David: Hi, and welcome back to today’s episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the lead quality matrix. Welcome back, Kevin.
Kevin: Good to be here. Excited to chat about this, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.
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Kevin: So what is this lead quality matrix and why is it important?
David: Well, a lot of times in my work with clients, we’re talking about leads. “I need more leads” and “I got to get more leads,” everybody’s always talking about leads, which is very important. But as we’re getting these leads in the door, sometimes it’s a good idea to say, “okay, well who do I actually want to bring in?”
Now, in our work with clients, we are very big on qualification. We want to make sure that the leads that we bring in are being qualified as quickly as possible. Because if they’re not qualified, we don’t really want to spend a whole lot of time interacting with them.
So when we’re bringing new leads through the door, obviously we’re going to try to disqualify the not so great ones in the early stages.
But also when we’re putting stuff out into the market, whether it’s a social media post or an email or we’re meeting somebody for the first time at a networking function, whatever it is, we want to try to get an idea of the quality of the lead as early in the process as possible.
When I talk about the lead quality matrix, if you just sort of imagine a graph. And going across the bottom is Willingness to Communicate. Are they willing to communicate? And so the farther you go to the right, the more willing they are to communicate with you and then going up and down is money to spend. Do they have money to spend?
If they have a lot of money to spend, that goes up. If they don’t, it’s at the bottom. So if you think of that as being the matrix. You start off in the lower left hand corner, you’ve got people who have no money to spend who are not communicative. That’s kind of easy, right?
Kevin: Yeah. Those aren’t ideal.
David: Right. We know what we’re doing with those people. We’re going to jettison them as soon as humanly possible. In the upper right, we have those who are highly communicative and who have money to spend. So what do we call those people? Like ideal clients, I would say, right, high quality leads. This is the sweet spot. This is where I want to be. This is what I’m looking for, right?
Kevin: Right.
David: So that’s kind of obvious. What’s less obvious, and in some ways more interesting is the other corners, right? If you look at some of the other corners and you say, okay here are a bunch of people who are extremely communicative. They’ll communicate all day, they’ll talk to you till they’re blue in the face, but they have no money to spend. Huge time wasters.
Many people will go to networking functions and talk to people like this for hours on end, weeks at a time, because they never take the time to just do the simple math on it and say, okay, highly communicative, unable to spend. So that’s an interesting group of people.
Then we have the other extreme, which is people who have a lot of money to spend, but they’re just not talking to you. So if they have a lot of money to spend, if it’s a big client, big company, very self-important, but they won’t return your phone calls, and they won’t talk to you… You decide how long you want to deal with that sort of thing.
Kevin: Yeah.
David: And those are just the four most extreme points. But it really is obvious when you look at it like that.
Kevin: And we’ve all chased the white whale or whatever that has all the money and you’re wanting it so bad to get them as a client. Because you know it’ll be lucrative. But I don’t know. Those people tend to be very difficult to deal with too if you finally do land them.
David: Well, yeah, particularly if they’re not communicative. I mean, we could do another grid, that has good people, bad people, right? It’s a similar kind of thing. Yeah. Because there will be people who are communicative, who have money to spend, who are just going to be rude and obnoxious, and then you can disqualify them afterwards.
But at least you know that you had the ability to communicate with them. You either did or you didn’t. They had the money to spend, but they’re not going to spend it with you. And now I can move on.
Kevin: How about the middle area? I feel like we’ve talked about the corners. You can kind of get a good feel for those corners. There’s a lot more gray area when you get towards the middle. How do you evaluate those people?
David: Yeah, well. “Meh,” that’s how I evaluate them, right? I got some money to spend. I’ll talk to you when I feel like it, and I won’t when I won’t.
Again, it depends on your tolerance for pain. How involved do you want to be with people who will communicate with you half the time and who don’t have a whole lot of money to spend?
Is that, in your mind, an ideal client? Now, I’m not saying you won’t take people like this, because, at some point we all do. We take people who seem to need our help. They seem to have money to spend, they seem to be willing to spend it. So we take the order. And then we decide from there, okay, do I want to take a second order? Do I want to continue to work with this person?
Kevin: Right.
David: And this kind of graph, this is not the be all, end all of decision making. But when you recognize that these components will really impact your day-to-day interactions with prospects and clients, it does make it a little simpler.
Because when you’re not thinking in these terms, you can have endless conversations with people and not even realize where they fall on either of those two layers.
Kevin: A hundred percent. I feel like I’ve been there many times, where I’ve had lots of conversations and lots of demos, and I don’t really know where they stand on either of those.
David: Yes.
Kevin: Or at least on the, what can they spend sort of matrix.
David: Yeah. There’s also a lot of people who don’t get communication back from someone that they’ve interacted with. And they’re frustrated about it. They’ll say, “yeah, I can’t get this guy to call me back.”
And I’m like, well, that’s because he’s not communicative, right? With you. He’s not. And so is that likely to change? Will it ever change? It could. Maybe he’s having a really busy week and he can’t call you back this week.
But if it’s like part of the relationship, where this person just is not good about communicating, then you have to ask yourself, is this the way that I want to continue to do business? And for most of us, the answer is going to be no.
And. If the person you’re trying to reach or the people that you’re trying to reach are all not communicative, you’ve got to look at it and say, okay, why is that the case? Is it that what I’m saying to them is not interesting enough to warrant a response? I mean, that could be hard to take.
If it’s one in a dozen or if it’s one in a hundred, then it’s probably not you. If it’s all 12 of them, then you might want to look at, “okay, well what am I saying to these people that could potentially cause them to not want to respond?”
Kevin: We all take rejection hard sometimes. I made a joke earlier, maybe last episode about comparing it to dating. It’s like, yeah, no one likes rejection. How can people not take it personally? Do you find that matrix helps that? To like take it less personally and make it more about data?
