How to Qualify Leads on a Call

Hey, guys. What's up? Matt here from Coffee is for closers.

How's it going, guys? James, also, thank you for mentioning with us. I appreciate that.

Yeah, we've got so much redundancy right now, it's crazy. I got my iPhone there recording. We got this recording. We did that recording. Just last time we lost some audio. So now. Well, redundancy.

Last time we didn't set it up to record both, Mike. So you'll notice my audio would have been pretty trash if you did happen to listen to the last episode. If not, go back and listen to it some stage.

Yes.

So you can hear the trash audio. It's actually not too bad. But anyway, today, what are we going to talk about?

I just had to tell people how.

To effectively disqualify people.

Disqualify and qualify. Yes.

Yeah.

So cue the intro.

If you listen to this podcast, you will make your first million within three years. I'm going to repeat that. You will make $1 million within three years of the first episode you listen to. We don't want pikers. We're not here to save the manate. We're here to make podcasts. You really want this? You listen and review.

Put that coffee down.

Why don't we start by going through the differences between qualification disqualification and when and where we utilize those for most effect.

So we talked about it before, which is like, your marketing and your sales have to talk to each other, and there has to be a definite intent behind if you're qualifying people through or if you're disqualifying people through. And then like, your sales team then sort of takes over and like, pushes everyone through. I just don't know why people don't get it, to be honest. It's like you either have a boatload of leads that are all garbage and you just, like, punch everyone through. And then your sales team is like, just disqualifying or you just have like. Yeah, you just throwing spaghetti at a wall from the marketing perspective. Or you're like, super careful with who you put through the funnel. You have high disqualification measures, and then your salespeople just try and sell everybody. What you can't do is have a lot of garbage and then try and sell everybody, because that is a cartel jail.

Yeah, you got.

You don't want to do that for one. For your sanity as a salesperson. You don't want that. You definitely don't want that. It'll just drive you insane because you're having mental battles with every single person you speak to, and it's literally a fight.

Yeah.

And there has to be like some level intent behind it. So like our client researchers at the day and was like, why are all these people not showing up to sales calls? It's like, well man, because like we're just, we're flooding through garbage. Like we have a famine. So it's like like we're having to really sort of push a lot of people through to a sales call and then try and figure out on the sales call if they're right. We're just giving ourselves the most opportunity possible. But like in exchange for that, like that's going to result in a higher, a higher no show and a lower close rate because like, but it's all intentional. Like, or we can just be super like we can be really, really, really critical as to who we put through. And then from there like you're going to have much less opportunity. And I was like, it's your choice. If you value our time then you can just tell me the word and I won't put anybody through.

Okay.

So. And to. It'd be really good to get a bit behind the scenes as to like why we made the decisions to do that. So this account is, is running a notoriously low quality type of funnel, which is a book funnel. The, the man's got a couple of really good best selling books. He sold hundreds of thousands of them. And the book is designed and written to attract a call.

Right.

It's got a lot of call to actions in there. A lot of people don't read the book before they, they hop on a call. They just, it's. It prompts you to, to book one.

Book funnels are garbagio.

Yeah. Yeah.

In terms of getting booked calls but they're good in terms of like creating a following.

Yeah.

So it's like. And that I think you can eventually cash that in. But I think if you're like I'm going to do a book funnel and that's going to get me to coaching clients. I don't think that's the thing.

No, definitely not. But in terms of like numbers there's about on average of course say like 50 calls booked a, booked a week. We do a two step. So triage. We do triage into sales call. Now we get about 50% that turn up to the triage and we give all of our guys like a lead quality rating of 0 to 5. 0. No show 5. Best lead ever. One shouldn't have been on a call. Now the. For our average client, we average about 3.6 in terms of lead quality, this account is down at about the 2.4.

All right.

Meaning they don't qualify. There's a lot of metrics there that they need to hit to work with this, particularly because there's a non ROI attached to this coaching offer.

Right.

It's branding. So knowing that we're not going to get many calls, it takes us about 12 taken triage calls to result in one sale, which is on the lower quality end of what we typically deal with. So with that, we put everyone through. We would normally put fours and fives through and occasionally the threes.

Right.

But here we're putting twos, threes, fours, and if we ever get a five, we'll just take it.

Right.

