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If you’re a sales representative you are skeptical of the leads your company provides to you. If you’re a sales manager, then at one time you were a sales representative and you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Is the world full of sales professionals that are just no good with leads? I don’t think so.

I have seen many sales managers bludgeon their sales team because they weren’t following up on the “good leads” that were provided to them. Studies have shown that 50% of leads are contacted just one time by the assigned sales representative, and then dropped.

Why is this?

1. The quality of the leads being provided to the sales force is bad. It is grossly naive for an employer to think they can just plug a SIC or NAICS code into one of the database services and hope to harvest a wealth of great leads. Come on. Nothing worthwhile is ever going to be that easy. This turns into nothing but a feel-good exercise for the employer and doesn’t help the salesperson a bit.

2. Sales management is fixated on the number of cold-calls and not the results. It’s as if the goal is to make prospecting phone calls and visits, not sales. Sales management thinks that if they throw a bushel of leads at the sales team it will help them increase the number of cold-calls which will then in turn lead to more sales. Talk about a long way around the barn.

3. The employer doesn’t really know where the best fishing places are so the leads are unfocused. Sales management has to know the types of leads that have the best potential in order to make the salesforce most efficient. The sales team needs to prospect where they stand the best chance of hooking up with the right kinds of potential customers.

4. Sales management doesn’t prospect with their sales force in order to show them how to best use leads. When sales managers participate in prospecting it has many benefits: it models the desired behavior, it lets sales management know what is working and what isn’t, it’s a great sales coaching device, it lets sales management evaluate the quality of leads being provided and does a lot for esprit de corps.

What is the fix?

1. Instead of going for quantity of sales leads, go for quality. Sales management can assign someone within the organization to scrub leads and also follow-up on those leads once they’re provided to the salesperson.

2. Provide sales coaching for the sales force on how to get their own leads. These kinds of leads are really the best in my opinion.

3. Ask salespeople on your team about the qualified leads they have in their funnel, not how many cold-calls they made yesterday. Focus on the end result, not the process.

4. Make sure that everyone knows your company’s ideal prospect and then target those companies.

5. Get sales management on the streets and on the phone prospecting with the sales force.

This is a common problem with many sales teams. It’s time to stop making prospecting just a mechanical exercise by throwing a bunch of leads to the salesforce. Start making your lead generation a serious exercise with an end game in mind - making new customers.

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Tags: Prospecting, prospects

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