Episode 283: Qualification Calls – Meetings: Getting to the Point and Not Wasting Time or Resources
Thank you for taking some of your day to join me on this edition of Around with Randall. I've been watching the conversation with gift officers, with the clients that I'm so fortunate enough to work with around the idea of a combination of portfolio size and the idea of how are we really figuring out who our best priorities prospects. And really we're talking about qualification.
So today I want to talk a little bit about qualification but in a little different way. And obviously we've talked about this before. If you go back you can go to episode 21 and talk about the basics of qualification. You can go to episode 133 and talk about how to overcome fear and making calls to people maybe that you don't know or just making calls in general.
We also have episode 179. Well I'm sorry. 146 about what's the language look like to get time with people so you can have individual conversations. We also talked about in 245 about the idea of making calls, and what does it sound like in terms of that request. And then 247, which got a lot of responses about gamify, how do you make this kind of a game in an office so more people do it?
What I want to try to deal with today is, is the fact that when we're on the phone or when we're reaching out, or when we're beginning this process, that we're asking the wrong questions. And some of this is loosely found in these other podcasts and blogs that I've posted, the trainings that I do for teams. But I'm going to really force this more often, because what we're finding is our portfolio sizes get too big because we don't know how to qualify correctly.
We're not willing to bless and release. And number two, we're not quite sure who the priorities are because we're not asking the right questions by the end of this episode today, 20 minutes or so. My 21st Century classroom, I want to give you some tactical things that you can be doing to make sure that you actually are using the time for qualification correctly and with the right language, the right questions when you get somebody on the phone.
And so if you're looking for how long does it take to get a portfolio. Again, we're going back to episode. What was that 22111 46. And how long does it take. Or you get all that. But today it's very specific. So why is this becoming more of an issue? The most valuable asset we have as fundraisers is our time, is the ability for us to know who to be talking to, when to talk to them and move them along, and at the same time possibly allow people to drop off of our portfolios who aren't going to make gifts.
The problem becomes is how to do that. And when we consume staff time and we try to convert gifts that aren't there or there are not meaningful. What this does is, is that it creates the idea of a large viewpoint of a portfolio, a lot of numbers, but not a lot of quality. And today's conversations about maximizing that quality.
So why does all of this matter? We'll start at the top. Work our way down to the specifics and some tactical, practical things that you can do. Recommendations to get through this in a more effective way. The first thing is, is mentioned. This time it's our number one asset. It's the largest constraint. And that we spend a lot of time trying to get meetings.
And before that, we're trying to get time with people on the phone or some type of communication that allows us to set up that first meeting. The larger your need of pipeline, the more calls you're going to make, and you will have heard me say you need to make 3 or 4 phone calls, 2 or 3 emails, a text message over, probably a 3 to 4 week period.
It's not just one outreach, but once you get somebody on a in a conversation you can't just want, you shouldn't just aim to have a discussion. We want to know, is this going to go somewhere. And so qualification in terms of our ability to move people forward and in that first meeting is to figure out, do they actually think about making or wanting to talk about making a gift?
It's just not more meetings. It's not. Well, I want to make sure my metrics look good. And so I've got lots more meetings on my calendar that I can put in the CRM, but they're not actually leading anywhere because that's taking up our time. The second is what I would think of as a distortion, really, of your pipeline or portfolio.
I had a recent client conversation talking to the team about their portfolio sizes and things of that nature, and what came of it was an interesting discussion about size. And they were like, well, I need more. And it became territorial. Interestingly, just on a kind of assessment call, and I took from that that they were really concerned about the quality of their portfolio.
And I challenged them to say, if you knew the 50 people that are most likely to make a gift this year or the next year or so, would you be willing to give up some of the people that you're not sure about? Those are the people they can't get hold of, or they're not quite sure where it's going to go?
If we qualified better, we'd have healthier portfolios and healthier pipelines. The third is that this has some degree of risk when it comes to donor experience, that if we don't do this correctly, we make everything we do feel transactional. We're not actually doing it for the right reasons. It's about the metrics and dollars rather than the relationship and finding out what the donor wants and how we can help shepherd them through this process.
