I had the most ridiculous, useless, time-wasting conversation with a garbage "lead" the other day. What follows is how to shoot these jokers down like playing Duckhunt with a bazooka. But just before, here's the context.

The lead and I are talking, and the "lead" mentions my being 20. I'm a young guy, he notes, and therefore I should be all the more excited by this opportunity [My thoughts: "Oh boy, this is gonna be a doozie ..."]. I point out to him that I spoke at SMX (with Eric Lander and Chris Silver Smith) and have done a little writing here and there. No reaction. ["This is going nowhere fast."]

I ask how we can work together and he responds dodgily, evangelizing to me how great this opportunity is ["Is it rude to hang up?"] and that there's limitless potential ["Do you moonlight as a preacher?"]. By the time he's proposing revenue share I'm about ready to tell him that I'm billing for the whole conversation, but I hold back. [We Canucks are quite the polite crew...]

After finally pulling out of him that he wanted to do all of this in insurance, I highlight that it's a very competitive business and would likely require buying links. (Unless you're a linkbaiter extraordinaire a la 0atmeal.) His response? "I don't think that link buying will be necessary." [... ... ...]

Note: I make it a rule to avoid talking badly about leads who don't become clients. In this case I'm making an exception because the person wasted almost an hour of my time on what should have been a 5 minute call. He kept insisting and trying to convince me to work for him for free. That's one reason why I'm sharing the above conversation. Also, there are a variety of phrases in there that I've heard before from the mouths of similarly bad leads, and I think my fellow SEO consultants will benefit from being exposed to them.

Anyway, here are some thoughts on qualifying prospects, and particularly SEO leads (i.e., leads who want SEO services).  

The ideal client is highly educated, spending money on other marketing initiatives and measuring results. They have a reasonable budget for SEO, and have a unique value proposition. (What does a UVP have to do with SEO, you ask? Well, people would rather link to something cool than link to crap, so a UVP makes your link building life a lot easier.) You can also infer the client's likely budget by checking out other ways they've spent their money (e.g., print/radio/tv/yellow pages ads, analytics, web design, accounting etc.), how established their business is, etc.

The time-in-business, branding, UVP, and networking questions help you in terms of how easy it will be to build links, craft a compelling message, and sell the product. And I'm sure you can find your own original uses for some of these questions. I bought Brendon Sinclair's Web Design Business Kit, from which some of these come, so kudos to Brendon. 

First, try some of the following questions.

1. How can we work together? Get to know their needs.
2. What have you read about SEO? If they're educated, the relationship will be smoother and you can do more advanced things - especially with enterprise clients - more easily.
3. Name 3 - 5 blog posts that are very influential on your SEO thinking. If they're reading Matt Cutts but not Michael Gray, chances are paid links are out of the picture. If they're reading Quadszilla...
4. What's your budget? Easily discount the jokers who want work for free, and pass on the leads beyond your capacity to friends with bigger agencies who can take them on. It'll help build a relationship and you'll eventually get work sent back your way too, or maybe even be a subcontractor on the project.
5. Is your site an affiliate site? You're going to have a harder time promoting and therefore should charge more.
6. Do you have a marketing plan? How organized/professional are these folks? This is important to the relationship and budget constraints.
7. Do you regularly measure results of marketing initiatives? How are you going to be measured? How accountable will you be? Do you need to lead them by the hand into web analytics? Think reporting costs and scope of work and professionalism/education (which helps you create the right deliverables as well).
8. What other marketing have you done? TV ads? Newspaper? Price is probably not the deciding factor in whether they accept the proposal (not an excuse to gouge, though).
9. What were the results like? This helps direct your creative orientation and deliverables you propose. Successful direct marketers will like generic keywords better and may be more open to content network than people who bombed there but generated nice sales from branded search.
10. Do you have benchmarks? Again, how are you going to measure this campaign?
11. How long have you been in business? (Budget, reliability for timely payment, etc.)
12. How much brand recognition do you have in your industry? It's easier to build links to authorities; pricing may be altered accordingly.
13. How long has your website been up? This helps estimate how much work is required to rank and stay ahead of the competition.
14. How established is your business network? This is a link building facilitator.
15. What makes you different from competitors? UVP = link building facilitator. If they say "lower price," you're possibly in trouble. Wal Mart's suppliers are forced to cut their own costs year-in year-out; you'll also likely be competing on price. Other generic differentiators like 'better service/quality' are meaningless, since everyone claims that position. Have them quantify things, like the people who told me they put in 5000 hours calling businesses nationwide compiling their product!
16. Are customers aware of this difference? If not, you might consider content network branding.
17. True or false: Having many versions of your content indexed in a search engine is great, because that way you can show up for more searches. Are you educated?
18. Who made your website? Their nephew or a web designer you know and trust?
    
19. Miserable failures exist because of Google bombs, or rocket links? Test their education again.
20. Willhelm Critchlow the Third is a trojan virus, automated comment bot, or an important member of the UK's most well known Distillery? 

Incidentally, if you're an SEO worth your salt, you should have good answers to all of the above as well. 

If the answer to the budget question is revenue share [and there is no revenue to share from the get-go], proceed as below.

1. Suppress the desire to trace the call and place an "Assassin Wanted, Specializing in Clueless Numpties and the Neuronically-Obstacled" ad on Craigslist. (Kijiji is better). Besides which, like the BC couple who recently posted their baby for sale, others in your community may not approve.
2. Tell them that you have to get back to work for paying clients. If they want to stay on the phone, tell them that you'll have to charge them for a consultation, beginning immediately. Ask for their credit card number, bank account number, social insurance, favorite Nigerian lottery providers (limit the possible number of answers to 3), address, mother's maiden name, and secret question and answer for retrieving their email password.
3. DO NOT have them answer a skill-testing question - when they fail you won't be able to prove that you were speaking to an adult.

Yes, I did just equate these people with crappy spam bots. No, I'm not trying to be mean to the bots.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, and whether any of these are useful to you!

Cheers,

Gab Goldenberg, with The Business Card Creator Software

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