Qualifying Leads

Many cold calls start with leads, often no more than names in a phone book. So your first contact is to find out enough about the person to determine if they qualify as a prospect.

Some financial firms have started to help their reps in this area. They realize that certain events can qualify leads.

Fidelity Investments, for example, knew that people usually make investment decisions as a result of major life events: marriage, retirement, birth, death, or in reaction to market events (interest or stock market swings), so it identified over 100 event 'triggers' that signaled when customers would need (or want) to trade, shift to other investments, or move their assets outside of the Fidelity family.

It used advanced technology to sort though millions of daily customer transactions to identify when life or market events happened, and target situations where customers might need advice, new products or be receptive to a particular offer.

These event triggers were then used to feed a wide range of email, website, agent and call-center programs that reacted quickly to put the right offer in front of the right person at the right time.

This focus on better timing allowed Fidelity to double every aspect of its marketing process: from the number of leads to the quality of leads to the response rate. Event triggers generated by this system created twice as many qualified leads, doubled the chance that a particular offer related to a customer's need and improved campaign response rate 200%.

What Fidelity did was assume that its customers were nothing more than leads, but certain triggering events could turn them into 'qualified leads', or what we call prospects.

Know what? We can do that too. We know enough about each of our clients to know when they bought from us, and why. Much of the reason is our sales ability of course, but what else might be a triggering event in the client's mind?

Four possible triggers are mentioned above: birth, marriage, retirement, death, and I'm sure you can think of a few more that would have a financial impact, such purchasing a home, receiving a promotion, starting (or selling) a business, etc.

It's a new year so you're looking for new business. A new place to look for it is to consider your present clients as leads, and determine what events (other than you) appeared to have triggered their previous purchases.

You may already have this information on your computer! In some cases it just needs a bit of 'data mining'.

You're going to be approaching your clients anyway, and if you know what events triggered their previous purchases, you too can put the right offer in front of the right person at the right time!

Qualifying Leads - To learn more about this author, visit Donald F. Pooley's Website.

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