Don't forget that brand reputation is critical, and it can erode over time when we don't allow this process to work correctly. And you don't want particularly maybe your smaller community. I have a couple clients in smaller communities, and I'm thinking about where the there's a coffee house or a restaurant or, you know, the hotel or the country club where everybody goes that you want to go talk to.
And if the word gets out, well, all they do is, you know, I just want they're not interested in what I think that can hurt your brand and actually hurt your long term success. The fourth, in terms of why this matters is internal cost. I remember early on in my career, maybe not as early, but quite a number of years ago.
The gray hair gives me away as having done this for more than a day or two is that we kept coming around to this name of this person, when who happened to be a patient and a very significant patient in that. And I'll keep that details out, because it might identify them a little more than probably they would want, although I don't think they're with us anymore in that this name kept coming up and people kept traveling across state of Nebraska, see this person?
And I finally saw this name for like the fifth time. And I said I had a very young gift officer. And I tried to, as a good leader, would go with them on a couple of calls, you know, every year or two, just to kind of get a sense of who they were and make suggestions and let them know I was supportive.
It really wasn't a check in, but it was really just a, hey, how do I help you? And we drove the two of us out to about 2.5 hours away here in Nebraska and within 30s. I knew this person wasn't going to ever make a gift, but we kept going to see him because he looked really wealthy. And frankly, he was.
And the point was, is that I went back and we talked about this very subject. Why are we keep pulling this name and trying to qualify this person when it is blatantly obvious, loves his experience, loves his doctor, loves the medical center, is so appreciative, so grateful. But he's not going to make a gift and we just keep going.
There's a cost. With that, I had to pay mileage. It wasn't the end of the world. I had food, I had time, you know, at the end of the day, it was just a lot of expenses. And it's expensive to do this. We want to maximize the dollars, not just our time, but the dollars. How do we realize that this is an issue?
So we've talked about why this matters. What's actually triggering it to be a problem. Number one is, and we've talked about this in a myriad of different ways, a total overreliance on, well, screening. Yes, it's directional, but capacity doesn't mean does not equate does not override inclination. The reason you want to work with someone, have a conversation, find out what their interests are.
Find out what they want to do. Find out if they want to be philanthropic is based on inclination, not capacity. And we've gotten I don't have a better way of putting it, so I'll just say it institutionally. I'm not accusing you personally of being lazy. It's a number. Oh yeah, they've got to give us money. They're rich. I know a lot of very wealthy people that don't give to anything I give to.
That doesn't make them bad people. It just means they have their own interest. And that's also okay. The second is, is that we don't have a very good training ground explanation or drive to have a really strong discovery, qualification, discipline that we want, early conversations. We want to teach this. We want to implore this should be directed toward philanthropy, not just I'd love to hear your experience.
So there's no structured effort to test interest. We'll talk more about that. What you can do to really find that test, really deliver that test, to find it really to determine whether you should move forward. The third is, is that we've misaligned incentives here. That and I've talked about the same story over and over. And it won't completely repeated here, but that we incentivize bigger portfolios for some reason.
And every study starting with northwestern and then E.B. did a study and then blackboard did a study at the beginning of the pandemic, says portfolio size should be somewhere between 50. You know, northwestern said 4240 and 7060 at the most. What happens is, is that when we build larger portfolios and we think that's okay. In my story that I mentioned a moment ago, was me going to my first conference, 1996.
I really hadn't done anything, went to this interesting conversation about metrics and portfolio size. And they said the average best practice portfolio size 125. And I went up because I'm a data nerd and a math nerd. And I said, where did the number come from? And they said, well, that's best practice. And I said, well, what's the math and what's your data?
And where'd you get it from? And they just kept coming into best practice. And I said, well, thank you for your time. I walked away and I'm like, you're a fraud. You've got no nothing to back it up. It's just a number. You pulled it out of the air. But that number somewhere between 100, 150, depending on what you hear.
And the part of our industry, the sector, it's way too big. You manage to many people. The fourth is, is that as I talk about the concept of bless and release, is, is that we don't even have a criteria to do that that's effective. And I would just say not only is it dollar, that's probably 10%, but inclination.
But we don't we don't incentivize it. I want gift officers, if they do it correctly, to bless and release people because they know they're not going to move forward. That's okay. We can have other people that we can build relationships with. So as we begin, this is kind of thinking about it from the framework or the of the standpoint of both the call and the first visit.
