To convert more sales and turn leads into customers you need to be dealing with qualified prospects. If somebody is not responsive, you can decide, do I want to continue to pursue this person, or do I want to leave them to my competitors? Let my competitors chase that person. If they’re disqualified, you don’t have to spend time with them at all.
David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of converting more sales: turning leads into customers. Welcome back, Jay.
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Jay: Hey, David. Such a pleasure to be with you. This is kind of the secret sauce, right? I mean, if we could all increase our conversion rates and bring down our customer acquisition costs that’s where the rubber meets the road.
David: Yeah, in a lot of cases it’s a really critical part of it, and I think some people make a mistake upfront when it comes to conversion, and that’s that they want to convert everyone. You know, they just meet somebody for the first time and they immediately go into sales mode.
And I think that they can really save themselves and other people a lot of time and a lot of aggravation if they actually start where it really should begin with a little bit of qualification. Trying to find out if they have the need, the desire, the money, the budget, the willingness to spend, those kind of things.
Because a lot of times there are salespeople who will spend weeks, months, years pursuing somebody, just to find out once they get an appointment with them that they weren’t qualified to buy to begin with. And you can eliminate that right up front. Save yourself a world of heartache.
Jay: Yeah, I love this point, David. I can’t tell you I’ve had this happen, you know, I’m on the phone with somebody and talking about the product and things like that, and then after asking some questions, I realize this is not a good fit. I don’t have the services they’re looking for.
And I could have saved us both a lot of time if I had done a little pre-qualification before we got started.
David: Yeah. Or if that’s happening on the first call, then you’re pretty good at that point. But literally, I know there are people who have gone to networking functions for a long period of time, and they’re talking to people and trying to get them to agree to an appointment, and then they finally agree to the appointment, and then you get out there and you’re talking to them.
I had this experience myself early in my career. I’ll never forget it. There was this guy and I thought he was going to be a great prospect, so I tried to get an appointment with him. He agreed to the appointment. I showed up at his place.
His place was a dump and he didn’t show up for the appointment, and I was sitting there looking around and I was thinking, “okay, why am I here?” And so a little bit of diligence upfront and a little bit of qualifying goes a long way.
Jay: Yeah, I agree. And I also think technology can do a lot of that pre-qualifying, right? We had the experience where our Google ad buy was not targeting the right people. And so I was getting all these calls and I’m like, “wow, look at these leads we’re getting.”
And it turned out I was just wasting time. So I’m wasting money on the Google ad buy. And then I’m wasting money fielding all of these calls. That’s just, you’re spinning your wheels at that point.
David: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about it, pitching unqualified prospects is the single biggest time waster on the planet. So if we can avoid that, we’re going to be a lot better off.
Jay: Yeah. I think there’s a tendency though to think, “oh, we can sell anybody.” Or I think the other side of that is if you’re not pre-qualifying, then you don’t have a really good idea of how effective you are as a salesperson, because you’re comparing it to every person you talked to.
Like, I’ve talked to a hundred people, my close rate was 20%. Well, if 5% of those were never going to be a lead for you, or never going to be a customer, then you’re not really using accurate numbers. Right?
David: Yeah, exactly. Everything’s skewed when you’re doing it that way. So, I mean, I believe qualification upfront is really important and systematic follow up is another thing.
If you’re not following up systematically with people, which means that you are in touch with them at the times when you need to be in touch with them, then you’re also going to be at a big disadvantage.
Jay: Yeah. and that’s really an area where I struggled a long time ago, and that is if I didn’t get them right away, then I’m going to move on to the next person.
David: Mm-hmm.
Jay: And like you said, it’s about relationships. And again, I love technology that can do a lot of this stuff for you, drip campaigns and those kind of things.
David: Right.
Jay: But because somebody down the road, they don’t need you now, that doesn’t mean they’re not going to need you in the future.
David: Yeah, and so if you’ve qualified them and you know that they would still be a good prospect for what you’re selling, then at that point you want to make sure that you’ve got something in place, whether it’s inside a crm, however it is that you’re doing, so that you know that you are in touch with them until they’re ready to buy from you.
And when we talk about systematic follow up, it goes far beyond the, “are we there yet” approach that a lot of people take where it’s like when you’re traveling in a car with small kids and they keep saying, “are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
And there are some salespeople who do that. They just call and say, “Hey, you want to buy, you ready to buy? You ready to buy? Are we there yet?” And that’s not what I mean by systematic and or strategic follow up.
Jay: Yeah. I think part of that is you start to seem desperate, right? And I think what we need to avoid, and I’m really learning this, is the feeling that I’m a salesperson and they’re a potential lead. If they feel like I’m a salesperson, then I’ve already lost kind of the battle, right?
So, whereas if I’m a consultant, if I’m somebody who can help them grow, if I’m somebody who they have a relationship with, who they feel really cares about them, then that’s a real advantage.
But if they just feel like this is sales to potential client relationship, that’s a much harder road to go down.
David: It definitely is. And when we think about it, you know, once you’ve qualified somebody and you’ve got your follow up in place and you’re interacting with them. You know, part of the deal then is persuasion.