So we're putting them through, which is naturally going to lead to a higher no show rate for sales call and a lower close rate for sales call. Now the reason we do that is because we still get sales from those twos and threes. They are rarer, but if we didn't put them through, we would get about 70% less of sales in total, which means 70% less cash collected, 70% less contract value. So with the infrastructure we have in place, the sales reps know that that's what they deal with and they're happy to go through that process to get better and learn. They're okay with it. Otherwise we would say, no, we don't want to, we want no part of this. It's not at a level that we consider at our standards.

Right.

So that's cool. The guys do that. And we get more sales from the fact that we are intentionally doing a spaghetti method. If we weren't, we would be very, very worried about the results coming through that from a sales perspective and from a time perspective.

Yeah.

So it's just about being intentional and having intent behind how you run your sales.

Yeah.

Like, and it's, it's, it's, it's super simple. It's like. But I think one of the things that we've found out is that people are just running and gunning, not really taking much notice of it.

Yeah.

And the sales guys are always feeling like they're under the pump. And it's like sometimes like, you know, we always say one of the mottos of the company is it's not our fault, but it is our problem.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's like if the lead quality is low, it's like, well, like we have nothing to do with that process.

We can't control it.

But like, it sure the affects us.

You Betcha.

So we better start figuring it out. Which is why we've created like organic marketing stuff, why we've created all these hectic follow up stuff so that we can continually make sales. But like, I guess that poses a question, like, how do you know when to qualify, when to disqualify? And I think like, it's, it's much more to do with the individual salesperson.

Yeah.

Than it is probably the business. Like, like if I'm a sales guy and I'm working on an account, like, this is one of the things that baffles me is like I hear people. Like, I was doing a training, I was coaching Eli the other day and I was saying how, like, I won't, like I won't stop a call if the person's partner isn't on there.

Yeah.

I was like, what do you mean? I was like, well, I'm on the call.

Yeah.

Like it's a waste of my time.

What the am I going to do? Like, what am I gonna do? Like, like, oh, well, yeah, just like get your partner on the call and come back. No, like you're never gonna make that sale.

That's great advice. If I was like a absolute rookie, I probably would want them to do that depending on where they're at in their development.

Yeah, no, well, I'll push back on that because like, because like you're there. First of all, have you expressly told them that they have to have all decision making parties present? Do you know what I mean? So, like, is that actual conversation been had? And if it hasn't, you have no right to reschedule that call. Like, you've booked out that time in their diary as much as you they.

Booked, they put down yours.

Okay.

Right. So like, you have to respect that prospect is probably equally as busy as you are. And it's like you never told me I need to have my wife here. Like, that was not part of the marketing campaign. Do you know what I mean? And you decided to book this time with me. So it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But also like, what am I gonna do? Go and watch Netflix? Like you could do follow up a sales guy. Like, I have a person in front of me with an opportunity to sell. Is it a high likelihood conversion? No, it's not. But what is it? It's a hundred percent likelihood that I have a crack and then I get the attempt and that I can then sell the crap out of that person to where they convince their partner to do it.

Yeah.

Like I've got to like, but if I was like now in that situation, I would never reschedule now. Putting people through to second things is different because like I just think like I'm a sales guy that's.

Yeah, we're miscommunicated. What I mean is like I would still do everything and pitch that person.

Right.

But then if they needed that partner to make a decision after I've tried to. Objection. Handle. I would book them into the as follow up call.

Yeah.

With that partner on the phone.

I would never cancel a call.

No, no, not all.

Like it's just such a garbage move. It's such a lazy, precious salesperson move to be like, oh, your partner's on the call. Cool. We should reschedule. Just get better at overcoming problems.

Yeah, that little baby bird.

Get back in there. Get back in the nest, baby bird, feed yourself. I was just baffled when I hear that. I'm like, are you that precious and are you that busy? Like I run a company with a whole lot of people and I have two kids.

Yeah.

Like I'm busy.

Yeah.

Like I'm back to back pretty much 8 out 99 hours a day. And then I go home and I'm back to back looking after children until 8:30 at night and then I have like an hour to chill out and I go to bed.

Okay.

