If you are fortunate to get lots of leads and referrals like we do, you may want to start scoring them in your contact database to work the best leads first.

Ranking leads with A, B, C or hot, warm, cold, based on a prospect’s BANT (IBM’s original acronym for Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline), has been around forever. But lead scoring goes deeper and gets to a prospect’s behavior, such as “how was this lead generated?” (referral vs. cold call) and “do I want to work with this person?”–what is known in our office as bad or good “Karma.”

Can you identify all the behaviors that made closing a favorite client infinitely more pleasant than selling to another customer who bought but drove you crazy every step of the way? Give that good client experience a score of 100 and break out each behavior with its own score.  For example, if he was a referral, that’s 10 points.  If he did his online homework to short-list you, award another 10 points.

Some behaviors may only add 5 points and some might be worth 25. In our business, we know we have a “25″ when a key salesperson absconds with the company’s customer list to become a competitor. Urgency trumps plain-vanilla need.

Weight the points so that everything ultimately totals 100. Now you have a template to measure all future sales prospects against. Record each prospect’s lead score in your contact database. Run a pipeline report in descending lead score order. Those at the top are your future best customers!

Consider putting everyone with a lead score under 60 on a follow-up drip marketing campaign. They’re not ready to buy from you or they may not know they should buy from you. You need to educate them. Then they’ll change their score and start migrating to the top of your list. To learn how to nurture them til they demand to be sold, attend my free drip-marketing web seminar.

What’s your ranking or scoring system? Post your ideas.

[Read more →]

Eight years ago I was an AFS host parent to Marilia, an exchange student from Brazil, for a school year.  Imagine having no children of your own, then being “mom” to a 17-year-old plopped into your life. Who barely speaks the language. Who comes from a completely different culture.  Here’s what being an exchange mom taught me about relationship building:

1.  Try harder in the beginning to establish a bond. Don’t take the connection for granted. Don’t think about “equal effort.” Give it everything you’ve got, without expecting a payoff.  I was matched with a very independent teenager. Most families expected their exchange student to blend into their “regular lives.” With no pre-existing idea of what being a mom meant, I treated Ma more like a guest than a kid. Instead of telling her what to do and how to do it, I solicited her input and gave her choices.

2. Find ways to help people achieve their goals. Ma had already graduated from high school in her country by the time she arrived. But it was very important to her to study in English and get good grades in her senior year in America. It was important to me that she experience as much of life in the USA as I could share with her. Somehow we managed both: She got straight As each semester, and we traveled to 13 states.

3.  Receive the lesson; don’t resist new learning. There is nothing more powerful than re-evaluating a “truth” by filtering it differently through someone else’s eyes.  Surprise. You may not really know it all.

4.  Keep the relationship alive by keeping in touch. With Marilia going back home 2 continents away, it would have been easy to lose contact with her. Instead, I decided to send her a postcard every time I went out of town. I was shocked in 2005 when I visited her in Porto Allegre  when she showed me her postcard collection.

In a couple of weeks, Ma is coming for a long visit and I’m most excited about all the time we will have together to catch up on each other’s lives. We haven’t planned more than a short road trip, and we’re keeping the itinerary focused on us. Since she went back home, she’s gone to college, become the manager of one of her father’s businesses, fallen in love and become engaged.

Knowing Marilia has been one of the most fulfilling relationships of my life, one that’s really been about the journey, not the destination.

[Read more →]