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[Music] good morning and welcome to mini mentors the weekly podcast that shapes entrepreneurs in the MENA region the podcast will be hosted by Sasha Christie and Lucas the knowledge [Music] good morning everyone and welcome to Mina Mentors this is episode 5 and today we'll be talking about how to qualify leads a lot of b2b companies nowadays they get a lot of leads on a daily basis the big question is always how do you know if these leads are the right fit for your business and how do you qualify them so good morning Luca you will be joining us for this podcast today what are you everybody and yes so qualifying we decide it's a big thing with particularly with companies that work b2b first of all special what is what a what if I'm lead I mean why do you qualify leads and why why is it important to qualify them well basically when you when you qualify a lead what it means is that you want to make sure that this lead is the right fit for your company or for the services that you're offering because the problem is that in your business you know the resources are limited you don't have unlimited salespeople or business development people that can take the time to meet every single lead that inquire about your services so the whole process of qualifying needs is to prevent and to avoid wasting time with the leads that are not the right fit for your company not the right fit would mean for example that they don't have the budget it would mean that maybe the requirements they have though doesn't fit your company it might be the fact that they don't have the authority to make a decision maybe they don't have a proper needs maybe they're just inquiring about something that it's not possible for your company to do and we always need to qualify these leads to proper ways through what we call a qualifying lead score you want to talk more about this guca well first of all we'll talk about the lead score eventually maybe let's talk about you know how you can even start to call it buyer leads so I don't know personally I think even before you receive Ally you should have some sort of minor betting process so you know I see some of the bigger agencies for example will have when you want to submit a lead on their website they'll have a budget selection menu and it starts at whatever their minimum budget they work with is so if you're below that they're not even going to talk to you like they're not even gonna give you their time because they know how big they are they know how big the projects are and how they they're fine I'm sorry so they know that they're not gonna work on anything smaller than that and I think this applies to basically any business you can you know when you set up your forms for somebody to contact you to submit an inquiry you can already start thinking about how you want to vet those leads and how you want to qualify them so if I don't know I mean what would be an example like let's say you provide let's say you you own a catering company and you cater to parties and let's say you don't want to cater to really small gatherings so you only want to take care of stuff that's like I don't know 50 people plus then you can have a selection that asks you how many people are gonna be at the gathering that's being posted and it starts at 50 you know 50 to a 100 hundreds 150 etc so I think you can even start before receiving belief what do you think afterafter leads come in after they've contacted you and let's say you know you'd forwarded 24 salespeople and you have them call the leads do you think a script is important when you go through a script would you have like a list of you know check marks or like some questionnaire to fill in well what do you think is the best way to go the best way to go in my opinion is to have a questionnaire to fill in because you want to make sure that these leads are properly qualified and in average you have five things that you need to know about your leads before to qualify them the first one is to make sure that they have a proper need they need to have a proper needs or proper requirements because if they don't they're not qualified the second is that they need to have the authority to make a decision you don't want to get to a point where you know you set up a meeting with an assistant and then you have to follow up and I get a second or third one with with the decision maker at the later stage make sure that the person that you will eventually meet or that you're talking to right now at this stage has the authority to make a decision the problem is that when you when you have such a lead on the phone or when you have such a lead on email it's very difficult to ask if they're the decision-makers and you know if they will be the one making the decisions at the end of the day so what we usually ask is we usually ask them a simple question that doesn't make them feel bad it's a question that goes like other than yourself who will be the one making a decision for this project because you just want to make sure that if you do set up a meeting if there's anyone else involved in the decision process you want to make sure that this person comes to the meeting or you want to make sure that this person is cc'd you know in your email sequence that's number two number three you want to make sure that this person has proper knowledge of what they want because especially now industry building apps and website so many times people come in and they tell us I want to build an app okay what kind of app I want to build an app similar to hook okay I mean what do you mean similar to soup or you know any other e-commerce website it's very important to make sure that the people that come in as lead they know what they want to build because you don't want to be wasting time with these people that just woke up this morning they have an idea you know they have a vision they just want to build an app because you know apps are cool and they they submitted their requirement you want to make sure that this person have done the research they know what they want they know what they want to build they know exactly the different features that they want in their app I mean we can help them complete this vision we can help them with suggestions at a later stage to make this app more complete but they need to come in with proper requirement because we have this too many times where people just come in and say I want to build an app what kind of up I don't know you know and you want to avoid this the fourth one is as Luca was mentioning before is that they need to have a budget because I mean it depends how big your or your agency is but I mean any agencies out there they have a lot of costs on a weekly on a monthly basis and any agency they have a minimum budget that they want to work with and if this budget doesn't match the budget of the potentially there's not even point of pursuing with this lead I know it's difficult to ask the budget of a lead but it has to be done it has to be done what what I usually what we usually say is you can mention you know in our case if you if you're planning to have an app you know such as this as this on average gonna be around fifteen to twenty five thousand dollars you know you give them a price wrench is this something that fits your budget if yes great let's pursue if not well you know I don't think that my agency is the right fit for you if you look at the example for catering that look I mentioned before is the same you know for your kind of catering on average we charge between you know two to three thousand dollars a day is this a budget that you had in mind if yes great if not well let's not waste time and the fifth point is is this lead the right fit for your company you know is this kind of projects the kind of projects that you want your company to pursue if it is the right fit and if it's part of the vision you have for the year if it's part of the vision you have when it comes to projects that you want to handle great if not again not qualified the big question is as I said before you know we usually give our guys or any business development NOC a kind of questionnaire you know to fill in all these different requirements and this is what we call a lead scoring system do you want to talk about this a little more locum and how this works and how do you put this in place and why is it so important to put this in place yes so the lead scoring system is basically like a bit of a cheat sheet for your business development teams so that they can quite easily and sort of systematically find out whether to pursue leads after just one phone call so essentially what we have set up here is they'll go through basically a