Like that's me. And it's like if I'm willing to be on the phone with that person, like who the is some 25 year old guy who has nothing better to do but sell people. Why is he whinging about? Like most of my time all you have is time. Yeah, yeah, like, but like now you should have a process. Which is why I like to call closes. I hate one call closes. I think it's a stupid way of doing things. But two cold closes where you can set that up and you can have a short call with someone, you can qualify them. And now qualifying people through going back to what I originally said, like if I was super busy, call one, call two, call one. Right. So if I'm going to qualify, that's why I like to call closes is because you can identify like people who should be pipelined, identify people who can be sold. Now you can do that easily. And so, and then you can make an active decision whether or not you put them through a sales call anyway. Because if like if I'm only selling for one account and I want to make as much money as possible, it's not going to hurt me to do a sales call with that person knowing that they're probably not going to sell, but I pitch them, do a great job, create a follow up. Like it's just an hour of my time. Like it's like you're Elon Musk, right? Where you have three assistants, you know, I mean, so like if I wasn't very busy, I would put anyone who I thought could genuinely benefit from the product I would put into a sales call.

Yeah.

Now if I was super busy and they had an abundance of really good leads, I would be far more picky in who I put through to a sales call. But I would have a pipeline process for the people who are not ready to go into sales.

Would bring people on under now to go through.

Yeah, yeah, I would have like, hey, listen, I think that we could really help you. I think that right now it's not the best timing for you. What I'd love to do is book you in for another 15 minute call in about four weeks time. Would that be something that you'd be open to, to like. Yeah. That's awesome. I really appreciate that. Let's do that. And then you're pipelining people and then it's like sweet, man. Like that's how you create lots of sales.

Then one day you cash it in.

Right.

All right, so call 1. Are you aiming to qualify or disqualify?

Depends on the marketing.

Okay.

If the marketing is qualification, then I'm disqualifying. If the marketing is disqualifying, then I'm qualifying. It's the opposite.

Glenn, can you, can you give me example?

So if you look at someone like Vince Del Monte's marketing, right. High disqualification funnel.

Yeah.

Like for the most part now it obviously changes and rotates and stuff like that. But it's like, hey, we are this person. We are here for this person. Watch all this content, answer these questions, fill out this application. If they've got logic involved where it's like if they don't make X amount of money, they can't get through to a booked call. X, Y. So if they have like, if they have the logic in place to be able to do that or they're like, like we look at Sirhant for example, heavy disqualification funnel. Yeah, like heavy. It's like if you don't tick these boxes, you don't, you don't get through. So with that I'm pushing everyone, like everyone. It's like the triage is a formality.

Yeah.

It's like it's just a basically set up, assess, need, do some groundwork, put to a sales call. Right, but, but if I've got like, if we look at like a biz op, like an Amazon roi. Yeah, bro, like, that's the wild west.

Yeah, get like everyone you can until call them, figure it out.

Well, we got to get everyone onto it. First call. And then we gotta filter hard. Yeah, but you know what I mean, we gotta. Because if we just put those people into sales calls, that's just a whole bunch of junk on someone's diary, you know what I mean? So that's where, like, that's just, that's the spaghetti method of marketing, right? We have to be like the colander, you know? Whereas if it's like, if they've already got the colander up high, then we have to take everything that's there and ram it through as hard as we can. Yeah, okay, that's. That's how we, that's how we figure it out. And then like again, then you've got like, you can break those rules if.

You need to, just like the fourth wall.

Well, if you're like, okay, just listen. Yeah, so you can go, all right, every now and then you can break those rules. Yeah, but as long as you're doing it intentionally and you understand the ramifications of it, when we were like, hey, we're going to cash in a pipeline. You want to have a massive month, we're cashing this in and we're just like, hey, open the diaries. And then all the junk goes in through and we just smash everybody through to it. Sales call and just whoever it gets there.

So please provide us with a. A couple of examples of questions you would use for qualification. First, dealers, qualification on call one I. E. Triage.

So a good one is can I understand the decision making of the business? That's a good one. Or the decision making of you and your family and all that kind of stuff, that kind of gives you a good meter as to if there is somebody else required. So that's an important one. I think it's important to somewhat financially qualify or disqualify people. So one of the ways that I like to do that is like, well, can you give me an understanding of the working capital that you have within the business so that you can xyz.

Yeah, yeah, right.

That's a good one. If they're like, oh, I don't have any. And you'll be like, okay, well, if you don't have any resources at the moment, are you able or willing to become resourceful to fix this problem? And if they're like, no, I'M like, have a good day, sir. Like if you have no interest, like that's the thing. Like he might want fish, you know, you're selling beef. Exactly. So it's like if he has no interest in becoming resourceful, that's probably a battle I don't want to fight because like it's such an uphill battle.

It's like that's just coming down to like you find him on mindset.

Yeah.

