Be picky with spending resources on leads

Lead analysis relieves you from the sunk-cost bias. Unless you collect and analyse the right data, you won’t know which positive leads are real, and which are just “no’s” in disguise. It might seem like a good idea to chase ALL THE LEADS, but you’re just making probability responsible for your performance. Take control instead, and chase only qualified “long yes” leads.

You’re sending a well-written cold email campaign to generate leads. You’ve researched a prospect list of potentially interested decision makers in several companies. Two things are for sure – you’ve got the right messaging, and you’re writing to the right people. Will it convince prospects?

It’s not guaranteed – you can’t control what kind of replies cold emails will generate. One thing’s for sure, a lot of them will be a “long yes” – a particularly tricky type of lead, which many salespeople have a problem dealing with.

A “long yes” lead from a cold email campaign is a person that:

• replies to your cold email and clearly states a need, but doesn’t have time/resources to buy right now
• tells you he/she doesn’t have time/resources once you’ve converted a cold email reply into a call

The term “long yes” covers a wide range of responses that give you hope for closing a deal, but “for some reason” not at the moment. A generic “long yes” looks pretty much like this:

You don’t know whether they’re just nicely rejecting you, or they really intend to buy from you in a few months. Since you don’t know the full truth, you need a method to uncover it and quickly qualify “long yes” leads. 

Otherwise there’s trouble ahead.

Don’t sacrifice your mental comfort

Salespeople often want to chase ALL THE LEADS(!!!). But this way, you invest a lot of time nurturing all business relationships at a mediocre level, while the most opportune leads are unsatisfied or just slip away.

Indecisive, pushing you back, not replying – “Long yes” leads dance Gangnam Style all over your lateral habenula (the little bit of your brain responsible for making key, everyday decisions). The “sunk cost” bias comes into play – when you spend resources to chase leads, the need to close a deal grows bigger. But people either ignore you, or keep re-scheduling. You’ve invested so much that you only want those deals more, so you keep sinking resources into hopeless leads.

The solution – you have to separate the good leads from the bad leads as soon as possible.

Qualifying a “long yes” reply

#1 – Generic “long yes”

The general rule for dealing with “long yes” leads is to hold people responsible for what they say. When you see a reply like this:

Your first instinct is to make that meeting as real as possible – for instance schedule time-slots in your Calendly and send an invitation, all they have to do is click the link and pick a time:

You have to show that you’re serious about it. At this point, often they’ll respond without picking a time slot or just ignore you alltogether. Which is the first bad signal of a poor lead. Imagine you’re trying to hook up with someone and you say “Wanna meet on friday?” and they only reply “I can’t do friday”.

Is your first thought “Wow, this is totally going to work out”? Nope, you instantly think about why they didn’t help you schedule a better date. When someone ignores you at this point, you can cut-off the lead completely. If someone keeps responding, you still have a chance to schedule that specific meeting so keep at it.

To clarify, cutting off doesn’t have to mean completely disregarding a lead. You don’t have to delete leads from your CRM forever, just create a separate lead segment like “undecided”. For this segment, your actions would be limited to basic nurturing – adding someone on Linkedin so that they could see your updates, or to your company newsletter. 5 minutes and they’re off your mind.

And pushing for scheduling means offering different dates and times, but also trying to reduce your wait as much as you can – eg. when someone offers a weirdly distant date, ask “why not sooner?”. This makes your intentions even realer, and speeds up the qualifying process.

So that’s the generic case –  you deal with different types of “long yes” leads very similarly. Now I want to show you the most common reply&qualification patterns that I’ve noticed over 2 years of qualifying leads at RightHello. We’re mostly in the B2B tech market – your industry might be different, so remember to analise your own leads and draw conclusions. Or get in contact with us – we know B2B tech leads in&out.

#2 – No budget “long yes”

If a company can’t afford us at first, they usually can’t afford later on as well. The conclusion here is that companies that don’t have cash for you now, have even less cash when you follow-up in a few months. If there’s solid proof that their budget will get bigger (100% secured funding), I chase the lead further and push to schedule a meeting. 

If it’s just an unbacked assumption, and they can’t provide a solid reason for the promised inflow of cash – it doesn’t bode well and I go for the cut-off.

#3 – No website “long yes”

Implementing a proper website always takes longer than it should, and I’m usually pushed back again when I follow-up as scheduled. If you manage to schedule a follow-up then by all means wait for it and get in contact, but if you can’t even agree on a good time to follow-up – cut-off.

If it’s not implementation, then it’s “not translated” – to this I say “Okay, but from what I see it would take 2,5 hours to translate the whole website”. Other times it’s “not good enough” – to which I say “if it works, and people can read about what you do, than it’s good enough”. People are either convinced they’ve been exaggerating the problem, or they ignore me from there on out. If they’re convinced, push to schedule future meeting. When it’s impossible to schedule – cut-off.

#4 – Bad customer profile fit “long yes”

In our case it’s mostly “we don’t have a sales team”. This is specific to our Ideal Customer Profile. In your case, this might translate to “no marketing team” or something completely different. The thing is, you don’t want a client that doesn’t fit your ICP.

To me, “we’ll start as soon as we have a salesperson on-board” is a really bad signal, because:

• in an early stage start-up, the founder (or co-founders) can do sales for a while
• at some point they run out of resources (mostly time), that creates a need for middle-management
• the existing team becomes the managing team – they make mistakes, thus increasing costs, because of which overall company performance drops for some
  time

So when I follow-up, they’re usually in more trouble than when I first contacted them and have even less time for me.

When I get a get a “long yes” like this, I push to schedule a meeting if there’s hope (good growth strategy for example), keeping in mind that it’s a low priority lead. If there are problems with scheduling – cut-off.

#5 – No time / production capacity “long yes”

Everyone is busy, so when the only reason I get is “not enough time” or “too busy” – I just call and say “I didn’t want you to waste time replying to my email, so I decided to call – I’ll only take 3 minutes”. I use those 3 minutes for lead qualification and to schedule a meeting.

As for production capacity – busy, successful teams only get busier with time. Until they decide on their own that they need a solution like ours (and that we’re the best) – there’s almost 0% chance that my follow-up will change anything. I push to find out when they suspect to be less busy and schedule a meeting then. When there are problems with scheduling, I cut-off.

There you have it, analysing leads for over 2 years in RightHello gave me a pretty good idea of who is really interested, and who isn’t.

Analyse leads and don’t waste resources on irrelevant leads

Lead analysis is a method to get a feel for your target group’s buying signals. The core of “long yes” analysis is collecting data about:

• reasons provided by all “long yes” leads
• amount of resources you’ve used to qualify them
• the outcomes of qualifying them

After a while of it, you can separate hot leads from cold leads, and in turn make good decisions to re-focus your sales efforts. Your goal is to get to a point where you’ll have the toolset necessary to quickly reach the truth – do they really need your solution, or are they just avoiding the “no” to be nice?

So the main and final takeaway I want you to remember is: in B2B Sales it’s more important to let go of leads, not hold on to as many as you can.

Aim to reduce the number of leads you’re chasing, and it will make a huge difference for you and your team.