Turning suspects into prospects and prospects into leads

The majority of the marketing programs I work on are designed to generate sales leads. For all of these programs, I use the same general strategy. The strategy is simple. Turn suspects into prospects and prospects into leads.

I define suspects, prospects, leads as follows:

Suspects - individuals in my target market that have never responded to a marketing communication.
Prospects - individuals who have expressed an interest in the products or services being sold.
Leads - prospects worthy of a salesperson’s time.

For the most part, my marketing objective is two-fold; generate prospects and generate leads.

Prospect Generation
Prospect generation is about turning suspects into prospects. Ultimately, salespeople want leads, but generating a prospect usually comes first.

Since a prospect is a person who has expressed an interest in what I’m selling, when I’m trying to generate prospects I want to get suspects to respond to an offer.

The offer doesn’t necessarily need to be a sales offer but the offer should qualify the suspect as a prospect. For example, if I invite suspects to attend an online seminar about an issue related to what I’m selling, the respondents would be classified as prospects.

Lead Generation:
Now, just because someone expresses interest in an offer, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a lead. A lead is a prospect that’s worthy of a salesperson’s time. So, some sort of qualification process must be in place to identify prospects who are leads. For example, if you invite suspects to attend an online seminar, perhaps you have them answer a few qualifying questions during the seminar registration process.

Now, if you don’t have many leads, all of your prospect might be considered leads. But, that’s not usually the case.

With an effective marketing program in place, your salespeople will likely have too many leads to follow-up on. So, marketing and sales must work together to constantly refine what qualifies a prospect as a lead. As marketing creates more leads, the criteria that define leads should get stricter. Ideally, we get to the point where we’re just marketing to a target prospect list.

A target prospect list includes selected individuals, or specific persons within selected organizations that we want to engage. When our marketing evolves to this point, every prospect is a lead and every salesperson is extremely busy.