Before the deep sales dive you gotta screen through the luke-warm jive.

You're in business to stay in business whether you've got an end game, a path for aggressive growth, or it's a lifestyle.

But for most smaller HR suppliers, when you've actually invested the resources and did all the continued hard marketing work -- now what?

I mean, you've got a bucket full of leads from Webinars, white paper downloads and the like -- now what?

We've talked before about lead nurturing before and how to stay in front of your prospects with continued content marketing.

What about cutting through the luke-warm jive and qualifying the leads? You don't need an complicated enterprise-level qualification system to get this done.

You and your sales and marketing staff (or you and your marketing firm -- or just you) can answer a simple question:

What constitutes a qualified lead for my firm?

Then develop qualification criteria based on (if you haven't already captured some of this in lead-capture forms):

• What’s the size of your company? (If this is a consideration.)
• Are you currently in the market for [insert your products/services]?
• What is your timeframe to buy [insert your products/services]
• Do you have a budget allocated for the purchase of [insert your products/services]?

These are but a few screening questions you can ask your leads. If they qualify as a warmer lead -- a potential buyer in the near term -- then you escalate your sales process.

Maybe then you'll get more detailed and ask them questions like:

• What is your decision-making process?
• Do you send out RFI’s, and/or RFP’s?
• How do you research, interview and screen potential vendors in order to create a short list of potential vendors?
• Who is involved in the decision-making process?

Of course your qualification screening process and the more detailed questions you ask all depend on what products and services you sell.

But for goodness sake don't rely only on e-mail to qualify leads. Write a script, pick up the phone and call them. Thank them for their interest in your "stuff". Ask them for a few minutes to answer simple questions.

You're going to get a heck of a lot of voice mail but you will certainly benefit from those you speak live to -- those that may become buyers.

Before the deep sales dive you gotta screen through the luke-warm jive.

We're helping more and more clients do just this, so give us a call if you need advice.

Post by Kevin W. Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn - and now join HRmarketer on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn!)