David: Well, I think what it allows you to do is to potentially reject those people before they even have a chance to reject you. If I’m reaching out to a new prospect a bunch of times and I’m not getting a response back, I can then determine this person is non-communicative. This person is not worth my time.
Therefore, I’m going to let one of my dreaded competitors deal with this person. Right? You leave them like little landmines out in the marketplace. Let somebody else deal with this.
So it’s helpful in the sense that you’re not waiting to eventually connect with that person and then have them reject you. I spent all that time trying to connect with this person and then they rejected me.
If you recognize people are uncommunicative, it’s just not a good trait. In sales. It’s a terrible trait.
Because if they end up buying from you and they’re not communicative, then good luck getting paid cause they’re not going to communicate there either.
Kevin: Or getting the information you need to put the through, whether it’s artwork or whatever it is that you’re doing. Yeah, for sure.
David: All of it.
Kevin: Very good point. Yeah, and obviously some people focus on quantity of leads. We’re talking here about quality of leads. How much does that impact the sales game? Having the quality over the quantity?
David: Well, it’s huge because if you are interacting with more people who are willing to communicate and willing to spend money and fewer people who aren’t, can’t even calculate the time savings on that. It’s enormous.
Now, I’m not saying don’t try to get a lot of leads in either. I’m definitely not saying that, but if you can bring in 10 leads who are communicative and who have money to spend it might be better than bringing in a hundred leads where 90 of them are not communicative and don’t have money to spend and you’re still getting to the same 10, right?
Or maybe in a scenario where it’s a hundred, maybe there are 20 of them who would eventually be communicative.
We just don’t know. So there’s no one definitive answer to this. That’s why I’m not saying, well, you must do this and you must do that. No, you decide. How much you’re willing to do, what sorts of conversations you’re willing to have to find out the answers to those questions, but also to do that as quickly as humanly possible.
You don’t want to wait three months into pursuit of a prospect to find out that they don’t meet any of these criteria.
Kevin: Right. Right. Are there certain signs , maybe other than we talked about, like someone who’s non-communicative, are there other signs that a business might be chasing the wrong leads?
David: Well, as far as this matrix is concerned, those are the two big ones, and generally speaking, communication is going to be more obvious than money to spend. You can…
Kevin: Yeah, I was going to ask about you that. That’s a hard thing to qualify sometimes.
David: Yeah. I mean, you can look at the size of a business. You can say, okay, this is a big business. They seem to have a lot of money. The person I’m dealing with seems to have the authority to spend some of that money. It seems like they have money to spend.
And we all will make assumptions about this, right? Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong.
We can underestimate someone who we think, “oh, they probably don’t have that much money to spend,” and then they place a huge order and they pay early. And you’re like, “wow, I was pleasantly surprised!”
Kevin: Didn’t see that coming!
David: No, exactly. But if you just consider these criteria, and once again, these are not the only criteria you ever want to consider when you’re looking at your leads, but it’s really not a bad place to start.
Kevin: Yeah, It is funny that you say that, because I definitely had those clients where you get excited about it and they ask you the dreaded question of what’s your minimum? You’re like, oh man, I really thought I was going to get something better out of this.
And then, yeah, you have the small company or the small brewery or something like that, and you’re like, well, this person’s ordering minimums. They’re like, yeah, I want to get 300 of those. You’re like, really? Okay.
David: Yeah…
Kevin: Cool!
David: And in the promo industry where you’re customizing stuff
Kevin: Yep.
David: And it’s less than numbers like that. I mean, for some companies, you know, it might be 144 to start. For some, it might be 72 to start, there is a term in the promotional products industry that when I first heard it, I was like, you got to be kidding me.
And the term is called less than minimum. Alright.
Kevin: Yeah, I know.
David: Less than minimum. So a less than minimum basically says, okay, the minimum is here. I’m looking to be right in around here. What can you do for me? But I’d like the preferential pricing on that too, right?
Kevin: Right, of course. Yeah, yeah…
David: This is…
Kevin: Don’t charge me a less minimum fee either.
David: I hear this and I’m like, this is like the classic underachiever, right?
Kevin: Yeah.
David: So you look at it, you say, okay, do you have the money to spend? Could you buy the 144 instead of the 72, or “I only want 36?” I’m like, okay, well…
Now you also have to decide, okay, is this for something small that they’re doing, where they only need 36 of them, but they could potentially do 10,000 next week?
In that case, yeah, you give ‘them the 36.
Kevin: Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, If it’s for a special event or something is one thing. Yeah. If it’s just for their order for the year, that’s like, it’s a little more concerning.
David: And that’s where it ties back to money to spend and communicative. ‘ cause you have to find out from them, is this just a one time thing? Is this your pattern? Do you have money to spend? So it all really does, in a lot of ways, this matrix addresses a lot of questions.
And you make the call. Once again, I’m not saying you need to do this, you need to do that. You make the call.
Kevin: Yeah, that’s great. What else is up there, on Top Secrets, right now, that people can get for more information?
David: Oh, we got all kinds of things, but I mean, if you’re looking to grow your business, if you’re serious about growing your sales and profits and you’re looking for some help to do that, I would say go to TopSecrets.com/shift. Pick up a copy of our PDF. It’s a quick, two page PDF, and it talks about making the connection between what you’re doing and what you’re earning.
Because a lot of people are struggling with the fact they feel like they’re putting in a lot of hours, they’re not earning the money they need to earn. And if you want to bridge that gap, this is a really great way to do it. TopSecrets.com/shift.
Kevin: Awesome. Well, thanks so much, David. Really appreciate your time.
David: Alright. Thank you Kevin.
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