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Updated August 22, 2022Youβre reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
Once you have an inbound lead data-capture form in place, the next question is: what do you do with these leads as they come in?
βimportantβFirst, the most important thing is to respond to inbound leads as quickly as possible. This is something that organizations botch constantly, thinking that because someone is asking to talk, theyβre happy to do it now, later, tomorrow, next week. This is completely false. Instead, what you have is a prospect who passed the threshold of sufficient interest in your solution and has made herself available right now. The key thing to understand is the right now componentβthis can change because other priorities pop up, she finds another solution to her problem (how do you think she found you? Sheβs actively trying to solve this problem), or a myriad of other reasons.
The pace at which this interest falls off is incredibly rapid. As surfaced in research done by MIT Sloan and InsideSales.com, there is a 100x drop-off in contact rates between leads that are contacted within five minutes of submitting a lead form and thirty minutes. And itβs a 10x drop-off just between five minutes and ten minutes. As you can tell, responding to a qualified lead quickly is pretty darn important.
Of course, the challenge here, if itβs just you, is that youβre probably doing other things that keep you from checking your email every five minutes! And even if youβre not, checking your email every five minutes sounds like a great way to get nothing else done (though later, youβll have a market development rep who focuses just on this). That said, you should certainly make sure that your lead generation form provider can at a minimum send a new-lead notification to an email address of your choosing, including the information that was provided by the prospectβespecially phone number, so you can call her right away from wherever you are!
But the reality is that you may not always be able to instantly respond to those inbound leads. One way to help with this is an auto-response email coupled with a form completion βthank youβ that includes that phone number we referred to above, directing leads whoβd like to talk to someone quickly to call (a Google Voice number is great for this, as it can be redirected to any number). With this approach, you can increase your chance of an inbound call which, even if youβre not able to answer, shows more commitment on the part of the prospect, while letting prospects know you will be in touch.
A more recent approach to inbound capture and response is the rise of chat interfaces. Companies like Drift and Intercom have offerings that allow you to have a pop-up on your homepage or product page, which can then amount to a form fill, but via a chat interface. The problem with this historically is that you need a human to staff this chat interface, and if youβre at the point where you donβt have enough inbound volume to merit that, you can mis-set expectation with the prospect when the chat window says, βHey, how can I help?,β the prospect answers, and then thereβs no response. More modern versions of this, again, like Drift, can follow somewhat of a Mad Libs approach and ask the prospect questions, and then catalog the answersβkind of like a demo request form, one question at a time.
Ideally, because you called the inbound lead back so quickly (right?), you can get him on the phone. But although I know youβre excited about getting him on the calendar for a demo as quickly as possible, first you need to make sure heβs qualified. If you go back to your ideal customer profile, youβll recall the demand signifiers that indicate a prospect has the pain points your solution solves. Now is the time to ensure that this inbound lead definitely has those characteristics. Of course, because you set up your inbound lead capture form in a way that captures these signifiers, this is more about verifying the information, and potentially digging in a bit more. Moreover, you need to be figuring out what other folks should be on a call. This is where size of prize comes into playβif the organization has many other potential users of your product, maybe you could get them all on a demo together? Or while you have this champion-to-be on the phone, figure out who would be involved in a purchasing decisionβis he the person who would pull that trigger, or should you think about involving the boss in this case? These are all valid things to consider, which weβll talk about more when we cover discovery in Sales Pitches for Startup Founders.
If, for whatever reason, it turns out that the individual and his organization arenβt qualified, itβs completely fine to let them know that this isnβt relevant to them. Of course, be sure to differentiate between a truly unqualified account and a qualified account for which this is simply an unqualified contact. Qualify the account, not the lead. By no means think that because someone came inbound you are obligated to do a demo for him. Rather, you are being respectful of his time and preventing him from having broken expectations at a later juncture when it finally surfaces that your solution isnβt a fit. Worst, of course, would be if he ended up buying your product under a mistaken understanding of what it does and proceeded to feel cheated, all while soaking up your support resources and complaining to his colleagues about it. Letβs avoid all that drama, okay? If youβre respectful and candid about not wasting prospectsβ time, while making it clear who your solution would be relevant to, you have the chance to convert helpful brand ambassadors who will tell their colleagues about you.
βexampleβThis happened frequently at TalentBin, where our technical recruiting customers were so stoked on the product (and our delightfully designed swag!) that they often bragged to nontechnical recruiting colleagues about the solutionβwhich is great. This is what you want. But those unqualified folks would then end up coming inbound as leads. As such it was very important that our inbound market development staff could qualify them. Rather than just putting a meeting on the calendar, they would pivot around the individual to figure out if she might simply be an unqualified contact at a qualified organizationβand in that case, work with this contact to loop in more qualified contacts from that same organization. Or, alternatively, they would ascertain if the entire organization was unqualified. (For TalentBin, that means a company with no technical, healthcare, or finance hiring. For HIRABL, itβs a staffing agency that doesnβt do contingency recruiting. Whatβs your version?)