You need to know where in the purchase process your international leads are at all times. This helps you to put up the best lead generation process to get more sales.

Before doing anything, you need a comprehensive definition of what a good lead is to your company. You will also need a scoring or evaluation process to put your leads into the right stage of your lead generation.

Qualify with BANTS

This is a simple method to come up with a clear definition on how to qualify your ideal lead.

* Budget - What budget does your lead need for your product or service?
* Authority - What level of authority does your lead need to purchase from you?
* Need - What obvious need does your lead need to have to buy your product?
* Time Frame - What is the time frame involved before processing through your sales team?
* Sales Ready - Is this lead ready to buy now? What is the size of the sales opportunity?

Your sales and marketing teams need to collaborate on qualifying your idea lead.

Your whole organization should have a good working understanding of your international lead qualification process.

Why?

This again comes down to the high incidence of cross-cultural miscommunication. Your international lead might be in the wrong part of your lead generation system. A different person in your organization might pick up more information from your international prospects that leads to a requalification.

Your international success depends on good teamwork.

Lead Scoring

You can find lead scoring techniques helpful when qualifying your leads. Give numerical values to different criteria within your BANTS process.

This gives a much more accurate picture to your marketing and sales teams. Scoring can help you to determine whether:

* There is genuine interest in the product
* Budget issues will influence purchase
* The lead is a decision maker or influencer
* An need or an immediate buy situation

You can adapt your scoring process to suit your specific goals and needs.

There is one difficulty. You need to have some accurate information and definitions to begin with.

Scoring is not easy to do with your first international leads. With international market, you may not be able to:

* Choose the right criteria to score
* Not be able to identify the key motivations in your foreign markets
* Be able to get enough information

In the beginning, you will probably feel that you do not get enough accurate information from your international leads to merit scoring.

Don't totally ignore the scoring process.

After some initial contact with your international markets, you will probably be able to see areas where you will want to use scores. These might not be for the same reasons you would use scoring in your domestic markets.

One of the key areas for using lead scoring in international markets is to understand your market segmentation much better.

Scoring can be a great international market research tool when just breaking into international businesses.

Integrate This Into A Full Lead Generation System

An international lead qualification process gives your company a solid foundation for international business development. Use the BANTS formula and an appropriate scoring process to get you started, then:

* Set up a process to qualify all of your international leads.
* Qualify all of your international leads as best you can.
* Be prepared to revise your definition of a qualified lead and your qualifying criteria.