“Our leads aren’t any good!” is a common complaint by rep’s whose company supplies their leads.
Sales managers who think this is an excuse better start thinking otherwise.
Why?
Just because a lead comes in via direct mail, phone or internet, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a qualified lead.
Yet often all of these leads go directly to your stellar sales team.
Your team makes the outreach and ends up spending their valuable selling time discovering you don’t have what they want, they don’t have the money or match the criteria for you, or they were using your lead gen as a lead gen for them!
When your stellar team invests more of their valuable selling time sifting through what they thought were the Glengarry Glen Ross golden leads, they get quite discouraged. These reps aren’t making their targets, the number of dials don’t add up to the close ratio goals in place and no one is happy.
Consider this.. hire a qualifying team. Allow this team to pre-qualify the lead and only send qualified prospects to your stellar reps.
Your ace team is now doing what they do best. Converting prospects to real customers.
The dollars closed will outweigh the dollars invested in the up front team.
And your best seller will no longer be complaining about their leads.
Great post Alice. In our business it seems like identifying the ideal prospect is the first step, the you reach out to them direct. The concept of waiting for a lead to come in means you are hoping something good comes in. I’d rather engineer a great lead.
Right on Travis. Creating the buyer persona does facilitate hunters to reach the right prospects – saving lots of time.
Our marketing director *wants* unqualified leads, because he believes that in the future they may become qualified leads. So, it’s a way to “get more email names” and addresses for direct marketing. I feel this is a waste of the entire funnel. Yes, there are people to “prequalify” and route, but that is still expensive resources. And the website then, isn’t specific toward perfect buyer — purposefully a bit vague.