That's all it's going to end up with.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So those are a couple ones. And then really it's around like you have to have a look at the business that you're. You have a look at the business that you're dealing with.

Yeah.

And then you have a look at the common problems that you have in your sales process and then just have your qualifiers. Like some of the businesses that we work for, it's like they have to have minimum revenues. You know, it's like, hey, if you don't make $500,000 a year, we can't work with you. If you don't have more than four employees, we can't work with you. So it's like in that discovery process, I would have like a series of five or six questions which then kind of goes through like, these are the boxes that we need to tick. If you don't tick a certain number of these boxes, like there's just not much point. You can't really move on. But what I want to do is. And then you can have really intentional downsells as well. Like, hey, you don't tick the box for our high end program, but you do tick the box. Obviously wouldn't say this, but you tick the boxes for a lower tier program. And then if you have like more junior sales reps that you can send those people to and then you have. Or have separate booking links for your downsell offer versus your.

Yeah.

Larger offer. And that's how you can like sort of effectively communicate the lead quality back to the marketing company while still maintaining the highest level of sales.

For sure.

Okay.

Yes. It's funny, like something that I've noticed is I don't go as deep into like technique on sale is what you do when you teach people. It's not really my strong point.

Right. That's.

That's your job. But I go into like the development.

Right.

And how to teach people how to learn those concepts. So like you could tell someone this is how you do this technique, but they don't understand how to actually figure that out and apply It. Because if you use a script, it's like, how do I take the script and apply it to my offer? That is very different.

Right.

And the way I go about the triages is super simple. It's like, okay, well, what. It's really the intention, what you're trying to get out of it.

Right.

And you got to figure out two to four things. We'll just do three. For argument's sake. On an ROI offer, it's like when you're qualifying, you need to know three things. One, does this person have a need for the product? Two, are they in a position where they could financially get the funds to do this product? And three, if they were to take the knowledge that we taught in this or whatever that may be, are they in a position where they can apply it and get a tangible roi?

Right.

So with this, those three answers to those questions, you can qualify someone for any product.

All you're asking there is, should they be sold?

Exactly. You're asking, should they be sold? And if the answer is yes, you put them through to a sales call because they're qualified. It's now just figuring out the how and why.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

That's like, on its most simplistic terms, that's what a triage is.

Exactly.

Is there a sale to be made?

Yeah.

It's so easy.

And if there is, sweet. Now it's okay. So it's easy. Conceptually. However, you could really all bet, like, you know, I remember when I was doing, like, I recently rewrote one of our new clients, his triage scripts.

Yeah.

Like, immediately just fixed a bunch of problems. And then you had a chat with him as well, and you simplified the booking link process. Yeah, I had all these things. You're like, why do you care about that? Just ask this question. All of a sudden it was like.

Triple ping, ping, ping, ping.

It was like six bookings in an hour. Right. Because it's just too complicated of a process. And it's like, if you have a triage in place, you can remove a lot of those filters because that's what the triage is.

Exactly.

Right.

Why are you trying to heavily disqualify and then have a triage as well? Like, that's what that's there for.

You increase opportunity.

Yeah, we just want to. And it's not like you're. Again, if you're so packed out with calls like, add in a qualifier, add in a qualifier, add in a qualifier. Like, do those things to, like, increase lead quality, lower lead volume, but you're doing it like, step by step, bit by bit, so that it's a really intentional process and you're still maximizing the amount of opportunity that you have.

So I keep looking this. I've just noticed that it says blue on them and it's black. It's annoying me.

Yeah.

Well, this is the brand again.

It's so ironic. I get that. I'm just good at it.

Buy more blue ones if you'd like.

I'm very easily distracted. There's no sale to be made. If they made this in blue, I'd buy more.

Yeah, I have more. Okay, cool. I have every color, my friend. But going back to triage is like, one of the things that I up once was that I listened to someone who said they were really good at sales, and I believe them. Turns out they're kind of garbage.

I feel like we've told this story.

Many times to each other, and then it was like, nah, man. You just got to tell everyone on the triage down the next call, they got to make a decision. That way, you know, the people are, like, serious. And I was like, okay, that makes a lot of sense. So I wrote it into a script, did it all, like, said it in the most tactful way that I could. Good tonality. I had a 100% no show rate for two weeks straight.

Yeah.

Literally. Not an exaggeration.

Yeah.

100% of the sales calls that I booked, and it was about 15 in the two weeks.

So much stuff.

