I was doing an email back and forth with
a friend the other day who is having a
lot of trouble qualifying the leads that
come into his company. He was trying
to increase his sales from, let's
say it was 1 million to 2 million a year. It
was around that. And I asked him about
marketing. I was like, 'Okay, so what are you
doing to generate leads, and how many
leads are you getting per month?' And he was
saying he gets about 150 leads a month.
And then I asked him, 'Okay, so how are
you closing those deals?' And he went
through his qualification process and
apparently when he qualifies a deal, he
can close it pretty instantly, but when his
sales team was closing the deal they
were having major issues and so he
always beat them,
he beat his entire team in terms of
sales quota which should not be
happening. So in this video I want to
break down how do you qualify an inbound
lead so that they'll actually buy from
you. Hoping to help out his sales team
and then also help you out.
So this is the complete guide to
qualifying inbound leads. I'm Alex Berman
from Experiment 27, let's jump into it. So
the first thing you want to do is
separate all the leads in your system to
figure out which ones are actually
gonna buy. So how do you figure out which
leads are quality vs which leads are
going to waste your time? The real
question is: how do we know who's worth
talking to?
So the exact process we use to warm up
inbound leads is what I'm gonna go over
here and I'll show you how we see
whether they're a good fit or not. So the
result of implementing a system like
this is that the leads in your pipeline
are going to become more higher quality.
Working with a higher quality base of
clients will lead to more referrals. Both
of those should work together to explode
your business. Basically, grow you by a
tremendous amount. So let's jump into it.
There's William Smith right there.
So number 1 is: learn the different
channels. The different marketing
channels. So for Experiment 27 potential
customers can contact us by: emailing
somebody on our team, if they have our
email address,
pinging us on Twitter, subscribing to
this YouTube channel and leaving a
comment, going to the
Olark chat box on our site or directly
booking a call from the contact us form
on our site, you can get directly on
one of our teams calendars. And what you
need to understand when your qualifying
inbound leads is that a user on each one
of those channels is going to be
expecting a different interaction. And by
understanding that user's mindset when
approaching you'll start to sell more. So
back to this. So when somebody emails
someone on the team they're expecting a
little bit longer of a response. Right?
They might be asking a question,
going back and forth. So you're gonna
want to put a little bit more meatier
responses or try to get them to a call
as soon as possible. I always try to get
them on a call as soon as possible. If
they're pinging on Twitter. Again, it's
gonna be a short response. I always try
to, if somebody's pinging on Twitter and
asking a question, I always try to get
them to send me an email because it's
easier to answer there and email is my
strong suit as you probably guessed by
watching this channel. If they subscribe
to YouTube and they leave a comment on
YouTube. Again, I'm trying to point them
towards email so I'll leave a big
comment to help the rest of the viewers
out, but if it's something very specific
to their business I'll say, 'Hey, would
love to talk about this further. Mind
sending an email alex@experiment27.com?'
And then once they send an email I'll
delete that comment so that no one can
really, so that I don't get spammed too
hard. On the site, chat box on the site, I've
disabled live chat and basically that
just sends me an email now when somebody
fills out the chat box. So I'll treat it
like an email going back and forth. And
directly booking a call on the calendar.
I assume they're qualified if they're
directly booking a meeting on the
calendar, but this happens so rarely that
it's not even worth talking about.
Everyone usually hits us up on
email or chat before they'll just click
the book a call button. So the next thing
you want to do is once you get them into
your email inbox you want to qualify
them using email. Which means ask them
for more information. And I'm gonna go
over the exact script in a second.
So here's what we use. Well,
actually isn't what we use. This is
what we were using at a previous company
using a PoS system. This is an example. So,
subject would be our company name and
then we'd say. -Hey thanks for reaching
out about setting up
mobile payments through Stripe. Would
love to learn more about what you're
dealing with, but first, what's your
monthly revenue? Trying to get a
better idea of who on the team to send
your way. And people are open to
answering these type of questions. They'll
fill them out in contact forms if you
ask what their budget is. And they'll fill
them out in email. Whatever that
qualification metric is. If you're
separating customers by monthly revenue
you can ask them about that in the email.
If you're separating them by their
company size. So if over 500 employees go
to one person, under 500 employees go to
another person or team, you can ask that.
