The 3 Best Questions To Ask Inbound Leads

In my last blog article, I promised to reveal the three best questions to ask an inbound lead.

Ask the wrong questions and you’ll either miss hot prospects or spend a ton of effort on those who won't’ buy from you.

Ask the right questions and you’ll quickly tell hot prospects from time wasters.

There are a lot people who say that you shouldn’t call someone who completes a form on your web site because they’re not ready to buy, so you pepper them with more and more content, hoping they’ll call you when they’re ready.

Now, I agree that just because someone fills in a form on your website, it doesn’t mean they are ready to buy. But research shows that 70% of decision makers want to talk to sales people during the early stages of their buying process.

So the next time someone completes a form on your website, PICK UP THE FREAKIN’ PHONE!

The big questions are: when is the best time to call, and what are the best questions to ask?

When Is The Best Time To Phone?

Research by MIT shows that when you follow up with an inbound in five minutes or less, you’re over 10 times more likely to reach the person who completed the form than if you waited just 30 minutes and research by InsideSales.com shows the first vendor to respond wins the sale 50% of the time.

Many sales experts, including myself, are firm in their belief that the more relevant a call or email, the more likely the prospect will engage with a salesperson. But how can you research a prospect to make your call relevant when you have to call them in less than five minutes?

Because they’ve demonstrated their interest in a certain resource, I would argue that you already know enough to get you through the initial follow up call.  

Once you get an understanding of what buying stage the prospect is in - and how you should engage with them going forward - then you can perform the necessary research.

Here’s a simple way to remember this: with inbound leads, salespeople should act, then learn, then act; with outbound leads, it’s learn, act, learn.

Every minute that ticks by after you receive an inbound lead reduces your chances of earning a new customer. So don’t wait, pick up the phone. Those with cat-like phone reflexes will win in the end.

What Are The Best Questions To Ask?

When you pick up the phone and say, “I’m following up on your information request. Can I take two minutes of your time and ask three really quick questions?” In all the years that I’ve used this method the answer has always been “yes.”

Then, launch into the following three questions:

1) “Did you get the email with the link to the resources you’re looking for?”

Before anything else, you want to make sure they got what they were looking for. If they misspelled their email address, you can resend the information to the correct address.

If it ended up in their spam folder, you can tell them how to get it out, or route it to them via another channel.

Follow through on this initial interaction between your company and the prospect to demonstrate your reliability.

2) “When you read about this or saw this, what resonated and made you say, ‘Hey I should check this out’?”

I typically include the question, “How did you hear about us?” in my forms, so I don’t need to ask this during my follow up. Instead, I pose this second question to uncover the specific words, images, or themes that compelled the prospect to click.

This information is relevant to both Marketing and Sales. Part of a salesperson’s responsibility is to help their colleagues in Marketing understand what’s working and what’s not, and this type of feedback goes a long way towards that goal.

In addition, learning about what words grab buyers’ attention helps salespeople tailor their emails and communication for maximum engagement and response.

3) “I’m curious. What happened recently that made this content more relevant or more important?”

This question not only uncovers the trigger event that drove your customer to your content, but also reveals what buying stage they’re in (for more information on buying stages, check out this post). And once you know the stage, you also know how to proceed:

• Status quo: Nurture. Put this prospect in a lead nurturing program until they enter a Window of Dissatisfaction?.
• Searching for Alternatives: Ignore. This lead has already chosen their preferred vendor and is now just getting three prices so they can justify their choice to others.
• Window of Dissatisfaction: Sell. This is a hot prospect. Now is the time to use the 7 Second Sale and reel them in!

Sometimes the hardest part of selling is knowing when is the best time to reach out to inbound prospects again.

I’ll cover that issue on my next blog post on the Three Best Times to Follow Up With an Inbound Lead.

P.S. With your buyers who are already searching for alternatives, the only strategy I’ve seen effectively work here is to be the least risky choice alternative and keep calling back to see if their preferred choice has let them down. Once they’ve been let down, they become even more risk-averse; since you are now the least risky alternative, you become the new preferred vendor.