Single one showed up and I was like, what the. And then I heard, like, that was the best thing that ever happened to me because that was when I was, like, banging my head against the wall and I heard of Jeremy's program. But that one change, like, totally my whole triage process. Yeah, but fixing your triage is like, we're talking to Marco today. And we were, like, going through, like, fixing things like he was going through with Sirhan. Going through their funnel.

Yeah.

And they wanted to do something. He's like, no, you don't do that. You do this. And they're like, oh, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. It's like, just fix the smallest thing possible. Lowest hanging fruit, the worst performing metric. Like, this is the worst thing. Like, the worst thing they had was a lot of people going to the booking page.

Yeah.

And not booking.

Yeah.

So they wanted to, like, you.

All this stuff. Why are they not booking? Let's look at the booking page and see if we can find anything that would put people off. Funnily enough, we looked at them go, there's the problem.

Yeah.

It's like, let's just fix the one thing. I remember when I was working in a business and like I was the one doing all the sales for it, and it was like the biggest problem we had was show operate to triage. That was the biggest problem. And it was like, if we just fix that one metric, like that will have the biggest level of flow.

Absolutely.

You know, it's like, so you've got all your little, like your little dams. It's like fixing problems here is good. Fixing problems here.

Yeah.

Either like it will exacerbate problems down here, but like it's your lowest hanging fruit to get in the faucet as well. Like, if you're gonna like unkink a hose, you unkink the one closest to the tap.

Yeah.

Because the power of that might just unkink the rest of it.

It'll look like our sales channel. Uncontrollable.

Yeah.

You ever seen, you ever seen when that happens and the, the hose goes into a snake and the little kid's playing with it and he's like trying to catch it? Or you ever seen a firefighter where they have that big hose and they turn on it just goes like crazy. That's the delivery team. When we start a new client.

We started a new client.

Holy. I can't control this. Stop. Please stop. Turn it off.

Yeah. Like really, the long and the short of it is that's our take on qualifying versus disqualifying. There's a lot of right ways to do it, a lot of wrong ways to do it. But really, like, you have to look at the totality of the evidence and then have a look at like work with your marketing department, work with the sales and go, what, what is the ethos of what we're doing? Like what? Like what are we doing here? Like, are we, are we disqualifying people? Are we qualifying people? And then, okay, if whatever we're going to do, we have to do the opposite on the sales. Because if we're disqualifying, disqualifying, we'll have like one great point.

And like, it's a simple question you ask the client. Do you want to make the most amount of sales possible or do you want to have. Or do you want to be able to brag about mad conversion rates?

Yeah.

Well, it also depends on like, how much time is the salesperson got? If they're selling multiple accounts, which I highly recommend. But if they're like a solopreneur, where they're the delivery department, accounts department, the sales department, marketing department. Like, you can't do that many sales.

You don't have time.

Yeah.

So like, you know, but then realize when you turn the app back on, when you get somebody in, like they're not going to close as well. Not only because they're not you, but also because now you just change your marketing funnel to let more people in.

Yes.

So because that person needs to be filled up. So it's just like all these things play a role in each other and I think people are just so frustrating that people don't look at it from like the entirety. And it's like, well, this is what's happening. Like, we can be okay with this or we cannot be, but we have choices to make. And it's like we can just increase here or increase here. And it's like there are reasons why all these things are happening. Like we got to figure this out. And sometimes it's like you can bang your head against a wall. Some businesses aren't meant to be sold on Facebook. Some businesses aren't meant to be sold on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

It's wherever your leads are.

Right.

And so it's like, let's not get emotional about it. Let's just figure out the right way to do things.

If you get. And this is why we, we track stuff down to like the, the adsense, you know. Well, I mean, in cases where we have that information and we can do that. We do if we know that we have like a, an average qualification rate of 40% through Facebook. But leads that come through LinkedIn have a qualification rate of 80%. Cut Facebook, spend the money on. On LinkedIn. Is that what I said?

Yeah, LinkedIn.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's like go towards the low hanging fruit and then come up with a different strategy. And this thing. Annoying. Come with a different strategy.

I'm annoyed for you watching it, but.

There'S a little screw that I'll just have to do. Tighter that.

Is it a blue one?

Yeah, yeah.

Ever seen a blue duck?

And on that note, I think we're done.

Yeah, I don't think we'll just ramble for another 10 minutes.

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So say it's the shepherd. So say it's the flock. All right, guys, we're out. Bye. Put that coffee down. Coffee's for closers only.