What are the things you can do in the first call that would get you better conversations? And what things can you do in the first visit to really make sure that there is an option or a possibility of a gift here. So the first side on the call is to think about it from the perspective of what is the goal.
And you've heard me talk about this, it's just not to have a meeting. And it's not just to solicit them unless it's an annual giving. You know, they're giving 50 bucks. Just ask them. But it's to really find out for testing purposes of alignment, interest and timing. So why are they connected to the organization and what do their personal values really show as an opportunity for us to explore that connects them philanthropically?
And do they have evidence either with us or was somewhere that they might be philanthropic, either by their explanation or even by language used? Or maybe they ask certain questions. You're like, they've done this before. The second is kind of a secondary capacity. We all have different gift levels. Some places I just started with a new client. Their major gift level is $10,000 over five years, so it's $2,000 a year.
I've got another client. Their major gift levels 10,000 per year. I have a third. That's 100,000 per year. All or. Okay. It's depending on your organization, size, scope, relationships, things of that nature. But we're not looking for exact wealth. We're looking for some indication that the level of which we work, they have some at least base understanding or comfort with in some type of conversation.
Maybe that's philanthropic behavior in other places. The third is what may be thought of as intense signaling, where they're willing to have a philanthropic conversation going forward. Not just, hey, I'd love to chat. There are many instances, at least in my career, and probably you have the same where we go over and over and over because they're just the nicest people and we have such a good relationship and they actually are more friends, but we never quite get to the philanthropy the way we should.
So if we think about the qualification call, then we can begin to think about not only the call, but the meeting. In asking some structured questions. And I'm going to give you four, four questions that you can ask. That's really going to highlight, depending on their answer, whether or not they are interested in philanthropic conversations going forward. Number one, what has drawn your attention about our work or the mission that we have or what we do here recently?
If someone has a legitimate interest philanthropically, they're at least going to probably follow some basic things about your organization if they don't know a darn thing about you. I kind of believe they probably aren't going to be philanthropic. And this is where we get into the disconnect with our executives. We're like, well, they're rich. They should love us.
I don't know if they love us, but if they're not even following us, and I'm not talking about on Twitter or Facebook or I'm like, they know something about us. They can tell you a recent story. If they're not able to do that. I'm not sure that all that qualified. Number two. How do you typically decide on where to invest your philanthropy?
Notice the verbiage, invest your philanthropy. It's done very purposely because people who are serious about dollars, particularly major gift officers. When you're doing this, their decisions are an investment. It's a conscious thought process in the mid for 5000, certainly into the five and absolutely into the six. So 100,000 or more six numbers 100,000 250,500. Then way over that.
This is an investment. This isn't willy nilly. Now I guess if they're a billionaire there, what's always said is kiss off gift or go away gift. Maybe a lot higher. But that's not usually what we deal with. And so we need to use that investment language about their philanthropy as a way of pulling that out of them, about their values, what's important to them.
The third question is what level of involvement feels right to you? Pretty self-explanatory. The fourth, would it be useful to for us to explore a specific initiative that we're doing that you're interested in? Can we do that together?
If you can add those four questions into a call, which would be awesome. But remembering the call is not there to make an ask or to have a 30 minute conversation. It's usually quick. Maybe we want to have a meeting, but you could shape some of these questions in there to see if it works, but absolutely using them in that first meeting, if nothing else is going to help frame this, then you need to have some type of scoring mechanism and you could do this formally and put numbers to it.
I just think it's high rate or medium or low, meaning there's three answers to this low. I'm probably going to kick them loose and you know thank them. And but this is not the inclination connection we're looking for. Number two moderate I'm not quite sure. Maybe one more meeting high. We start moving down a road. If you have clear discipline on this what you'll do is you'll advance to cultivation more quickly with the people you should you park for later, or at least maybe a second meeting people you're not quite sure about and you bless and release.
Let the people go that aren't going to be interested based upon the conversations, you have any answers to those questions? I used to work with a principal gift officer. Frankly, I think she made better phone calls, qualification calls, and initial conversations. Anybody else ever seen? And I think I'm pretty good at this. I was nowhere in her league.
