Summary: To convert more sales and turn leads into customers you need to be dealing with qualified prospects. If somebody is not responsive, you can decide, do I want to continue to pursue this person, or do I want to leave them to my competitors? Let my competitors chase that person. If they're disqualified, you don't have to spend time with them at all.<br> <br> <br> <br> David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of converting more sales: turning leads into customers. Welcome back, Jay.<br> <br> <br> <br> Jay: Hey, David. Such a pleasure to be with you. This is kind of the secret sauce, right? I mean, if we could all increase our conversion rates and bring down our customer acquisition costs that's where the rubber meets the road.<br> <br> David: Yeah, in a lot of cases it's a really critical part of it, and I think some people make a mistake upfront when it comes to conversion, and that's that they want to convert everyone. You know, they just meet somebody for the first time and they immediately go into sales mode.<br> <br> And I think that they can really save themselves and other people a lot of time and a lot of aggravation if they actually start where it really should begin with a little bit of qualification. Trying to find out if they have the need, the desire, the money, the budget, the willingness to spend, those kind of things.<br> <br> Because a lot of times there are salespeople who will spend weeks, months, years pursuing somebody, just to find out once they get an appointment with them that they weren't qualified to buy to begin with. And you can eliminate that right up front. Save yourself a world of heartache.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah, I love this point, David. I can't tell you I've had this happen, you know, I'm on the phone with somebody and talking about the product and things like that, and then after asking some questions, I realize this is not a good fit. I don't have the services they're looking for.<br> <br> And I could have saved us both a lot of time if I had done a little pre-qualification before we got started.<br> <br> David: Yeah. Or if that's happening on the first call, then you're pretty good at that point. But literally, I know there are people who have gone to networking functions for a long period of time, and they're talking to people and trying to get them to agree to an appointment, and then they finally agree to the appointment, and then you get out there and you're talking to them.<br> <br> I had this experience myself early in my career. I'll never forget it. There was this guy and I thought he was going to be a great prospect, so I tried to get an appointment with him. He agreed to the appointment. I showed up at his place.<br> <br> His place was a dump and he didn't show up for the appointment, and I was sitting there looking around and I was thinking, "okay, why am I here?" And so a little bit of diligence upfront and a little bit of qualifying goes a long way.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah, I agree. And I also think technology can do a lot of that pre-qualifying, right? We had the experience where our Google ad buy was not targeting the right people. And so I was getting all these calls and I'm like, "wow, look at these leads we're getting."<br> <br> And it turned out I was just wasting time. So I'm wasting money on the Google ad buy. And then I'm wasting money fielding all of these calls. That's just, you're spinning your wheels at that point.<br> <br> David: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about it, pitching unqualified prospects is the single biggest time waster on the planet. So if we can avoid that, we're going to be a lot better off.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah. I think there's a tendency though to think, "oh, we can sell anybody." Or I think the other side of that is if you're not pre-qualifying,
