Prospecting and Avoiding the Trap of Bad Leads

Just because a lead looks like a customer and smells like a customer doesn’t mean it is necessarily going to become a customer.
Recently a person showed me all of the “leads” they received from a trade show. I should correctly state, leads the salesperson received from the Marketing team that was at the trade show.  When I asked what made them leads, his response was, “Last year we got a lot of new customers from this same show, so they must be good.”
Well, that settles the issue, right?
If the trade show was great one year, it must be great every year thereafter.  I’ll remember that next time I walk into a Sears store. I’ll just keep repeating to myself, “Years ago this store used to have to what I was looking for.”
Leads change and, more importantly, customer expectations change.  You can fall into a deep hole pretty quickly thinking all leads from a