High Volume | High Quality | Sales-Ready
High Volume: This probably does not need an explanation. Your sales team wants more leads. As a sales organization they are looking to build volume and sales pipeline. They’ll naturally take as many leads as marketing can provide.
High Quality: Possibly more important than the volume of leads is the inherent quality of the leads being generated.
- What information or intelligence about those leads, suspects or prospects do we have available to us?
- How reliable is the source?
- What do we know about them that will help us build better relationship? Do we know their reasons for any initial interest? What pain points do they exhibit? How do they buy or transact? And, how will our products or services add value to their business or personal purchase?
Sales Ready: Is there a pre-determined agreed-upon signal or trigger? Do you have a somewhat subjective condition or perception of when it’s time to turn a lead over to sales for follow-up?
Can You Relate?
Marketing planned and executed a campaign. Leads were generated, and immediately turned over to sales for follow up because they are new and therefore HOT? Sales reasonably expected to receive basic contact information. From here, the salesperson has the sole responsibility of educating the lead and nurturing them as long as may be required to close it. To some, manual lead management is the only way. Why? Because they’ve been doing it this way their entire selling careers.. Those engaged in this scene below don’t have any problem with it until the end of another performance quarter. The end of a quarter is when “guesstimated” deals that didn’t come in as forecasted, further the “us” and “them” dialogue. As a result, it creates resentment internally.
Real Life Sales Scenario
Here’s How The Scene Plays Out After We Miss Our Quotas:
Marketing: “We gave X-number of HOT leads to sales that they didn’t close. It’s not our fault!”
Sales: “Marketing gives us poor quality, unqualified leads and we waste our time following up on them! It’s not our fault!”
It’s Abusive to Your Sales Team
When you are focused on high volume leads but give little attention to their quality, and no attention to lead qualification. Ultimately, you are giving approval and support to your labor-intensive sales process which abuses both the would-be-prospects and your team of professionals. It isn’t just that your old way is inefficient and contributes to increases in overall cost of sales and lower margins. There are serious hidden costs for continuing to execute this old process via the existing method.
When salespeople aren’t talking to interested, qualified leads, they are wasting valuable skills and limited company resources. Enable them to do what they do better than anyone else in the organization…take a sales opportunity through its entire life cycle.
Moreover, assuming your organization is a consultative-selling group, with a sales cycle that is extended several months or years, they’ve become long-suffering educators, nurturers, and, in a word: FARMERS. Firstly, planting, then sowing, and hoping to reap a future reward for their patience and persistence. Your existing way of approaching prospecting is labor intensive, requiring resource-consuming, manual follow-up. This method is more often than not, providing unlimited access to voicemail and email. That’s possibly the most inefficient way to handle sales qualified leads (SQLs).
No doubt, it was probably a heaping dose of sheer determination and good old-fashioned hard work that got you here today. That will no longer assure you the continued growth from here to the next revenue goal. You’ll need to work smarter now, handle leads differently, and be more strategic about how you spend your resources if your intention is to grow.
For more on this subject check out 6 Things Every Great Sales Person Loves to Do.
