Leads, Qualified Leads, and Rich Leads

There are all sorts of nuances when it comes to describing the sales cycle. When does a suspect become a prospect? When is a lead truly ‘qualified’? What counts as a lead? There’s often a discrepancy between what the people generating leads would like to call a lead, and what the people receiving them might agree counts as one.

Let’s take the car industry as an example. A typical ‘lead’ that comes in from the dealership’s website, or a third-party media company, might look like this:

• Name: Tom Cheesewright
• Telephone: 01234 456789
• Email: tom.cheesewright@canddi.com
• Address: CANDDi Towers, Newcastle
• Enquiry: Nissan Micra, Azure Blue, Ref: 8073976
• Date: 07/02/2011

That pops up as an email on a salesman’s desktop, alongside tens of others each week. Is that a lead? Is it a qualified lead?

It’s certainly a lead: assuming no-one is using a fake email address or phone number for some reason, the chances are that this person is genuinely interested in the car about which they have enquired. That said, the phone number in the example above would be cause for concern.

I’d argue it’s not a qualified lead: the reader has no way of knowing if the enquirer is a legitimate prospect or a 12-year old boy with a strange fetish for small Japanese cars. The recipient also has no idea how to prioritise this lead against the other fifty in his inbox. If he can only respond to twenty today, which twenty should he respond to?

This is where “rich” leads come in: leads that are not only qualified in terms of the capability of the customer to buy, but that actively help the salesperson to prioritise leads and respond effectively.

Imagine that instead of just capturing the data in the website form that the prospect completed, you knew about all the cars they had been looking at, and the criteria they had been searching on before making an enquiry?

You would know that they enquired about a Micra, but spent most of their time looking at a Mini

You would know that they have enquired about a car that is 5000 pounds, but all their searches had a budget up to 7,000

You might even know what their current car is worth, or what their monthly budget is and whether they prefer a Personal Contract Purchase product to a Hire Purchase

Now imagine you can wrap around that information some detail about the individual: where they live, the demographic profile of people in that area, their social media profile. All of a sudden you are armed with the facts to prioritise that lead, and even finesse your response to the prospect. You know about what they really want, what they can really afford, and whether they are a good prospect.

That’s what we call a ‘Rich Lead’ and that’s what CANDDi is providing to car dealerships today.