Glossary
Lead qualification
Deciding, from a few facts, how much a lead is worth following up and how soon: the project, its timing, who decides, and how warm the conversation was. At an event it is done in the minute after the conversation, by the person who had it, or not at all.
A stand produces contacts faster than anyone can call them back. Qualification is the sorting that decides who gets called on Monday, who gets an email, and who gets nothing but a thank-you. Done at the stand it takes ten seconds; done the following week it takes a meeting, and the meeting works from memory.
The three facts that matter
Nearly every qualification method reduces to three questions. Is there a project, and what is it. When: this quarter, this year, someday. Who decides, and is that the person you spoke to. Budget comes fourth, and is rarely answered honestly on a stand, which is why it belongs in a question the team answers rather than one the visitor sees.
Temperature
The shortcut most sales teams use is a temperature: hot, warm or cold. Hot means a project, a date and the right person; cold means a pleasant conversation and nothing else. It is coarse on purpose. A three-level scale filled in by everyone beats a ten-point one that nobody uses, and it sorts a register of two hundred contacts into the twenty that get a call.
Who answers what
A visitor will answer what they came for and when. A visitor will not, on a tablet, tell you their budget or admit they do not decide. The lead capture form should therefore split its questions: the ones the visitor sees, and the ones the salesperson answers afterwards, out of sight. A kiosk only ever shows the first kind.
In LeadShake, an event campaign carries up to ten qualification questions, each shown to the visitor, reserved for the team or both, plus a hot, warm or cold rating on every lead, and the answers come out as columns of the export.
Questions
Two or three for the visitor, and two or three more for the salesperson afterwards. Every extra question a visitor has to answer on a stand lowers the number who finish the form, while a question the team answers after the conversation costs the visitor nothing.
Related terms
- Lead capture
- Collecting the contact details of someone you met, with their agreement, so you can follow up. It is the reverse of a business card: instead of giving your details away, you record theirs.
- Campaign
- In LeadShake, one card and the register that goes with it. Your account has a default campaign that never expires, and each Event Pass opens an extra one for 30 days so an event keeps its contacts separate.
- Kiosk mode
- A self-service screen left on a stand where visitors enter their own details, and which resets after each person. In lead capture it means a tablet showing the exhibitor's form under the exhibitor's account, as opposed to the visitor's own phone or the salesperson's.