The Good Lead Framework

If you have never picked up the phone and dialed leads, it’s a worthwhile experience. Just picture yourself not on the generating end of the leads but on the calling end. Instead of getting paid when a form gets submitted, you get paid when you close a sale. We’ll factor out the challenge of getting a hold of people. That process alone explains whynmany companies who buy leads will pay another company to call on the leads they buy and transfer over only those that they can get on the phone. For this exercise though, just imagine having nothing but the contact details in front of you and the assumption that the person has an interest in the product you are selling. Are the leads you need to close interested? Are they qualified, i.e., can they actual transact? Thinking through that part alone explains why lead buyers spend upwards of one hundred million per year just trying to gain some additional insight into the leads they’ve bought. It explains why you, in the role of a sales person, would also want some additional context to help you when you speak to that person.

For such a simple question, answering what is a good lead proves anything but. The answer usually focuses on an outcome, e.g., they close. Ask enough buyers, and what you’ll probably hear are the two things mentioned above, that the person is qualified and interested. If you were selling a product or service, that’s what you’d want. You would want a potential customer who was interested and you would want them qualified. I could be interested in a new car, but if I can’t afford the one I’m looking at, from the sellers point of view, I’m not a good lead.

Let’s look at a potential way to visualize a lead. It would have a qualified score and an interest score.

A random sampling of leads, might look something like this.

For simplicity’s sake, we could also look at the chart as a grid in four quadrants.

• VQ-VI – Very Qualified, Very Interested. The best of the best.

• VQ-NI – Very Qualified, Not Interested. They fit the profile; they have the means, but they aren’t into it.

• NQ-VI – Not Qualified, Very Interested. They want it, but they don’t fit the characteristics of other buyers.

• NQ-NI – Not Qualified, Not Interested. Selling ice to an Eskimo.

The quadrant view is not an interpretation of lead scoring or a suggestion of how lead scoring can work. Scoring can identify and isolate characteristics of a lead, and it does a good job of analyzing the X axis. Our qualifying traits either tend not to change (gender) or they change predictably (age). Scores also plug in to other data sets to provide more color into whether I have the socio-economic characteristics of good leads. What it can’t do, yet, is say whether I’m interested.

Finally, let’s layer the random sampling inside of the grid view.

Here’s where things get tricky. After reading the above example with an interested but not qualified car buyer (NQ-VI), guaranteed that some are thinking – but I could become a good lead. I might earn more money in the future, or, the sales person might sell me into a different car that I can afford. Two perfectly valid reasons that help illustrate why an answer to the question of what is a good lead is not clear cut. Said a different way, it’s easy to define a good lead. VQ-VI. And, it’s easy to define a bad lead. NQ-NI. What, though, are leads that have part of each. They are either qualified but not interested (VQ-NI) or interested but not qualified (NQ-VI). These are the tricky ones, because selling can make a big difference. The sales process can look for ways to push them into the truly monetizable quadrant.

As there are only so many naturally occurring leads in the top right quadrant, so much of what takes place happens in the other three. They also prove that lead evaluation is not a two dimensional process. It needs at least another dimension. Good leads aren’t just qualified and interested. They are committed. They are dedicated. The longer the contract the more this matters. If you refinance your home, you need to hang in their for weeks. If you are signing-up for school, you need to be in it for years. That’s why there is a long-term danger in certain areas when focusing on leads that are missing one or all attributes. Good sales masks true commitment, but until there is a gauge of commitment both sellers and buyers must hold off from overselling – the sellers, in order to make a lead out of one that shouldn’t have been; the buyers from making a lead into a sale that ultimately shouldn’t have been.