She was so good at it. When I was on site with the client for the work that we were doing, I specifically asked, I said, would you be willing to carve out 30 minutes of your time where I could just sit and listen to you make phone calls because I want to know what you're doing? And she said, sure.
And so I sat in a corner quietly, and she got on the phone and she went through a regular routine. She actually had a habit of making herself comfortable, and she took off her shoes and, and she'd have her computer open and she'd have her special drink there and she but she, she knew how to get herself in the right mentality to go get this done.
And she'd get people on the phone working through assistance and other things or on their cell phone. And part of her conversation was, I work with donors who give a minimum of $500,000 to organizations like ours. Is that something you'd be interested in talking about, particularly about something you think it's important or you value it's a priority to you?
The first time I heard it about fell out of my chair, and I watched her do this for half an hour. She made about 5 or 6 calls, as I remember, and I at the end said, why did you do this? She goes, well, of the 5 or 6 calls, I had three conversations. Of those three conversations, I had one person who said, yes, I'd love to talk to you.
Base health care related to my experience. And yes, I do things like that, and I love Doctor Smith and I'll be glad to have that conversation, she said. I had one for sure. She goes, that's going to be at least a six figure gift worth my time. I had one that I wasn't quite sure of, and I said I'd call them back, and but I wanted to talk to them about maybe a higher level thought process, and I wanted to give them a chance to think about it if they'd be interested.
And she goes, I tend to think the answer is going to be no, but I'm going to call them back next week. The third one had no interest. She goes, I'm not going to waste my time. And I thought, how amazing is that? She knows exactly who her priority is. And it turns out, because I kind of track this with her, kind of always asking that a the first person, the 500,000.
Yes, that's something I do. It turned into a $10 million gift. It took six months, but was it worth it? She was able to qualify on the phone, and I'm not advocating this, but the honesty that we have to have, which is going to get us into the practical recommendations, tactical is, is we got to be honest about what we're doing here.
And so not only are you asking them questions, the four I mentioned to figure out do they actually. But we need to be honest as to what we're doing so that we don't take someone down the road and have them be surprised. So let's kind of begin that pivot. The last part of today's discussion and classroom activity, the five different things that I think are tactical, practical solutions, recommendations for you to be able to be more successful.
The first is, is you need a formalized disqualification standard. So one of which they don't respond. And we've talked about this in other podcasts. And when I teach in classrooms, 3 or 4 calls, 2 or 3 emails, a text message or two, if you do all of those things over 3 to 4 weeks, they're out. Don't worry about it.
Let them go out of the portfolio or in the meaningful interactions. Maybe two maximums. That'd be a call in a meeting. They can't answer the questions really well that we talked about what draws your attention. What. How do you typically decide your investment in philanthropy or when do you do that? What involvement feels correct? Have you thought about maybe some initiatives that are valued?
Can we kind of talk about them if they absolutely cannot answer those questions in some type of conversation, then you got to let them go. So the one is a formal disqualification process or standard. And that may mean every quarter you got to go through your portfolio and say I got to prune some people, get them out because they're not they're not meeting that that threshold to cap your portfolio so that you really have to push on either turnover or blessing and releasing that we really are going to hone in on the right people instead of just a larger number of people.
And the number I always talk about mentioned here earlier, somewhere between 42 and 60 is a major gift officer. If you're a leadership annual giving officer, probably closer to 100 to 120. You know, those are people you're asking for anywhere from, let's say, $500 to 2500 or 5000 ballpark. It might be sponsorships and other things. And that when you add somebody, particularly as you get closer to the top of whatever number that is, you're going to remove somebody who's on the low end, you're forcing yourself into decisions.
So cap your portfolio size to force turnover or to bless or lease people. Third, and we've talked about this from a metrics perspective before. Redesign your metrics around movement not volume. How many people conversion rates. And I love the idea of conversion rates. There's a podcast I should do sometime around how many people are we moving each quarter from qualification to cultivation, from cultivation to solicitation, from solicitation to stewardship, we should see movement in over time.
We can begin to see trends. But if you're not monitoring that or your office, if you're the leader, aren't emphasizing that, then all we do. John Wooden and I use this in my teachings. The great UCLA basketball coach won ten national championships and 11 year span. The pyramid of success. Don't confuse activity with achievement or accomplishment. That activities fine, but what we're interested in is accomplishment or achievement.