checklist of things they need to get from a new lead so it's all the things you mentioned it would be like their level of decision making power so that's for example a score out of 10 it's like if are they the CEO of the company which would be its anathan or are they literally some sort of admin assistant or something that has basically no decision-making power over all in in the choice of this project and then they get like a1 or a2 same thing for the budgets do they have it or not essentially you end up going through all these important points on your checklist and assigning the score to each points and then once you add up all the points and you average them out above a certain level is where you should pursue lead and anything below that you should keep drop it at that point because even though you know you might end up closing this lead and even though it might end up being a good lead for a company overall on average it won't be and so the time wasted pursuing this leads when you could be pursuing other better leads is it was just not worth it overall so the most important thing when when you're making your qualifying score questionnaire or whatever it's important to get questions that are relevant to your business so you don't want to be checking off things that aren't important for your clients you need to look at your ideal customer and see what characteristics this person has that are actually essential then based on those you create your cat questionnaire and then you know to actually get the right rating you know above which you would pursue the lead I would say look back at all the best clients you dealt with and look back in decent clients you dealt with that you would deal with again and then look back at clients or people that you wish you know lead you wish you hadn't pursued and you wish you would have dropped at the very start and then assign the scores you know score those leads in retrospect you know try to be as objective as possible try to score them how you would have scored them at the time and then see you know test your system TV balances out see if those unfavorite leads fall into the unfavorite leads category if the good was fall into the good leads category that's how you'll know that it works and you know once it does work you give this your team you would struck them on how to score everything you can even automate it you know make an excel sheet and you know they just fill in all the different numbers and then it sums them up by itself averages them out you can even color code it at the end you know if the light turns green pursue the lead if it turns red don't it's super simple once you've once you've got it set up and it's very very efficient so you know your sales people can be making calls and they don't have to do all this unnecessary thinking they just see if it's a red or a green cell and they know whether to pursue or not so I think it's something that's might take a bit of time at the beginning but it's worth it's definitely worth it in the long run because you get so much more efficient at deciding whether or not to pursue leads and the quality if your lead just goes way up so I think it's something anybody should put in place what do you think here paint out there well you've covered the lead scoring system pretty well now the only thing that I want to add to this is as we talked about it before you know these five characteristics that you need to go through through this lead scoring system to make sure that these leads are properly qualified and the big question is how do you get this information ha out of a potential lead what kind of questions do you ask in order to extract this information out of this potential leads so for example when we talk about the characteristic number one which is the needs a common questions would be what is your goal you know what's your long-term vision about this project for example so that you get to see what kind of needs they have when it comes to the second characteristic which is decision making the questions that you know I would ask which is something that I've mentioned earlier is you know apart from yourself who else will be involved in the decision-making of this project you know so that you get to know and you get to extract information of who else will be involved without making the particular person that you're on the phone with feel bad as if they don't have any decision power because if you just ask them who's your boss or who's the marketing manager who's gonna take the decision on this you know you make them feel inferior and you don't want that to happen the third one which is the budget the thing is you don't want to get to a point where you where you ask them directly because this is a very commercial approach and I personally don't like it you know it's on the phone with the potentially then you just ask them eh you know what what's your budget you know what what we usually do is we usually ask them what kind of apps they would like to build what kind of website they would like to build or in your case whatever you know industry you're in or catering what kind of events do you want to have and then based on this you just informed them you know from past experience apps like this websites like this events like that usually cost around this much to this much you know you give them a range and if and based on the reaction indirectly you know what kind of budget they have without asking them based on the reaction they have you know what kind of budget they have so you extract this information out of them the fourth point which is requirements so the question is you know do they have proper knowledge of what they want do they know exactly the the requirements so in that case you know you just ask them questions relevant to their inquiry for example if they want to build an app ask them what kind of features you want on this app how are you planning to monetize this app if you're talking about an event what would be the location of the event how many guests are you expecting what kind of food do you want what kind of layout you want us to put in place you know it's just about making sure that this particular lead has the proper knowledge of what is it that they want okay and the last point which is is this lead the right fit for your company this will vary with different leads that you deal with in our case you know it's based on how the conversation goes it's it's based on what kind of long-term vision they have because in our agency we we don't want to work project by project basis only the leads or the clients that we work with we want to make sure that they have a long-term vision you know in this case they want to build an app to start with or they want to build a website to start with but they have the long-term vision to eventually you know focus on digital marketing there is the potential of us having a business relationship for the next 2-3 years to come and this is these are the leads that we want to target or that we want to you know put more importance on anything else that you want to add look up and I think we pretty much covered it you know when qualifying leads most people think it's just about budget and it's not there's a lot more a lot more things that go into it and a lot more things that need to be considered because I mean how many clients have we had who had the budget but we still wish we never you know we had never worked with them just because if we had betted them properly we would have realized that they just weren't right for us you know this is something we we learned over the years how to properly qualify engage ever you incoming lead I guess my final takeaway would be if there's anything that's really really essential to your agency something that's you know a deal make or a deal breaker I think that's something you should consider being very direct about and maybe even putting it as a complete prerequisite to submitting an inquiry so you know I mentioned earlier your company won't work below a certain amount well you know it's it's uncomfortable it's gonna lose you inquiries overall but maybe you should ask for the budget straight upfront and let people know you know you don't work below a certain amount or if you if you only want to work long term then maybe you should have a requirement that asks how long in the future they've planned out this business or something you know I mean it's a silly example but ask the important questions basically make sure that at least your most important issues are addressed upfront and you know you get started on the right foot okay thank you look I guess that covers it all so I hope that this was insightful for you guys and I will see you next week