Mar 11
25
According to an IDC Report, 80% of marketing dollars are wasted on lead generation because many sales people either ignore the leads in their database, don’t have the ability to access key decision makers or don’t have the skills to ask the right questions.
Many companies are spending substantial marketing dollars on lead generation via social networking, SEO/SEM, website re-writes, blogging, Google Adwords and PPC, list development etc. When a lead comes in, we need to learn and know how to qualify and identify if that lead is worth spending your precious time and money pursuing it. At some point your going to have to pick up that phone and make the dreaded cold call, don’t assume just because a lead came in via a Twitter Tweet that it can be classified as a ‘warm” lead.
Questioning is a skill that is critical to uncovering a customers needs and your opportunity to do business with a prospect. If you don’t have the courage to ask relevant and meaningful questions, you can burn a good lead in a hurry and in today’s economy we just don’t have any room for error. Many un-skilled reps ask meaningless questions of the wrong people i.e.; “do you have a project?”
There are many attributes that constitute a well organized call containing relevant questioning and interaction with a decision maker. How you plan your strategy for the call, formulate your questions, the style in which you deliver and the order in which you ask questions will determine how effective you are at determining if you are talking to a market-ready buyer.
Asking targeted questions are the keys to understanding their business need, current environment, decision making criteria, time frame and budget. It allows you to uncover what competitors may be there and if they are being serviced properly.
Examples of targeted questions:
‘How old is your home?”
“When was the last time you replaced the roof?”
‘How is the performance of your network, are there any bottlenecks?”
“Could implementing a new solution help you serve your customers better?”
“Would you like to schedule a free consultation or estimate?”
“What is your decision making process and who is involved in those decisions?”
‘What other solutions have you looked at?”
“What seems to be your biggest challenge today?”
And there many more that can be asked. Knowing what questions and when to ask those questions are the keys to knowing what a good quality lead is and will help you to understand where to put your time and energy.
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Take a look at our No Risk Marketing System here
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