Score and route inbound leads

1. Qualify before the call

The case. A weight-loss company had exceptional show rates and high profits, especially for a small business with an ordinary product. Looking at how it worked turned up something that seemed absurd at first: it actively canceled sales appointments. Who cancels sales appointments? Yet the owner made far more money in weight loss than almost anybody else. Asked why, he explained. Every lead fills in an application before the sales call, and from the answers he can tell who is going to be a fit.

He was qualifying his leads. As a result he spent far more time working good leads and ignored the bad ones entirely.

The tactic. Collect information on each lead, then take the leads unlikely to buy off the calendar, to free time for those more likely to buy. Applications are the case's way to collect it. Adding friction before booking, to cut bad appointments, is a separate move on SOP 85 section 8.

2. Send the best leads to the best closers

The case. At about the same time came a dinner with the top sales rep at a timeshare company of nearly 3,000 reps, a man who had finished first in five of the last six years. Asked his secret, he told this story. Winning his first year earned him an hour with the chief executive, normally a formality at which nothing happens. He used it. Asked what the company could do to drive more sales, he said it was wasting all its good leads on junior reps, while he wasted two-thirds of his own time on people with credit scores of 500. Give him the best leads, he said, and he would make the company a lot of money. It took the rest of the hour to persuade the chief executive to try it in his local office. The next year he raised that office's production fivefold. The company rolled it out across the country, and its sales went from $200M to $1B a year over the next five years.

As obvious as it sounds, it was not being done in the companies of the owner who heard the story either. Once it was, the profit came at once.

Flag: the timeshare case. SOP 168, section 5, tells this case with other figures for the credit scores, the sales and the years it took. This page does not settle which reading is right.

The tactic. Connect the leads most likely to buy with the reps most likely to close.

3. The five steps

In order:

1. Study your best customers: what they do, and who they are (their demographics).
2. Ask those same questions in your opt-ins, in your applications and in the time before sales appointments.
3. Score every lead on a 1 to 5 scale, or red, yellow and green, by how qualified they are.
4. Route your best leads to your best closers.
5. Enjoy the results.

4. The traffic-light score, and the middle band

The bands. Reds are truly unqualified. Yellows are less qualified. Greens are prime leads. As you would expect, there are plenty of yellows.

What happened to the yellows. A young rep on a cold-calling team complained that some of his leads just were not qualified and working them felt like a waste of time. The answer he got was to treat every unqualified lead as free practice: he could still run the script and hear the objections. He took it to heart. He offered to take the under-qualified leads from the whole team; the older reps just wanted to cherry-pick, so most of them handed him their yellows. He worked them in off-hours and at weekends and kept closing them. In time he summed it up as "yellows are the new gold", and for a salesperson or an owner with the right outlook, they are.

The culture that grew from that, and what it is worth to a team, is SOP 88 — Pay and rank reps on show rate.

5. Match the message to the lead

Get the right message to each lead. One software company raised its email marketing return 7x after segmenting its list; the figure is a third party's and this page gives it as theirs. Once your leads are segmented by score, nurture each in line with what you know about them. There is an easy version and a hard one.

The easy version. The simplest version of this is to look them up: their profiles, their website, a search of their name, and what they have done recently. It takes five minutes of preparation before you speak to a lead or reach out to them, for far higher response rates. Now that you can tell good leads from bad, research the good ones.

For example, you might open by saying you can see their site traffic is down 18 percent this quarter; that another customer was in a similar spot and is up 100 percent 90 days later; and that you have prepared a walkthrough showing how the same principles could apply to their business. The figures in that line belong to the example; yours come from your own research and your own customers.

At the very least, when you introduce yourself, have some idea of who the lead is, and say so early. People are more likely to listen to, and pay attention to, somebody who acts like somebody they already know.

The hard version. This takes more time up front and less from then on. Set up emails and texts for every category of lead that comes in. If you ask businesses their revenue, run a different sequence for each revenue level. If you ask people how much weight they want to lose, send them case studies and content that fit that amount. Make each sequence specific to the problems those people live with. Clear a weekend and build all of them; the higher response rates repay it.

The bottom line. More bookings, and more shows.

6. What this page does not decide for you

• Which questions to ask. They come from your own best customers; none are given.
• Which scale to use. A 1 to 5 score and red, yellow and green are both offered; neither is preferred. A rule of thumb from scoring customers, on SOP 273, section 2: have as many bands as there are different things you will do as a result, since a number score ends up cut into ranges anyway, each with its action.
• Where the lines between the bands fall. This page gives no figure for a cut-off.
• What to do with reds. The qualifying case ignores bad leads; the free-practice answer above treats an unqualified lead as still worth running the script on. Neither names reds. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• Who counts as your best closer. Ranking reps is SOP 88.
• The best closer, or whoever is free. In sections 2 and 3, top leads go to top closers. Under SOP 90 section 3, each new lead goes to whichever rep is free, and moves on if two minutes pass without a call. One rule routes by quality, the other by speed. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• Whether a credit score is a criterion. It appears only as a detail of one rep's complaint.

7. The checklist

Question	The answer
Why qualify	To spend time on the leads likely to buy and take the others off the calendar
How	Applications and demographic information, so leads talk to the right people
Where the questions come from	What your best customers do, and who they are
Where you ask them	Opt-ins, applications, and the time before sales appointments
The score	1 to 5, or red, yellow and green
How many bands	A rule of thumb: one for each different action you will take
Who gets the best leads	The best closers
Yellows	Worth working; the new gold, with the right outlook
Messaging, the easy way	Look each good lead up before you speak; five minutes
Messaging, the hard way	Separate emails and texts for every category of lead
At the very least	Know who they are, and say so early

8. What this page does not cover

Incentives and proof for getting scored leads to turn up are SOP 87 — Lift a show rate with incentives, and the list of personalization tactics that this page draws on is in its section 2. Adding friction before booking is SOP 85 section 8, and the setter scripts that ask qualifying questions on the phone are SOP 53.

Credit checks and data-protection rules are not covered on this page.