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Should You Pre-qualify Your
Advertising Sales
Leads?
Not all magazine advertising
sales leads are “created equal”. It seems as though for every hot one,
there are a dozen or so from literature collectors, competitors and other
non-buyers.
A lot of
companies send these raw leads directly to the sales force for follow-up.
Doing so has several drawbacks:
1. Outside sales people
aren’t good at qualifying leads. Don’t get me wrong... they’re certainly
capable of it. It’s just that they place a low priority on
lead qualification because such a high percentage of raw leads are dead
ends. When they do it, it’s apt not to be as timely or thorough as you would
hope. The risk is in getting in on good opportunities late, or perhaps not
at all.
2. Its tough to get feed
back. Marketers need feedback to gauge the effectiveness of the
magazines that they advertise in. To be useful this feedback needs to be
organized and consistent across sales territories. Every one’s
definition of an “A” lead has to be the same. In practice, getting
good
feedback from the field is very difficult.
3. Lead qualification is
a poor use of a sales person’s time. Outside sales people provide
their maximum benefit when they're in front of prospects selling.
Peripheral tasks like lead qualification dilute their overall effectiveness
and steal from the top line.
Lead pre-qualification
is a great alternative. It accomplishes the same end result in a
more timely, consistent and cost effective way.
Properly organized, it is a
low to moderate skill level activity. It requires a very good
telephone presence, but only a basic understanding of your products, and can be staffed at a fraction of the cost of an outside sales person.
It’s done by calling each new
lead and asking a brief series of closed ended questions about the
prospect company's application, the timing of any planned purchases, and the
contact’s level of authority.
At the end of each contact
the caller
rates the lead according to uniform criteria. Typically, hot
leads are sent to the sales force for immediate follow-up, future prospects
are entered into a database for periodic mailings and telephone follow-up, and unqualified
leads are
removed from the active database altogether.
Outside sales people prefer
pre-qualification not only because it frees them from a tedious task, but
because they know that each lead that they get is a good one, worthy of
their full attention. Sales managers like it because it keeps their sales
people selling, and provides another objective measure of sales
effectiveness. Marketers like it because it lets them evaluate
publications on a “cost per qualified lead” basis.
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