them in order to reschedule. When someone no shows me, I have to abate the urge to be passive aggressive in my messaging. Approach this with empathy. People, things happen. And so I try to give folks the benefit of the doubt. Hey, looks like maybe something came up. It happens. No worries. You know, I'm going to go ahead and move this to the same time this day. And if, you know, if that doesn't work. Let me know. I usually will call with that same message. Now, if someone misses and they express clear desire for this, Hey, I'm sorry. I missed this at X, Y, Z come up, but I want specific thing. That sounds like desire to me. I'm willing to follow up with that person. If someone doesn't respond or if someone says, Hey, sorry, I missed that. They haven't shown me any desires. So I got to match that energy. That's when I would move on with someone is if I'm not sensing that desire. Assuming the prospect does show up, we want to make sure we handle that intro call the correct way. This is a great opportunity to learn more about your buyer's goals and the problems they might be looking to solve with a solution like yours. With the same level of curiosity, the same goal of discovery as you would with an outbound lead, they've expressed that they need what you have. And so it's really difficult to remember, Hey, they may not even know what we have, right? They, they may have an idea of what the product is, right? And that's, what's making them think that they need it, but maybe it's not actually right, or the other way around, maybe there's some aspect of the product that they hadn't thought about that might. With your inbound leads, you already know there's some sort of interest in your products or services. You know there is some familiarity with your products or services, and you know that there is probably some sort of challenge or goals that they're trying to accomplish, which is why they reached out to you. So you might start your calls for, hey, you know, you guys decided to reach out to us. What was the reason that pushed you to actually fill out the form? And that will get them opening up and keeping them on the talk track to help you. related to your products and services. And then I'll just kind of walk them through like exactly what they want to see and then I'm a little bit more forward with like are we doing this or not. I always get a next step on that first call. Now just because someone came inbound to your company doesn't guarantee they're actually looking to buy your product. There are all kinds of reasons they might want to talk to you. Be careful not to get your time wasted. Look for the warning signs that they are tire kickers. So I actually used to sell cars. So I've seen like real live tire kickers and they waste your time is one way to look at it. I think that the telltale signs are things like, you know, I just want a quote. You ask them questions and they're just not trying to be forthcoming. So when you encounter these signs of people saying things like, just, you know, what's the prize? Can you send me a quote? Stand firm. On what you know to be true about who's a fit for your product. It's a telltale sign if they won't give you that information that maybe somebody in the organization just didn't want this on their desk and said, Hey, call a bunch of people and get some quotes. If they're like, Oh, well, this vendor charges this much. I'm like, great. Buy their software. You're clearly not buying it. So what's the holdup? Julia, you challenger. Now, most companies, your marketing department is also going to be sending over some lower intent leads to your sales team through demand generation campaigns. Someone can attend a webinar or download a white paper and they're an inbound lead. And if you think about where they are in their journey, it's still kind of starting out on that knowledge phase of just identifying who they are, what they're dealing with and the problem. The point of webinars and podcasts and all those things is just to educate and get them to that point where they're like, okay, this is. That's the thing that we're looking for. They're in that like investigative mode and you want to take advantage of that and you want to reach out. But what you don't want to do is scare them away. And if you come along and you try and pull them into the end of their story, it's going to be uncomfortable and you haven't built enough trust to be there. Sherpa, so to speak, but for low intent leads getting the prospect on the phone and asking them why they attended the webinar How did they like it asking for feedback again? We want to focus on low friction asks I would approach it less about hey, do you want to book this meeting? And more about hey, I saw you downloaded this white paper a lot of people when they read this It's on this page here, where it talks about such and such, that really raises an eyebrow. What did you think about that? We'll figure out if this means that, you know, you actually are someone that we need to have a conversation with. But at the end of the day, everybody wins at the end of that conversation. Sometimes you might start getting inbound leads that don't look like good fits. That's where you might wanna work on aligning with your marketing team on targeting and messaging. Having an open line of communication between your marketing team, both of you can help each other out because sales, we're talking to the people every single day. So when you hear something that stood, stood out, let marketing know. When you hear something that might be a little misconstrued, let marketing know. You know, it's a team effort. No sales and marketing can be friends. So there you have it. You are now ready to handle all kinds of inbound leads by reaching out to the buyer as soon as possible after they inquire qualifying your buyers. Booking an intro call, making sure they show up and booking next steps to continue the deal, all while staying in touch and giving feedback to your marketing team to improve the leads that they send you in the future. Good luck out there sellers!