Whatever that question is that you want
to qualify people with. The way that we
qualify inbound leads is a little bit
different system. This is better for like
high-volume SaaS. If you were getting,
like, three or four thousand inbound leads a
month or even like 50,000 inbound leads a month
this is the system you'd implement. For us
as a company. I like getting on every
call or have my sales team get on
every single call because you never
really know what you're missing out on.
But if you're getting too many leads to do that,
this is what you need to be doing. The
goal is to collect one relevant thing
that will instantly tell you if the
inbound lead is qualified or not. For
mobile app development it's usually
budget. So if a client is under 50k you
might send them to a partner or if
they're crazy about the budget or they
won't tell you what the budget is you
might want to send him to a certain guy
whose specialty is getting the budget
out of them. So if you ask what you, if
you ask for what you need upfront it'll
save you a bunch of time. Budget is a good
thing to ask for in the email. Having them...
The easiest thing that I found to ask
for from an inbound lead is actually a
write-up of the application itself. So
let's say they send you a contact form and
it's like a bunch of nonsense that you
can't really understand. You can ask
something like, 'Hey, before we get on a
call would it be possible to take a look
at some specs or a quick paragraph on
what the application is? By the way,
here's my calendar link. Let's let's jump
on the phone when you're free.' So that
way they'll book a call and you'll be able
to get a write-up of their app so you
can cancel the call if they turn out to
be crazy. But again, I don't recommend
canceling calls. Just get on the phone
with everyone you can.
So once you're pretty sure they're a
good fit for your service. You'll want to
get them on the phone and get more info
on their problems. So this is the next
phase of qualification. The easiest way
to ask this is: how much do you know
about our service? By figuring out what
they know about your company already, you
know how much you need to sell them.
If they know a bunch about you
they've... Like for us, we do youtube videos.
So if they watched a bunch of our videos
and they've read a bunch of our blog
posts. Our team knows to approach them in
a certain way versus if they're cold
we're normally gonna have to do like a
45 second pitch that we practice that's
pretty tight in order to get them sold
on us as a company before we jump in to
the actual selling. When can you jump
directly to the questions about fit and
need? You can jump to those if they're a
warm lead and they say that they've
watched your videos. Then you can just
say, 'Oh, yeah. Okay, awesome. Yeah, so
what are you looking to do?' And they'll
basically tell you all their problems.
That's why content marketing is a very
key channel to have. Not just for lead gen,
but for speeding up the sales process. And
then when you assume they don't know
anything about what you do then you
launch into that quick elevator pitch.
Once you have done that. You want to
qualify on the phone. Once they respond
and you listen to their answers. So
you've talked back and forth, you figured
out their problems and their solutions.
Then you want to pitch how your product
or agency can fix the problem that they
just brought up. They'll be talking about
all of their issues. Let's say, 'Hey, I
was talking to three other developers
and they all burned me. Or they all
came in way low and I'm super nervous
about this project.' Then you can answer
that by saying, 'Okay, we built three of
these in the past. You know, for
different industries and this happened,
and you might want to watch out for this.'
And like, basically give your advice,
consultative-selling-style to make them
feel good about you versus the other
developers. Once you do that. You want to
close the deal or progress. The question
I like to ask is, when that
call slumps down at the end. I'll say,
'Okay, what do you think are good next
steps here?' And whatever they answer will
tell you what to do next. So they'll say,
'Well, I think I need to show it to my boss
and I need to give it to him
before we move forward.' So from that you can
say, 'Okay, let's get a meeting on the
calendar next week.
Would love to talk to your boss and
present it to him as well. I'm sure he'll
get a ton of value just listening to us
and get a better view of the development
process as a whole.'
If they are the founder and
they say, 'Okay, I need to talk to my
co-founder before we make a decision.'
You can say, 'What notes do you think
your co-founder would find the most
value in?' And they'll tell you like, 'Okay,
send references and proposal
that's like this long and has these sections.'
Clients are usually, if they
want to work with you even a little, very
open about the type of things that are
going to make their lives
easier when they're selling through. At
least in my experience. That happens
almost every single time. Which I was, I
was very, very confused why that was
happening at first, but I think it's
because clients... They want
companies that are going to deliver
massive value for them. So if you ask for
help you're going to get help,
basically. And that is the entire process.
Feel free to like this video to
encourage this type of content. Subscribe
to this channel for more B2B sales
training and if you need marketing
support for your digital agency check
out experiment27.com !! Thanks! :)