Work an inbound lead from the form to a qualified deal

The situation

Marek at Halden Systems fills in the form. Sixty engineers, replacing something they built themselves, mentions SSO. In most teams what happens next is: a record appears, a rule assigns it to somebody, a sequence starts, and a week later nobody can tell you what was actually said.

The version below takes about four minutes of your attention across five days and leaves a record somebody else could pick up cold.

What must be true when you are done

• The person and the company exist, matched rather than duplicated.
• What they asked for is on the record in their own words, once.
• There is a next action with a date on it.
• If it qualifies, there is a deal with a real number and a real close date. If it does not, the reason is written down.

The arrival

The form submission itself should be an automation: the fields are already structured, there is nothing to work out, and it should behave identically at 3am. Your workflow creates the contact and the company.

What should not be automated is the part immediately after, because it is the part that requires reading.

The evidence quote is worth the extra five seconds. In three weeks when somebody asks whether they said sixty engineers or six hundred, the answer is on the record rather than in a thread.

The two rules you are not writing

Lead scoring. Sixty engineers replacing a homegrown tool is a good lead, and you know that from reading it. A score would have given you a number derived from a company-size field that nobody populated, and you would have learned to ignore it. Ask the agent to tell you why it thinks a lead is worth time, and you get a sentence you can argue with.

Round-robin assignment. There is no assignment engine here, and that is a real difference from what you are leaving. Ownership is a field somebody sets. For a small team this is a feature: the conversation about who takes an account is the useful part, and the rule was mostly a way of avoiding it. For a large team it is a genuine gap and you would automate it against the API yourself.

Before the call

The brief is one question, and it is the reason to have bothered with any of the above.

Everything on that brief is bounded rather than a feed, so it is the same length on an account you have worked for two years. What it will not do is pad: if nothing has been said, it tells you nothing has been said.

After the call: qualify or say why not

This is the step teams skip, and skipping it is why pipeline reviews are archaeology. Do it while you are still in the tab.

Note the shape of that instruction: it is what you would say to a colleague. The stage, the status, the lifecycle change and the linkage all follow from it, and none of them is a field you had to think about.

If it does not qualify, say that instead and say why. A lead that goes nowhere with a recorded reason is worth something later; one that just stops is worth nothing and clutters every list you look at.

Verify the motion

• Read the account as a stranger. Could somebody who has never spoken to Halden run the next call from what is on the record? If not, the summaries are too thin.
• Check the deal has a date and a number. A deal without either is a wish, and it will distort every forecast until somebody fixes it.
• Ask what is unchecked. The company size and the industry came from a form and a guess. Knowing which facts nobody has verified is its own recipe, and this is the moment it earns its keep.

Run it again

Every inbound lead, and the discipline is the whole point. The version of this that fails is the one where the first two steps happen and the qualify-or-say-why-not does not, because that is the step with no immediate reward and all of the later value.