The Qualified Lead, or, Leading with Qualified Content

When I was 16, I went looking for a summer job. I got an interview and they hired me on the spot. That following Monday, I reported for my first day of training.

The job: cold-calling “qualified leads” to sell people coupon books for local retail and entertainment businesses. It was hands-down, the worst job I ever had —FAR worse than cleaning kennels at the Dumb Friends’ League, for instance.

The training was great. We all got in a room, and a 20-something “super-closer” told us all about how he was making $5K a month. He gave us his “surefire, winning script,” and taught us all how to “overcome objections!” He wrote simple formulas on the whiteboard and explained how this incredible, tiered commission structure worked.

“Yes, this is a pure commission job, but you’re getting $8 per every book you sell. If you only sell TWO books in an hour, you just made $16 an hour! (This was back in 1990, so that was real cash —and it was a FORTUNE to a 16-year-old kid)… And if you sell THREE books, your commission goes up to $12 per book! So if you sell just one book every 15 minutes, that means you’re making $24 per hour!”

It sounded AMAZING.

The next day, we all reported to another room, where they had rows of folding tables, folding chairs, and telephones. At each telephone was two stacks of paper, a little bell, and a pen. And that was our work stations. One stack of paper was the order forms we filled out for every sale. The other stack of paper was our “qualified lead” sheets. The bell was what we hit with each sale, when the “team lead” would swing by and grab our latest successful sale order form. And the pen was for filling it out. We were seated elbow-to-elbow, and within moments, they we all were, one hand holding the phone to our ear as tightly as we could, the other hand covering our other ear so we could hear the person we were talking to.

By the end of the day, I figured out that they “qualified” their leads by ensuring the telephone number we were given was an assigned residential (this was before cell phones, remember) phone number. In other words: All they did was make sure the phone numbers on our list were working. “Qualified” indeed.

That was the longest, most disheartening day of my young life. Call after call after call after call, I was treated to hangups if I was lucky; a string of epithets and rants, however, was the status quo. By day’s end, I had somehow managed to sell one book. I wasn’t even excited to hit the bell by then. It was literally my last call of the day, and the old woman on the other end took most of my time talking about her grandkids. I think, in the end, she just took pity on me.

When Scott (that was the name of the “team lead”) came to get my order form, he went to give me a high five and said, “You got your first sale, buddy!” I looked at him and said, “Scott, that was also my last sale.” I stood up, thanked him for the opportunity and said, “Keep the commission. I’m never coming back. I don’t even want to drive back here to pick up a check.”

Thankfully, the science that goes into delivering so-called “qualified leads” to the sales team has evolved by nearly geological eras’-worth of time. That old approach could not be more fossilized, relatively speaking. And still, companies struggle withit. Even with all of the automated marketing tools at our disposal, if the marketing approach isn’t carefully researched, tested and tested again, the fallout can be tremendous. And that means lost time, higher costs, and fewer sales.

But, when the marketing team really does their due diligence, the results can be extremely profound.

Content marketing delivers on that effort. There was no internet in 1990 —so when someone had a widget to sell, their first approach was to convince the buyer why they needed that widget. The culture has changed geometrically since then —today’s buyers go looking for things online, and that, compiled with the terabytes of data they provide on a second-by-second basisvia all of the connection points in their lives (smartphones, computers, home appliances, cars, TVs, etc.), creates a tapestry of information savvy marketers can use to ensure they’re helping fulfill an identified need —even before the buyer might know what problem it is they’re trying to solve. That’s really the key —specifically in B2B marketing. It’s why more B2B companies refer to their offerings as”solutions” than “products” As much of a buzzword as that is, it’s still an accurate one. Our clients all sell solutions to business problems. As marketers, it’s up to us to position those solutions in a way that meets the buyer at their intersection of “right place, right time” to catch their eye. Nearly a decade ago, the Corporate Executive Board (now a part of Gartner) did a whole bunch of research to determine that the B2B buyer completed 57% of the “buyer’s journey” before reaching out to salesperson. That stat became a flashpoint for marketers, even though it was an average of the aggregate of every single vertical across the business landscape (which is fine

4—it was a benchmark and it gave us all a place to start from). Nevertheless, while that stat is likely not directly applicable to your industry —and less so, to your company in particular —the spirit of the stat is accurate: B2B buyers spend significant time researching their own problems and potential solutions long before they reach out to talk to a potential vendor.

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