Is It Possible To Over-Qualify A Sales Lead?
I’ve worked with a wide range of sales reps through the years and they all seem to have a unique perspective on what their job should consist of. Generally the ones that provided me the biggest challenge seemed to believe their inside rep should be doing all the busy work from passing the opportunity - all the way to arranging travel to the meeting. From my experience these generally are also the sales folks that have no appreciation for the work it took to even get the prospect on the phone and interested to begin with. Typically their opinion is that you’ve brought me in here to perform the very specific task of closing business. All of the frivolous busy work should be left up to the support team. As a result they feel that at no point in their day should they be wasting their time with anything other than a company that has been thoroughly qualified and is in a position to buy.
Well, we would like to think that those kinds of opportunities are easy to come by...and they are…in "lala" world. The outside rep that's grounded in reality knows that they may actually have to do a little more work on the front end until their prospect gets to the point where they will have budget allocated.
I remember when my "favorite" prima donna sales guy recognized that he wasn’t going to have his prospects hand fed to him on a silver platter, so he decided to change things up on me a bit. This was right around the time when the tech bubble burst and as you can imagine budgeted projects were that much more difficult to come by. Since a majority of the opportunities being passed weren't in the position to buy yesterday, he wanted me to qualify his prospects further than I had been already. The traditional 6-7 questions I was asking to pre-qualify before transitioning to my rep, shot up to 15.
Believe me, I wasn’t pleased. Essentially he was accomplishing two things by plopping the 15 number in front of me. One, I was essentially running his discovery call FOR him. The level of detail I was looking to pull out of an introductory call would have been something he would have been better suited to ask. Not only that, but it got me into a position where I was being asked questions that required my sales engineer to answer. Secondly, with the amount of questions I had to ask, many of the prospects that may have been interested at the beginning, seemed to quickly loose interest as I got to question number 10. -"Don't worry buddy, we only have 5 to go!"
The long and the short of it was I ended passing over on average 2 leads a month that ended up meeting my reps criteria. As you can imagine he wasn't able to build much in the way of forecast and soon had his VP breathing down his neck. The only thing that prompted him to eventually change his ways was a little pressure from his VP of Sales. Fortunately for me he changed his ways, unfortunately for him the hole that he dug allowed for a quick exit the following quarter.
While I understand that most of us would prefer not to waste our time talking with tire kickers of the world, the best outside reps I've worked with understand that every sales conversation they had was a worthy one. They know that not every tire kicker is a competitor looking and gather pricing, but in fact very well could be a legitimate prospect in need of a little direction. Point is, you don't know unless you take the time to pick up the phone and talk to them. Just because everyone we talk to today isn't necessarily ready to buy yesterday doesn't mean that won't be something down the road.