Lead Types

In sales lead management all leads can be classified as one of two types: 1. request or inquiry 2. cold name or list name. We'll look at what differentiates the two types and evaluate their attributes.


First lets start with the request or inquiry lead. These leads are generated when someone contacts you and requests more information about your product. A simple example would be someone who goes to a car dealership and looks at cars they are considering purchasing. When they leave if they did not make a purchase, but are still interested, the sales rep gets their information and enters it into a database. Creating a new lead. Another example would be someone who fills out a web form requesting a free trial of web software. After submitting the web form their information is entered into a database as someone who has expressed interest in the product and should be followed up with. These are your best leads.


Request or inquiry leads are someone who already has an interest in your product. If you compare it to fishing you would say they are “nibbling” at the bait and all you need to do is set the hook.


You can capture these leads in several ways; people coming to your place of business, calling toll free or local numbers, filling out a web form, are just a few of the most common methods.


When capturing these leads you want to obtain as much information as possible. This helps you in two area's. First, scoring, or calculating how likely they are to purchase your product. Second, more data helps with the contacting process. More data increases your chances of contacting the prospect after the initial contact. Two ways of contacting is always better than one, like a phone number, email or mailing address.


It's important to contact request leads as soon as you can even immediately if possible. Studies have shown with web leads specifically, that if you do not contact them within 5 minutes of the chances of making contact and making a sale start to drop dramatically.


The second type of lead is a cold name. This type of lead is not nearly as good. Collected from a list vendor or phone book listing these, you can contact these people with the hope that they might be interested in your product. Using cold names is more like throwing your line in the water not knowing what the fish are biting on.


What you are selling determines how effective cold names will be. If you are selling a product with a large market, such as cellphones, or TV's cold names would be more effective, than something with a small market like whitewater kayak paddles, which would be very ineffective to sell using cold names. Depending on what you are selling determines how effective these will be, but they are proven to be less effective than the request leads.


The primary difference between request leads and cold names is the level of interest. With request leads you have people who are already interested in buying your product. With cold names you are trying to build interest in your product so you can sell to them.