FIR 109: You Said What? I Said...How Do I Improve The Quality Of My Leads??

Financial Investing Radio

In this episode, we're asking the question, How do I improve the quality of my leads? Do I use special language? Is there a framework I should use?

Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. This is Grant. Okay. So, one summer, during my college days, I was selling long distance phone service, right? That definitely dates me, I was constantly looking for ways to find people who wanted to save money on their long distance service right now back then, as you probably know, the big fish in the ocean was AT&T.

And so there is this other company that had bought a ton of their capacity and had got the rights to sell that service or that capacity. But at a reduced rate. Right. They clearly didn't have all of the infrastructure that at&t did. So they could undercut him. So I was selling this service and I was looking for customers, how am I going to find a customer? There were times that I stood in the local mall. This was in western Colorado, and I would try to solicit people, right? I'm trying to figure out how do I do this, right. So I went, I went to the mall and set up a little booth there. And you know, the drill, I'm trying to make eye contact as people are walking through the mall, and they were trying to avoid eye contact. And of course, we've all been there, right? We've all avoided the contact, I know I contact It was painful.

Well, there must be a better way, you know, I thought so I had to find some other channel or avenue to find more qualified leads. So I started looking to small to medium businesses, I started thinking Wait a minute, they're going to be making a lot of phone calls. And they would most likely welcome this ability to reduce their costs. So I started literally going through the Yellow Pages, alright, that dates me again to write and I'm going through these businesses, and I'm showing up on like, I can save you some money on your bills. And they're like, hey, alright, suddenly, I found this vein of value, right? So I would go in, I would talk with the business owner. And I'd say I can save you about 25 to 40%. And they just started jumping in on it and signing up.

And interestingly, while I was in those businesses, signing up the business owner, individuals, right employees in the business, they would come forward and they'd say, Hey, you know, is this for personal stuff, too? And I'd be like, Yeah, absolutely. So then I would sign up their employees as well for their own home service also. And so it was this wonderful connection that I sort of stumbled into? Well, it helped me get through college, right? The difference? We know, when I look back at that, right, it was finding the high quality lead, right, it was always interesting to me, that the individuals would come forward and sign up as well, meaning I could have approached those same individuals in the mall, and they would have likely walked the other way, right, they would have not made the eye contact. So when we're looking for high quality leads, it's particularly about finding the right individual, but even more important, it's where and when we find that individual.

So in that scenario, you know, when I was finding the individual, they were clearly more comfortable buying the service in the context of their workplace, as their boss was buying it, then they were buying it standing in the mall. So discovering the buying scenarios for our leads, I think is one of the most important ways to improve the quality of our leads. And as you know, it's often that exact same person or business when you know when we get them into the right scenario that they'll purchase and become a customer. So the question then is, how do we discover those scenarios? Right? What are the techniques for doing that? If a scenario is that critical to reduce the time to value, then how do we find it? So in one of my startup companies, we had been developing some software solutions and at one point, I sold a two week consulting project to a large company. So me and my team went in and we did the work, things went, well, this large company liked it, and we got paid. That was all good. But I thought, Wait a minute, you know, always better to go back after a hot market and a warm market than it is a cold market.

So I started showing up to that same company for the next six weeks after that, every few days, I just show up, and I check in on it. Hey, how'd you like what we did for you, hey, did that go pretty well don't want to be a pain. But we would love to do more stuff for you. Right? So I started walking the halls. And pretty soon I was having Hallway Conversations. Now, in a COVID. world, that would be a little more difficult. But there are virtual hallways, right that we can walk. So this enabled me to, you know, gather their scenarios, right, understand what their pain points were. And then that further enabled me to design a solution. So I crafted a solution that I felt would be meaningful to their scenarios. So not long after that, I had the opportunity to get a pitch that solution in the context of their scenarios, right, addressing their pain points, and we ended up closing a seven figure deal. So it's all about knowing our customer.

Alright, that's that's real key thing. But it's, it's knowing the scenarios in which they're willing to, in fact, bring on and understand the value that it is we can deliver to them. If I address them directly in the mall, it's not going to go well, metaphorically. Now, the stories that I just shared, I think demonstrates some of the things that we can do to improve the quality of our leads. But I think that there's a challenge with these stories that I shared. And one of them is that I think they take a lot of time, right? That's a lot of effort to find the people to go, you know, cultivate the lead, but it's still a good effort. It's the right effort to do. But I often wondered, is there a way to reduce some of that effort. And one of the one of the techniques that we have used leverages AI. And so for most businesses, of course, their customer base shares some common characteristics, which brings them to the business.

So creating a profile, right? If you sit back and think if I created a profile of my customers, right, and I fed them into some AI models, which is what we do, then you search for the people that align well with those profiles, that actually improves the quality of the leads. But I'll get nerdy here for a moment. Most important thing I think, in all this is that it never replaces the human touch in building business relationships. So I don't think that'll ever go away, at least for a long time, right. But what it does do is it puts the leads and our efforts into a quadrant. And so allows us to reduce the amount of effort that we do spend, so that we can have that human touch in the more important set of people that are more profitable, highly qualified leads. What it does is it introduces a quadrant, okay, fact some call it a confusion matrix fact, I hope I don't confuse you with the next 30 seconds.

But it basically has these two variables. One is, is the quality lead predicted to be a quality lead, yes or no? Or is it actually going to be a lead? Yes or no? So those are the two case you need both of those. So in some cases, you'll have a person and is the person predicted to be a quality lead? No. Will they actually become one in real life? No, then the answer is we don't ever really want to spend our time least talking to them about what it is we have to sell anyway. So AI helps us to take that whole set of people and move them away. We don't want to spend our time there. The next the next layer, there's four of these is is this person predicted to be one? No, the AI said no. But in real life, it turns out, they would have been. And so that's a lost opportunity. We call that an opportunity cost, right. So those would be some that hey, just the AI got wrong.

All right, the next area, the next two areas, though, is where we will spend our time, it's where it is predicted that person is predicted to be a quality lead, in reality, they won't be a lead. And so one of the ways we found helpful to mitigate that is to be very clear and crisp, on the profile of the customers know the customers the message there, right. And that keeps that quadrant and that section of people very small. All right. And then the last area is the course one that we really want to focus on. This is where the AI says you're predicted to be a quality lead, and in reality, you are quality lead and you will actually purchase. That's the goal, right? That's the vein of value that we're pursuing. So the real the real goal here is to let us get to those high quality individuals or businesses where then we can build those connections, those human relationships, figure out what the scenarios are for them and then make it really effective at delivering the kind of service that they need. Hey, if you're interested in reducing in reducing the effort to find high quality leads and reach out to us at click ai radio.com My name is Grant. Thank you for joining. Until next time, go get some quality leads.

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