A good sales process requires one very important result—CONVERSION. Converting Suspects to Prospects, Prospects to Leads, and Leads to Customers. And the first step to successful conversion is Lead Qualification. Lead qualification is an information gathering process that begins when a suspect first crosses your path and continues until you've converted a customer or disqualified the contact.

We often see sales and marketing professionals make a very costly mistake—not properly qualifying, and therefore prioritizing, the prospects they engage before investing their time and budget in trying to secure the business. Marketing is too quick to throw the ball over the fence to sales when they get a "name" or "inquiry" and the sales team is too quick to either ignore the lead (feeling it hasn't been well qualified) or push too quickly for the close. These unfortunate, but real-world, scenarios result in a serious waste in resources, or worse yet, a completely ineffective sales process.

So what does it take to better qualify your suspects and convert them to good prospects and even better leads? And what is the best way to go about it? We recommend you create a Lead Qualification Checklist with this 3-step process:

• Analyze. Start with the exact information you need to have in order to automatically qualify or disqualify a suspect. To do this, take a very close look at the profiles of your best customers. Define their common characteristics. Are there similarities between them (i.e. their company size, industry, market, needs, values/interests of the buyer, behavior patterns)? Be as specific as you can be and include both psychographic and demographic attributes. Essentially you are hunting for what information you absolutely have to have in order to identify and move the contact from a suspect to a prospect, from a prospect to a lead, and from a lead to a customer? For a definition of these contact types, see What is Your Sales Process.
  
  
• Gather. Once you've determined the information you need, create a qualification checklist to help you capture the information. Be sure to include basic contact information, as well as a list of the top 8-10 characteristics from your analysis. Once you've created a checklist, put it to work immediately. We recommend making electronic copies available to all of your salespeople, or better yet, incorporating it into your customer relationship management tool. Also, go back and use this checklist with the suspects, prospects, and leads in your current pipeline. Have you gathered all the critical information for each of the opportunities you're already working on?
  
  
• Rank. Once you've gathered the necessary information, use it to rank each of your new and existing opportunities. For example, calculate how many of the 8-10 characteristics align with your prospect and use the data to calculate the quality of the lead (such as COLD=0-3, WARM=4-7, HOT = 7+). Test this against your current pipeline. Are there good leads you're neglecting and cold ones you're spending too much time on?

When a Lead Qualification Checklist becomes a permanent part of your process, you'll be able to quickly rank your leads and determine where you should be spending your time and efforts. Only after a lead has been qualified as a warm or hot prospect do you proceed with an investment in targeting their business. Remember, BE SPECIFIC. Your qualification process is not effective unless it ELIMINATES some prospects from the pool, and highlights the opportunities you have the best chance of winning!

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The Sales and Marketing Toolkits BUNDLED contains:

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