Carefully using your limited resources -- both time and money - for sales lead generation and follow-up on prospective clients is key to building a profitable small business. 

Whether you're a solo-entrepreneur/consultant or have a staff to help you generate revenue, how can make the most of each and every sales lead that comes your way?

Developing a simple process -- a "sales lead qualification process" -- is essential.

A qualification process helps you systematically evaluate every new client business opportunity, and prioritize how you handle each one. 

Specifically, this process helps you to:

• identify the potential clients that are the best fit for your service.  These are the businesses that have a pain or problem that you have the experience and credentials to solve, and ones that match the criteria of your "ideal client profile" and target market. There's nothing worse than investing lots of effort on proposing a solution for a prospect, only to later realize that it isn't a good fit for you (or them).
• saves time and money in following-up with prospects.  You can avoid allocating limited resources following-up with tire-kickers, people that don't have the funds to pay you, or don't have the authority to make a buying decision.
• understand what you know, don't know, and need to know in order to adequately follow-up with the prospect, increasing your probability to gain them as a new client.
• determine who are the key players (influencers and decision makers) to make the deal happen.
• understand where the prospect is in the buying process.  Have they just started doing research?  Have they identified other options (like your competitors)?  Are they ready to buy now, or do they need more nurturing before they can commit?
• identify the strengths and weaknesses of your service (which can help you be more competitive in your marketplace).
• track and measure -- overtime -- the best approaches for each type of sales lead you get.  A key to profitable growth is to duplicate a process that has worked in the past to convert prospects into paying clients.

How do you qualify a sales lead?

The easiest way is to create a simple internal checklist, and rate or score the new client opportunity based on several criteria, such as:

• needs analysis of the prospect (what pain or problem do they have that needs to be solved?)
• the best-fit solution for the prospect
• the time frame and urgency the prospect has to solve the problem
• the value or return on investment (ROI) the solution will provide the prospect (does the solution save them time/mioney? increase sales? etc.)
• the budget and other resources the prospect has available
• what relationships do you have with the key players that have authority to buy your service?

A sample sales lead qualification scoring form is available for you to use as a model in developing your own process of evaluating and prioritizing your new client opportunities.

Click here to download the Sales Lead Qualification Scoring Form