The CRAP Report

Here we go – halfway through the comparison between a fully qualified sales opportunity and the members of John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club.  On Wednesday, I made the point that the athlete of the group, Andrew Clark, was like the scope section of a lead.  Athletes are strong and tend to be susceptible to what?  Pains, and therefore the scope section should be large and full of a prospect’s business pains.  On Thursday, I shared that Claire Standish, the princess of the group, is analogous to the budget section of a lead, as princesses tend to evoke images of money.  Today, however, I’m talking about the bad boy of the fully qualified B2B sales opportunity:  the John Bender piece.

Judd Nelson plays The Breakfast Club’s resident bad boy and de facto leader, John Bender.  The comparable portion of a sales lead here is the decision making part.  There’s a scene in the movie where the kids have “escaped” their library detention and are in danger of getting caught by the principal, Richard Vernon, and Bender makes the decision to cause a distraction so that the rest of his new found friends can get back safely.  When a Business Development Rep is qualifying a prospect, one of the most critical pieces of information that he/she can obtain is the decision making process.  Taking the top down approach to lead generation, you tend to get passed around to different individuals.  Do you want to pass a CIO for an enterprise wide security solution?  Of course you do, but the truth is that it’s not always going to happen.  The CIO may have a Director who is responsible for reviewing solutions, and that Director may have a Manager below her that she’s farmed evaluations out to.  Whether you’ve outsourced your B2B lead generation efforts of you’ve got your own inside team, your BDR’s had best be getting detailed decision making information from the person they’re passing over.

Do your BDR’s understand the importance of detailing the decision making process for your sales team?  If they don’t, its up to you educate them.  Everybody wants to feel responsible for making business decisions, and that is especially the case when BDR’s are talking to prospects on the phone.  BDR’s need to capture true information for sales, and paint them a picture of what the decision making scene is like.  The LAST thing you want is a lead that has incorrect decision making information.  BDR’s need to find out exactly what role the prospect they’re passing over plays in the vendor selection process.  Are they the recommender?  Are they the check writer?  Are they an evaluator?  Are they the technical decision maker but one without purchase authority?

Just speaking from lead gen experience, I’ve spoken to a lot of prospects who told me that they were the only people involved in the decision making process.  Now, I knew that wasn’t the case, so I had to draw out the information that my clients needed in other ways.  You need to ask questions like, “who else, besides yourself, is involved in the decision making process.”  Simple question, yes, but what it does is show the prospect that you’re validating that their involved, you just want to know who else is.

There are a lot of different ways to gather decision making information, and a lot questions that need to be asked surrounding processes, but one thing is for certain:  they need to be asked.  How do you go about evaluating new tools?  How do you know you’re getting the most from what you’ve already got if you’re not evaluating the latest and greatest?  Who makes the final decision?  No matter how it gets done, make sure your B2B lead gen vendor or your inside team gets it done.  It wasn’t easy for Vernon to find Bender in the empty school, but eventually he did.  Hopefully your team’s better…