5 Steps to Prequalifying Leads Effectively

Clients are looking for a trusted advisor, someone who truly understand their business and the challenges they’re facing, who will deliver great work and to help them achieve their goals.

As an agency, you want to ensure your resources are spent on genuine leads that align with your strengths and to work with clients who are a good fit for your culture and expertise in their category. With budgets tightening and competition becoming more intense, prequalifying leads before committing to a full-scale engagement is crucial.

 

The process of prequalification forms an intrinsic part of marketing-led new business, helping you to identify the most promising opportunities and ensuring your efforts are focused on projects with the highest potential for success.

 

Executed well, prequalification allows an agency to get to the heart of the brief, to really understand why they client is doing the pitch – and what they need from the relationship. It evaluates whether the potential relationship aligns with agency’s expertise, strengths and strategic goals/solutions, to ensure both parties clearly understand the other’s needs and capabilities

 

Pitching is expensive, labour intensive and time-consuming for everyone involved. Prequalification helps to focus on identifying the right clients based on your agency’s strengths and the benefits you can offer them. It’s all about having the right fit and at Beckon, we will always begin by asking:

 

• Why have they selected you?
• What is it about you that they were interested in?
• What have you seen about your people and your capabilities that makes them want to work with you?

 

If they can’t answer clearly, it can be a red flag that you’re a filler agency, making up numbers.

 

Remember, prequalification is a two-way street. If a potential client wants to know about your business and how you operate you need to do the same, so don’t be afraid to send an RFI back. It’s a bold approach that helps to identify and address any potential issues early – and shows you’re serious about growth and winning the right type of clients.

 

A few well-qualified leads can be far more valuable than many unqualified ones. By identifying high-potential leads early, you can allocate resources more effectively and dedicate your team’s time and talents to projects that are more likely to result in successful outcomes, helping you to avoid the sunk costs associated with pursuing unsuitable clients.

 

Here Are Our 5 Steps To Prequalifying Leads Effectively:

 

Define the characteristics of your ideal client. Think about industry, company size, budget and project scope. What are you delivering well for your current clients? Identify 2 or 3 of those benefits and use them as a model to take to market to find similar types of clients

Use a prequalification tool or RFI to gather basic information from potential clients. This can include their project needs, resources, budget, timeline, experience and objectives

 

Ask the tough questions early on in the process when you have the most influence (in other words, when the client needs you on the list.)

 

Assess the cultural fit between your agency and the potential client: does the client’s communication style and expectations align with your agency’s working MO?

 

Use a scoring system to rank potential leads based on your prequalification criteria and focus on those that score highest before making an informed decision on whether to pursue the lead based on the gathered information and scores

 

When time and resources are in short supply, having a robust prequalification process in place is a realistic approach to ensure agencies partner with the right brands, who genuinely need and value your expertise, leading to more successful and rewarding projects.

 

Whether in-house or outsourced to a consultancy like Beckon, focusing on leads that are more likely to convert will allow your marketing and new business teams to tailor their efforts more precisely, resulting in higher conversion rates.

 

Remember, it’s not just about finding work; it’s about finding the right work.