The Lonely Marketer

As small business marketers, we not only get to create lead generation programs, but in some instances we also get to be the gatekeepers for lead qualification. I’ve developed many programs where we try to generate leads via forms on our website. As the gatekeeper, I’ll see the leads from the forms come through and I’ll pass them on to sales if they look legitimate.

I had an interesting situation the other day that I thought I should pass along. I deleted a lead that looked bad. I always like to see john.doe@legitimatecompany.com and not johndoerocks2007@yahoo.com.

The lead I’m referring to had one of the quirky, spammy email address and the company name didn’t pop up in the search engine results when I searched. So, I deleted it. But, the legitimate looking name and title got the better of me and I fished it out of my deleted folder and turned it over to sales. The next thing I know the sales person is showing me the signed purchase order four hours later.

Wow, I almost deleted revenue. Lesson learned.

Here’s some tips on being a lead gatekeeper:

• Remember, you have sales people for a reason. If the lead looks at all legitimate, pass it on and let them do the qualifying.
• Do company searches for two reasons: qualify that the company is real and also to gather background information that could be passed on to sales.
• Check the phone number for a real area code and correct amount of digits (know phone number patterns outside of US as well)
• Know from where the lead came as background for your sales person
• Keep in mind that people may not provide a legitimate email address if they don’t want to be contacted that way.

Anything else you think I could add to the list so people can avoid the pitfall I almost fell into? Remember, quality revenue potential is on the line!