The CRAP Report

Yesterday I started my five part series comparing the important aspects of a fully qualified sales opportunity with a different member of The Breakfast Club.  I talked about how the athlete of the movie, Andrew Clark, is like the business profile (or scope) of a lead; it’s typically the strongest section of a lead and full of pains and needs.  Today, I want to talk to you about the princess of any good quality sales lead, or how I like to think of it, the Claire Standish section.

Claire Standish, played by Molly Ringwald, was the rich girl of The Breakfast Club.  This one is really the easiest to correlate, as when you think of princesses, you typically think of money.  It’s no surprise, then, that I’m talking about the budget section of a sales lead.  After fleshing out the pains and needs that a prospect has, the next natural road to lead them down is where they’re getting money from to solve that problem.  Better yet, today, where are they going to reallocate money from to cure what’s ailing them.  With budgets dwindling, having the ability to show a prospect that they can reallocate funding from one effort to the one you’re calling them about is key.  One of my oldest clients gets around budget questions because they’re able to show prospects a full return on their investment in an average time span of six months.  Obviously, if you’ve got an ROI case like that, people are more likely to stop and listen to what you’ve got to say.

The money section, budget section, funding section, whatever it’s called in your world is so critical to the value of a fully qualified sales opportunity.  Handing off a lead to a sales rep with a budget section that has vague wording is a sure fire way to drive down the value that you’re hoping to add to a B2B lead generation campaign.  If you’ve got an inside lead gen team or your outsourcing those efforts, how important do you think this information ranks with your sales reps or your client’s sales reps?  I’m betting pretty high as I know it does with mine.

There’s a number of ways you can ask prospects about their budgets, and about how they’ll attempt to buy your solution, but make sure that your BDR’s are doing so.  Make sure they’re peeling the onion back on this one.  There’s more to it than just, “yep, we can find money to buy.”  Really?  How much can the prospect sign off on?  Where are you going to find money to buy?  Who’s going to approve that?  Who signs that check?  If you find a piece of software or a service that is really going to solve a deep pain, how long does the process take from decision to wire transfer?

Claire was the princess of The Breakfast Club, and budgetary information is the princess of a fully qualified sales ready opportunity.  Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about the John Bender of a lead, the decision making section.