7 Staples of an Effective Lead Qualification Asset Package

So, you’ve built — or are planning to build — your B2B company’s first lead generation program.

You’re confident that the right people and processes are in place to successfully construct a high-performing lead gen team. You’ve designated a manager to run the operation, implemented a CRM system, and identified the top prospects that your newly hired reps should be targeting.

And then reality sets in.

You listen to a few of your lead generators’ phone conversations and read their emails to prospective buyers. Each rep conveys a different version of your value proposition, sometimes with varying degrees of accuracy or specificity. Even worse, when those reps encounter fairly generic objections or rebuttals from those prospects, they stumble through a hackneyed, scripted response.

If that sounds painfully familiar (or that scenario routinely plays out in your nightmares), then you’re probably lacking one of the key tools that we laid out in our latest infographic: a high-quality lead qualification asset package.

In essence, a lead qualification asset package is a technical term for the content, collateral, and materials that serve as a reference guide and high-level encyclopedia for your lead gen reps. It’s a guidebook that helps your reps better understand your customers and their pain points, leading to better (and more) quality conversations.

Need help piecing yours together? Here are seven key components of a comprehensive lead qualification asset package:

1. Conversation guide: Standard sales scripts often sound cheesy and trite because the reps reading them aren’t able to immediately adopt the voice or language of the sales manager who wrote them. Instead of giving your reps scripts, provide them with a conversation guide that includes a few strong opening lines, a crystal clear value proposition, your buyers’ top pain points, a handful of qualifying questions, and a summary that will help them transition conversations to the next logical step.
2. Persona guide: This document should include everything related to a specific persona or role (think VP of Sales versus VP of Marketing), including: their role within the organization, who they report to, what their responsibilities include, who influences their decision making, and what their pains are.
3. E-mail templates: Similar to a conversation guide, the goal of an e-mail template isn’t to compose every follow-up e-mail for your reps. Instead, it’s to give them the ammo they need to deliver relevant, concise e-mails to their prospects. As a rule of thumb, e-mails should be limited to a few sentences or one brief paragraph and shouldn’t try to fully pitch your product.
4. Current customer testimonials: You don’t have to give your reps a list of every customer you have, but you should give them relevant, credible, and referenceable examples of how you’ve helped similar companies. If the customer giving the testimonial is a direct competitor of the prospect, however, make sure your reps are careful about the information they disclose.
5. Competitor information: You might have 20 competitors, but again don’t overwhelm your reps. Instead, pick the five that your sales team encounters most frequently. Break down those competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and provide prompts that will help reps continue the conversation if a prospect brings them up.
6. Common objections and rebuttals: If you’ve never done an outbound prospecting initiative, your initial objection list may not be long. Start with the four or five most common. By the end of your first quarter of outbound prospecting that list will undoubtedly double. Be sure to discuss new objections or rebuttals in weekly meetings and add them to the list if necessary.
7. Attention grabbers: Assembling a brief list of compelling factoids or tidbits of information will arm your reps with ammo they can rattle off in a voicemail, e-mail, or in a live conversation. Some things that might qualify as attention grabbers include analyst statements, ROI numbers, customer retention data, and industry awards.

There you have it. Collecting and disseminating those assets in a nice, tidy package will go a long way toward making your reps’ activities more productive.

But don’t just deliver the finished asset package to your reps. Bring everyone together, go over the documents as a group, and perform role-playing to ensure that every rep is comfortable with them.

Also, as you prepare to go after a new segment, hand over your current lead qualification asset package to your product marketing team and have them turn each document into a template that can be customized to future verticals. That will remove the need to reinvent the wheel for each new segment and allow your lead gen team to hit the ground running.