Monday, June 8, 2009

Think About Quality And Not Quantity When It Comes To Sales Leads

By Wade Henderson

When it comes to sales leads, quality is better than quantity. Instead of worrying about the cost per sales leads, companies must really focus on how profitable they become once they turn into sales.

Focusing on the cost of sales leads is an unrealistic measure because you do not know how likely the information you receive about your customers is to be turned into actual sales.

Generalizing will not do it. Marketing people may tend to pay more attention to the amount of leads they are sending. But if this department has no idea what kind of information constitutes a good Lead for the sales department, we are going nowhere fast. This is why your company has to struggle to constantly reduce the gap between the marketing and the sales department.

When accepting sales leads into the pipeline, think about the quality that you need in order to reach your goals. You can do this better when your marketing department has trained people, and when the process is designed appropriately. The quality of the sales leads has a great influence on your sales and therefore in your return of investments.

If your company is using the "cost effective" model when it comes to sales leads, you had better think again. When using this mental frame your natural tendency is to decrease costs often at the expense of quality. It is crucial that a company realizes that many of the sales leads are not high quality sales leads.

The key questions to ask are:

Are we giving the sales department the information they need?

Are these sales leads likely to become customers?

Marketing departments have metrics to meet and of course are under a lot of pressure. This stress may force them to rush into qualifying sales leads ineffectively.

The truth of the matter is that unqualified sales leads can likely be translated into important input losses for your sales department, and therefore affecting your bottom line. Unqualified leads take up your salespeople's time and money. And this is why we cannot measure the cost of sales leads using this framework.

Forcing sales leads and generating more activities for the marketing department ends up in the long run, giving a bad reputation to marketing.

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