Part of lead qualification involves management of your leads. If you don’t have a customer relationship management (CRM) system or a contact management application, you can still manage leads.
Print up lead qualification sheets. On them, provide spaces for:
- name
- title
- business
- answers to lead qualification questions
- lead status
- and so on
Even though I’ve always used CRMs and contact management applications, I still take lead qualification sheets to tradeshows and I’ve often kept them by the phone. It’s a handy way to record information on the fly. You can always input it to your application later.
And, if you just want to keep things simply by using paper, create a system of folders in your filing cabinet.
We’ve also found that a big part of qualifying leads is the response time. Since we’ve been using our lead response management tool to respond to our fresh leads within one hour of time they were created, our qualification rates have gone up about 15%. We have rolled this out to our clients and they are experiencing great results as well.
The other day, one of my co-workers filled out a form on a very popular mortgage search engine. He was to be contacted by 7 different companies as a result. Only 2 contacted him within one hour. Three others contacted him within the next 48 hours and two never contacted him. All seven companies are paying for these leads. Guess which companies get the majority of the business from these leads.
It is very important, as you said, that with or without a crm you need to keep track of your leads as you qualify them. Just remember to respond to them while they’re hot. After 48 hours, we’ve found most leads are pretty much dead.