Qualifying Leads - Sales Tips for a Web Shop

During a typical week, LessEverything receives anywhere from 3 to 12 contact form submissions from people inquiring about working with us. We’re blessed to received these leads. We don’t take them for granted, but if we were to have 30-minute phone calls with each of these leads, we could potentially spend the entire day on the phone.

Our time is our greatest resource, so we’re big believers in qualifying leads before giving them 30 minutes of our time on the phone. Qualifying leads is the act of figuring out if your potential customer is the right fit for you.

• Is it a project you want to work on?
• Is the client someone you can get along with?
• Do their expectations align with how you work?
• Do they have enough money to afford you?

Qualifying should be a very quick process that answers the question, “Is this person worth spending more time on?”

Some people don’t do any qualifying. They believe that qualifying leads eventually means lost sales, and they’re right. If you have very few leads and lots of time, it’s probably better to not worry about qualifying them and rather, spend more time with each lead, trying to make each sale. As our business has grown, the number of leads we receive has increased with time, and our business focus has moved away from consulting to focusing on our products. Qualifying has obviously become far more important to us.

Most of our leads start from a contact form submission. Once the lead is qualified, they move on to a phone call. Here’s a sample email response you’ll get from us if you contact us via our contact form.

Reasons Behind Each of the 7 Question:

1. To see if they can explain their project clearly.
2. To see if they have the money to pay you yet. Are they still gathering funds?
3. We want to design the apps we build. Plain and simple.
4. To see if they are technical. (If they don’t know anything about hosting, they’re probably needing you to really hold their hand and act as CTO for them. This changes our sales approach.)
5. If you learn that they haven’t run a software project, you’ll need to set more expectations for them about the process.
6. This is really the only question that matters: can they afford you? If they have no clue of their budget, there are ways to figure it out.
7. Who cares? It’s a filler question.

Like us, most web shops do not have a full-time person devoted to sales. If you can qualify the right lead, you can gain insight into how they need to be sold on your web shop (which is probably better explained in another blog post). Good day to you.

3 Comments

Brennan said on January 11, 2012

“If you learn that they haven’t run a software project, you’ll need to set more expectations for them about the process.”

I’d be interested to hear more about how you set these expectations, and what they are.

Allan Branch said on January 14, 2012

@Brennan: Oh great idea, I’ll blog about that next week!

Jonathan Wold said on January 20, 2012

I like this. Have you considered putting the questions directly into a form? (I notice your contact form is question-less)

P.S. Really looking forward to that consultancy ebook! I signed up, waiting for that email!