3 Questions To Ask About The Qualified Lead You Just Received...
If you partner with a teleprospecting firm or have an in house inside sales team, they may have some sort of scoring system in place to evaluate the quality of the opportunities they are throwing over the fence to sales. I applaud the idea in theory, but I can't help but equate it to letting a 6th grader fill out their own report card. ALL A'S BABY!! I'm not accusing your vendor or in house inside sales team of dishonesty; I'm merely stating that they are biased as they generated the opp. If you really want to find out if your fully qualified leads are living up to that name, ask your customer...the salesperson receiving it. You can easily ascertain the quality of an opportunity by asking your sales people these three basic questions. 
1. Based on what you've read in the XYZ lead write up, what are the top three corporate wide business pains facing that company that we can easily solve with our solution? If your salesperson can answer this give the lead 33 points.
This is what we sell to, we don't sell to timeframe and budget. We need to understand what is wrong within that organization so that we can eloquently explain to them how we can solve it.
2. Based on what you've read in the XYZ lead write up, what are the top three individual business pains that we can eliminate from the main point of contacts’ life at work with our solutions? If your salesperson can answer this give the lead another 33 points
This is how you build rapport. It's not enough for your Teleprospecting rep to find out what is wrong within the company at large that we can solve. Your lead should contain information surrounding how that affects your prospects day specifically. This level of detail allows your salesperson to connect at a deeper level with the prospect. They'll not only understand how to help the company, but they'll understand how to help the contact as well.
3. Assuming all of the information provided is accurate and your discovery call happens as scheduled, what would you predict this deal would be worth in forecasted dollars? If your salesperson can answer this one give the lead a final 34 points.
Points 1 and 2 are great, but they aren't enough to get your rep excited to sell. If your salesperson can answer this question it means that the lead contains all of the business profile information needed to start thinking about the potential size of the deal. Number of users, potential need for services, if it's hardware..some sort of idea as to how much of it they'll need. This is critical information in the success of the first meeting. A salesperson that is already crunching numbers as to the size of the deal is thinking about closing. They are more excited and in many cases will have a more successful call
Successful leads contain three very important attributes. Corporate wide pain, individual business pain, and business profile information. I know that some of you will scream from the mountaintop that I'm forgetting Budget, Timeframe, and Decision Making Tree. I'm not, I just don't believe in scoring a fully qualified lead based on those things. You've got to ask questions in those areas, that is a no brainer. However, where a lead should truly be scored is in the meat of the opportunity, the stuff that not only helps your salesperson to sell, but get's them excited to do it.
How do you score a fully qualified lead?