And the goal should be getting people to move through the system or letting them go. And so track those conversion rates and set metrics to them. How many people this quarter, six month, whatever do we want to see move from A to B, B to C, and how many states stagnant. And we're not happy with that number. Number four use a two call or two step qualification sequence.
The first is exploratory get time. The second is to confirm intent. So it's better to do this in person, particularly for a major gift officer. But if all you can do is phone, I’m okay doing it in one call or two, but it's a max of two. Remember the example I used of the gift officer basically said, I work with people at the $500,000 or more levels.
Is that something we could talk about? Man, that was blunt for me, but she was raising a fortune because she knew exactly who to work with. She wasn't afraid to make that call. She had a, in her case, a one step. I'm going to get Ahold of you. We're gonna have a conversation, and then I'm going to reaffirm that in the meeting.
But we're going to start moving into cultivation, which happens much more quickly. So Max two step two called call visit, but no more let them go. The last is, is to train yourself for intention detection, meaning you become that. As I always talk about the Hardy boys from my youth, you're a detective for intent, not just for relationship building.
Will they be willing to move forward? How do you know that? You ask the questions. How do you get better at it? You role play it. You have recordings of this where you're watching yourself, or you work with someone like me and I, we kind of role play and say, well, you might add this, or you might subtract that, but you focus on the right question.
And then the listening and I talk about in the trainings that I do with gift officer teams and individual gift officers, we have two years in one mouth. Use them proportionally. You need to standardize this as a way of figuring out their intent. If you do these five things, if you formalize disqualification standards, there won't respond. Or we go through the interactions, it doesn't work.
Number two, you capture portfolio size, so it forces you to focus on who's going to make a gift. And you only bring in people at the highest potential levels, not dollar intent that allow you then to push people out. Maybe at the bottom third, you have more metrics around conversion rates about moving people through the moves management process.
Number four is that it's max two step in terms of qualification. We don't know this six times. If possible, do it in one. And finally train yourself for detection of intent, not just adding more people that will have meetings with me for relationships, you'll find yourself more effective. You'll see a reduction in wasted time. You'll increase your moving people through them.
Paradigm of gift donor engagement. And lastly, you'll actually close more gifts. If you do this on the front side, you and that prospect are moving together as a on the same road jointly towards what they want to do. And there's no surprises because there's nothing worse than getting to that. Ask in somebody surprised either soft ask or formal qualification.
In this process, it's all about being a little bit more blunt and looking for their intent, not their capacity. We need to listen with the right questions, and we need to tell people what we're doing. And if we did that more effectively in the qualification process, we'll be more effective in the fundraising end game. And in the end, that isn't about numbers.
That's about allowing people to do what they want, how they want with your organization to fulfill their dreams that make our missions possible. That's a worthy way of looking at all of this, and might help you get through the abruptness that might be needed. You might think of abrupt, but just a little more practical, a little more forefront of being for honest.
At the forefront of this, about what we're looking to do. Don't forget to check out the blogs at Hallett Philanthropy two per week. You can get an RSS feed. All kinds of things I see read, personal experiences, leadership, fundraising, industry stories. Take a look. 90 second reads at Hallett Philanthropy.com Backslash blogs to get on your feed. And if you'd like to reach out to me as podcast.
I feel like I repeat this every week, but I think it's really important we sit in this gap for enterprise has its way of doing its business, but they don't want to do certain things as it does make money, and government wants to make those who need it the most give them a helping hand, but they're not really efficient or effective at it at times, depending on the organization, size, scope and all of that which leaves this hole in the middle and people and things we love in our community fall into that hole.
That's where nonprofit work, philanthropy work, charity work, nonprofits, they are at their best making a difference. And that's what you do. Board member, gift officer, CPO, someone else in the organization, front line nurse, doctor, whomever you are listening to this, you make a difference. Don't forget, some people make things happen. Some people will watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened.
Aim for and continue to be someone who makes things happen. For those in our community who fall in the gap, who are wondering what happened. It's a pretty darn cool way. Great way to spend a career and feel like you make a difference in the world. I'll look forward to seeing you the next time, right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall.
And don't forget. Make it a great day.