Lead Qualification

With effective lead generation algorithms, you could end up with dozens, if not hundreds, of potential customers. Yet what should you do to sort the wheat from the chaff? Lead qualification is the art of discriminating between bogus leads and promising leads. Lead qualification is as much an art as it is a science, since it involves intuitive judgment as well as logistical and statistical planning.

Qualified leads generally meet an array of sensitive parameters. However, if you use too much information in assessing whether a lead is qualified or not, not only will you waste time, but you also may overlook some potentially good customers. Smart qualification ultimately comes down to a cost benefit analysis.

How to Tell Apart Qualified Leads
Ideally, you would like to follow every lead, and ideally you would like to waste as little time as possible. If you follow every lead, you will burn a tremendous amount of time. Conversely, if you toss out too many potential leads, you might miss out on dozens of potential customers. Determining the balance between lead follow-up and processing speed requires sensitive experimentation. Often, even lead qualification experts are unable to determine the best course of action.

I think it's wise to err on the side of too much follow-up rather than on too little. After all, consumers are bombarded by requests daily, and even promising leads may disappear if you're not persistent. This is not to say that you should discount the time dimension entirely; merely, that you should take into consideration the fact that not all successful leads are instant turnovers.