Don’t Chase Leads Away by Disqualifying Them

What do you think of when you think of account qualification? You may think of “qualified leads” or some way of weeding through potential customers so that you don’t spend time where you’re not likely to get sales.

Most salespeople think the point of qualification is to spend your time wisely. Here’s what one sales coach suggests:

It’s really easy easy to waste our time in front of customers who aren’t going to buy…remember, if it’s not real, or we can’t win it, or it’s not worth it—you’re wasting your time—find something else that is!

The message this coach delivers is that time is money; your efficiency matters, and customers are infinite and undifferentiated, so that if one doesn’t fit, drop him or her quickly and go find another more likely candidate. The implied message to the customer is: My time is important, and you are not. You are important to me only in terms of how fast I can sell you and how many dollars I can get in the sale, and I want to figure that out as quickly as possible so as to minimize my potentially unproductive time.

Think about this approach as applied to some other aspect of human relationships. Suppose a teacher looked at her students this way? What’s the reputation of someone who approaches dating solely as a screening mechanism, rather than as an exploration and learning opportunity? What would you think of a father who screened his interactions with his kids to determine what was in it for him?

The approach is built around a transactional, seller-centric model. You judge that you won’t run into this person or this company, again, so that the only thing that needs to be done is to evaluate, as quickly as possible, whether or not there’s anything in it for you.

It’s the equivalent of a military scorched earth policy. If there’s nothing good for me, leave it behind, pay them no mind, they’re irrelevant. I’m busy and the monthly quota still needs filling.

Trust-based selling has a different approach. Of course, if you’re selling widgets, you don’t want to spend time talking to buyers of window shades. But usually buyers and sellers get put together for some sensible reason. There may or may not be a sale coming out of it but some common interest brought them together.

These situations are not potential wastes of your time—they are the best marketing opportunities you have. A lead that you disqualified isn’t just an empty hole where you invested some time. A disqualified lead is a human being you talked to or met or who sought you out—someone who has now formed an impression of you.

A lead you disqualified is someone who knows enough about your business to have sought you out, who has enough of a relevant business issue to think you might be of help, who has a business close enough to your customer base to warrant conversation. Such a person is very likely to walk with or near the clientele that interests you. A positive impression can result in second or third-level referrals. People put far more weight on personal testimonials than they do on unvalidated images.

Never get rid of someone the minute you find out he’s not qualified. Never leave unsolicited e-mail inquiries unanswered. Instead, invest some small amount of time to give the person the benefit of your knowledge and wisdom. Help point them in the direction of solving problem or issue it is they have. If your product or service isn’t right for them, they don’t expect you to continue to give charity. But they will be mightily impressed if you care enough to give a bit of your expertise to help them knowing it isn’t going to result in a sale.

Isn’t such an encounter a free opportunity for personalized publicity? Isn’t it a chance to send out someone into the market who understands your business and the kinds of clientele you seek, together with a testimonial that you behaved well toward the person—when you didn’t have to?

Investing over time in those kinds of leads generates a reasonable rate of return. You can’t tell which unqualified lead will result in a lead, nor when; but if you live your selling life according to the principle of doing good when the opportunity presents itself, those leads will pay back several fold the minor investment you made.

All that is required is to stop seeing leads as opportunities to be dis-qualified; and to see them as opportunities to help clients, with a payback stream less distinctly linked to the client than in qualified lead cases. The only difference lies in how fast you get paid and from whom.

Thinking this way means you’re operating less from tactics and more from values. If you just “do business” this way, you become known for it—in a positive way.

This article is from “Trust-Based Selling (Using Customer Focus and Collaboration to Build Long-Term Relationships)” by consultant Charles H. Green. It will be published in February 2006 by McGraw Hill. Copyright 2006 by Charles H. Green.