Lead Qualification Assets: Are You Taking Too Long to Adjust?

February 15, 2012

Your conversation guide doesn’t seem to be resonating, and your team’s opportunity creation has dropped. Your emails are not generating any responses, and your team’s conversation rate has dropped. Can you relate to either of these statements above? If yes, well at least you’ve identified that there is a problem. Now, what are you doing about it? Are you “riding it out” waiting for the prospects suddenly become interested in what YOU are putting in front of them. If that’s the case – it’s time for a wake up call.

If you are not being agile with your messaging (when it is NOT working), your team is likely missing out on many, many opportunities.

Let’s lets face it, “riding out” poor assets will give your competitors a head start to get into your target prospects and win over the business that should be yours. My recommendation: if you are not seeing the results that you want from your asset package after 2 weeks of poor performance (appointments set or opportunities created – depending on your team’s goals): it’s time to make some adjustments. First off, and this may be the root of the issue: take a look at your buyer personas… are you missing the mark and “telling” them things that means NOTHING to them in their role? Are you truly addressing their pains? Do you really understand their role/responsibilities, and what their business goals are? (If this seems kind of foreign to you, and it is not documented and agreed upon internally, well no wonder you are struggling! Make this a top priority to research/nail down/document, and make sure the results are shared with your entire sales organization, not just your lead qual team.)   Okay so you’ve got your buyer personas nailed down – you get it, and your team is aligned. But yet, your assets are not resonating. Here’s what you do…and I’m saying YOU, the persona overseeing the success of the lead qualification team, NOT MARKETING. Let marketing help you with the buyer persona stuff (particularly product marketing if you have that resource), but YOU know best about how to communicate with prospects. Create three new email templates for the team to use. Address a different pain in each, and structure them a bit differently — i.e., in one use bullets, in another do not. Regardless of the structure, remember, keep it brief. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of (short) paragraphs. For the conversation guide do the same thing – create a few different versions. Try out a couple opening statements. In one guide, start by expressing the pains that you would imagine they have based on your experience working with others with their title in similar organization. In another version, ask the questions right off the bat, rather than throwing it out there that you are aware of their pains. Try a few different conclusions — obviously you are still looking for the end goal, but try variations of closing statements to get what you want…

The Key: Track your success in order to determine what message is resonating the most.

In your CRM, track which email templates you are sending to your leads in the activity’s subject line… i.e., Email #1, Email #2, Email #3. Do the same for conversations… Convo Style #1, Convo Style #2, Convo Style #3. At the end of the week, pull a report (based on those subject lines) and examine your team’s success rates with the different versions. For those that were successful, agree to use that version the following week, collectively. If you find that they are not working 2 weeks later… make the adjustment and give it another try. The more agile that your team is when it comes to your messaging, the sooner they will have the “ultimate” assets to get the attention and interest of your prospects.