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):

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:

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!)


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