Top 7 questions to determine whether sales leads are qualified

There are seven essential questions used to determine if the contact or business is a qualified prospect:

1) Does this contact or business have a need for my company’s services or products?

2) Does this contact or prospect business perceive a need or problem that may be met by my company’s product or service?

3) Does the contact or prospect business have a real desire to fulfil this actual need or solve this problem?

4) Can this contact's desire to fulfil actual needs or solve problems be converted into a belief that my company’s product or service is needed?

5) Does this contact or prospect business have the financial budget to pay?

6) Does this contact or prospect have the company authority to buy?

7) Is this potential contact's purchase large enough to make it a profitable sale?

These are the questions that you should ask, and we ask them as well, during the prospect qualification process (which is always the most important part of the lead generation process).

Top 10 PR Tips

1) Talking about doing PR isn't as good as actually doing something. Waiting for the best story to happen can take a while, it is better to get something out there

2) Have a steady stream of appropriate PR to editors seeking your content

3) Read the up-coming Features list and try to put some PR relevant to the feature

4) Find a PR company that can make something out of your product or service, that you might think is normal

5) Use pictures with your PR to help Editors to visualise your uniqueness

6) 'The more you write the less gets read' good PR companies have learnt to be brief and to the point

7) Recycle old PR with a fresh new slant, in some fringe publications

8) Good PR agents will find a good story by just interviewing your customers

9) Fully written-up Testimonials with pictures are like gold, you can use them for PR and for sending to prospects in your marketing materials

10) Measure the success of your PR with clippings, but allow time for editors to start using your submissions

A technique used in public relations is to identify the specific target audience, and then to tailor every message to appeal directly to that audience. The audience can be a general, nationwide or worldwide audience, and it is often a segment of a entire population. Marketers often refer to "demographics" such as "black males 20-40" for example. In public relations an audience is often more fluid, being whoever a company wants to reach. For example, recent political target audiences include "soccer moms". There is also a grouping based on fitness, eating preferences etc.

As well as audiences, there are stakeholders, people who have a "stake" in a specific issue. All audiences are potential stakeholders, but not all of the stakeholders are audiences. To provide an example, a charity enlists a PR agency to produce a campaign to raise money to find potential cures for a disease. The charity and the sufferers of the disease are stakeholders, and the audience is everyone who could donate money.