Hey, question: does anyone else still end up with like 30-40% unqualified meetings on their calendar no matter what they do? I've heard forms, qualification calls (SDR), stricter criteria... but there's always a chunk of meetings that shouldn't have been booked. Worst part? You still need to take those calls because you never know! Has anyone actually cracked this or is it just part of the game?
I don’t know what you’re selling, so it will be generalities, but I really think that this part of the game. You can always improve it but unqualified meeting will always be there. If calls are coming from inbound, a few reasons I can see right away:
People might lie to still try to get your services/product
You and they don’t know they’re actually unqualified - specificities that a form cannot capture
Let’s say you have optimized to the maximum and have like 5% of unqualified meetings. You now have “free time” and explore a new “vertical” -> back to unqualified meetings until you figure out the exact set of criteria
You have your set of criteria, the world changes, your criteria needs to change. The world currently changes faster than our ability to adapt our criteria in a meaningful way
If people are coming from outbound, there is something to look at in the lead gen process 🙂 I am sure there are plenty of other reasons, but at some point, I think that as we’re managing humans relationship and connecting to actual people, we have to accept that it has to have a little bit of sub-optimized stuff 😄 Side note: from a strategic point of view, if 30-40% of my rep calls are unqualified, I would strongly look at opportunities to serve all of this people reaching out to me!
Generally I think most companies are happy making the mistake of "taking some calls with leads that do not qualify" rather than "over screening and excluding some calls which would qualify", and I would be surprised if the numbers don't support that for inbound
For a lot of startups or small companies, best practice is to narrow your ICP as much as possible. The example I use, when Facebook launched, their ICP was student with a Harvard.edu email, not all college students, no everyone, Harvard.edu. When you’re raising money, tell VCs the biggest TAM story in the world, when your trying to nail your GTM notion, find your Harvard.
Good morning, we have implemented in Lusha a lead AI qualifier, which is a very smart chatbot that is interacting with the leads (instead of submission forms) . The bot is fed with all historical leads transcripts (using our own Product call recording tool), our help center and more and can even generate payment links for customers that are at very low scale and not worth sending over to a rep. This has reduced dramatically the noise our reps are receiving and allowing them to focus on the right leads, causing an increase of meeting booked %