You know, what are we saying that is going to entice this person to want to move forward? Essentially, are we hitting their hot buttons? What are their hot buttons? What are the things that are motivating them to either take action or not take action?
Because if you’re not doing that, once again, you’re going to have a lot of difficulty converting.
Jay: Hmm. Yeah. This kind of goes back to the pre-qualifying you talked about. You’re not just finding out if they’re a fit for your product. You’re finding out what their specific needs are.
Because how often have you been in or anybody been involved in. I’m pitching a sales strategy to them and it doesn’t meet their needs. And what I’ve done is I’ve conveyed to them that I didn’t listen or that I don’t know their business.
And there’s nothing worse, in my opinion, if somebody’s trying to sell me something and they haven’t taken the time to really figure out who I am, what my needs are, what is my business model? And that can really be a detractor to the process.
You can lose the sale if you are going down the wrong path.
David: Yeah, you definitely need to keep it focused on them. A lot of times we make the mistake of talking about ourselves and our product and our capabilities and how great we are and it’s like, you’ve lost me at hello. When you do that.
Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been there like with somebody else and we walked in the door and we were both supposed to be part of the sales process and before there’s even a hello, they’re like diving into the product and opening the book and this is what we have and what we have.
And. I’m just like you got to at least take a few minutes to set some baseline relationship and ask some questions and pre-qualify even there, if you’ve pre-qualified them before you’ve arrived.
I think that pre-qualify is really, I think there is a pre part, but there’s a constant requalifying that happens as you go along.
David: Absolutely, and people are constantly cycling through the five levels of qualification. Sometimes they’re ready to buy right now. Sometimes they have specific dates in mind. Sometimes they’re open to it. They’re generally receptive. Sometimes they’re disqualified, and sometimes they’ll just ghost you. They’re just unresponsive.
When you recognize that they’re five essential levels, then you know exactly how to follow up with each one, and it becomes a lot more systematic.
Jay: Yeah, and I love that you’ve broken these things down into different levels. Because that makes it really easy to classify. And that’s the problem is you may have a sense that you want to do this, but you really don’t know which buckets to put people in. What are those buckets?
If you can have a system where you’re not giving a lot of thought, you’re just like, boom, this one goes here, this one goes there, then you can spend more time working on the right buckets, I’m guessing. Right?
David: Exactly. Because if somebody is not responsive, you can decide, do I want to continue to pursue this person, or do I want to leave them to my competitors? Let my competitors chase that person. If they’re disqualified, you don’t have to spend time with them at all.
But if you focus on those first three buckets, the ones who are ready now, the ones who have specific dates and the ones who are generally receptive, you’re going to be a lot better off.
Now the ones who are generally receptive. The goal there is then to find out, well, when are they planning on moving forward? When will they be ready to buy? And a good way to do that is through sequencing, which would be another step in this process is to say, we’re going to put out a series of communications, drip campaign, whatever you want to call it, that is designed to be in front of them when they’re ready to buy. Even if we don’t know exactly when that’s going to be.
Jay: Yeah, because that can be hard to project. I mean, I know with promotional products there’s a seasonality, but it could also be based upon their product releases, right? They’ve got a new piece of software coming out, or they’ve got a new special or something like that. So it can be very business oriented.
They may not know when they need it until the day before. Right? Or the day of, the way I see some people run their businesses.
David: That’s true. And there are a lot of times where we’re in touch with someone for a long time and we’re not hearing back from them. And then we sort of give up for a while.
We wander off, we do something else, we pursue other people, and then we come back and we find out they bought from someone else.
Jay: Mm-hmm.
David: And it’s cause we didn’t have these sequences of communication in place for the people who are actually worthy of them. Now again, if somebody’s totally ghosting you. then I don’t know that you even want to do that. Because if they’re not going to be responsive to you, when they’re thinking about buying something, how are they going to be when they need to pay their bills, right?
Jay: Yeah. Yeah.
David: So you need to balance this, but if they seem like a good prospect, if they’ve been qualified upfront, if you have been following up systematically and you’ve been able to determine that there is a good fit, you’ve been able to exercise a little bit of persuasion and keep yourself in front of them, then at that point it could very easily convert into a sale.
Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I love this. This is great feedback and great instruction. How do people find out more, David?
David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with my team. We can walk you through this stuff. If you’re thinking about where you’re stuck, you’re not quite sure where that is, you’d like to have a conversation… TopSecrets.com/call. We would be happy to have that conversation with you.
Jay: Well, and I love it. Just sometimes talking about it is important. But there’s not a reason to reinvent the wheel. You’ve got these systems ready, and sometimes that’s just perfect for people, right?
David: I was literally talking to someone the other day who’s been in the industry for a really long time, and she was asking a question about what to say when someone says they already have somebody they’re working with. And I was thinking to myself, “you’ve been in this industry a long time, like you need to have an answer for that.”
Jay: Yeah.
David: And a lot of what we do with our clients is we have this type of stuff in place so that when you get a really common objection, you have a very specific response that you know works. And without that kind of thing, you can be spinning your wheels for a really long time.
Jay: Oh yeah. I love that. I love it. David I hope people check it out. And as always, it’s great talking to you.
David: You too, Jay. Thank you.
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