Are Sales Leads worth anything anymore?

When corporate offices are trying to help salespeople sell, they give them lists of leads; companies have sprung up in all industries selling lists of leads. You can buy lead lists sliced and diced any number of ways – want to know the names of all the females living in Sandusky who have 2 kids and a household income between $36,700 and $63,700? We can get that.

But lead lists on their own aren’t worth anything. Sure they give you people to call and if you get paid by the call, I guess they’re worth something. But salespeople get paid to sell, not call and unless someone buys something the list is worthless.

So how can you tell if that housewife wants your widget?

Marketing departments often perceive their number one priority to be finding likely buyers. In other words, it’s all about the Who. It’s easy to get the Who (even if it’s not the right Who).

What about the Why? Why do people buy? In individual settings, lots of studies have been done trying to ascertain consumer buying patterns and motivations but how much do you (or your salespeople) know about why corporate customers buy the particular type of widget you’re peddling? After all, in business settings, there are a lot of forces at work in making purchasing decisions – the customer’s need and budget, sure, but also historical vendor relationships, internal political struggles, the firm’s willingness (or resistance) and ability to change, and the overall corporate environment. Some of these things are easier to ascertain than others, either by doing research or asking pertinent questions but some, like the political and relationship questions are harder to ascertain.

And failing to get those details can, unfortunately, derail a potential sale at the 11th hour.

All of this theoretically falls under the heading of “qualifying the lead” and even lists of “qualified” leads aren’t typically going to get into that level of detail.

So what are you gonna do? Well if plain old lists of leads are worthless, lists of “qualified” leads are at least a starting place and to the extent that the marketing department can further drill down, at least on the need, budget and timing issues, the likelihood of converting that lead to a successful sale goes up exponentially.

The real work of getting to the Why (or Why Not) comes from relationship-building, usually on the part of the sales rep, which is how it should be.

After all, although it’d be great, it’s not marketing’s job to give us customers ready to sign on the dotted line – it to give us potential customers who are ready and willing to begin building a relationship with us. And if they can do that, it’s not worthless at all.

The Metrics of Metrics

We all know that using metrics in a sales organization can be a great thing. After all “what gets measured gets done”, and there’s lots of things we need to get done in sales.

So naturally the first issue is figuring out what you want/need done. Closing more sales is usually the main objective, but there may be others – customer satisfaction, brand awareness, functional cross-selling etc. that may need to be done either on an on-going basis or for limited periods of time. So what you want done can change over time. The next step is figuring out a) which activities directly contribute to your end goals, b) which of those activities are measurable, c) what the measurement is gonna be and d) lastly which activities will get done anyway even if you don’t measure them. This last one may seem weird but you can’t measure everything so why bother your reps having them track something they’re going to do anyway. You also don’t want to be redundant in asking your reps to measure something you can get from other sources – for example, if you get a report showing how many quotes each rep has, you don’t need a metric for that; you already have one.

Whatever metrics you choose to implement should be designed to encourage the actions and behaviors you want in your reps – actions and behaviors that directly lead to more sales (or whatever else your desired end result is). If your best practices show that presenting a proposal face-to-face, rather than via snail mail or e-mail, results in higher closing ratios, measure f2f meetings. If your studies show that prospects close more consistently if you respond to their RFP in under 36 hours, make speed your metric. Whatever you want reps doing better and more consistently is a good activity to measure.

But there can be pitfalls to metrics, too.

First and most egregious, is making the tracking of metrics time-consuming and difficult on your reps. Many of your reps, especially the most successful ones are a) already doing most of these things and so see the tracking process as redundant or b) are successful without doing these things and can’t understand why you’re cutting to their selling time with new reporting. So it’s gotta be painless or so important that it’s worth the pain – theirs and yours.

Second and only slightly less egregious is instituting metrics that you can’t clearly show are valuable in closing sales. For example, making all the reps in your organization make 25 calls a week on an unproven sales channel is a recipe for disaster. Unless you know for a fact that firms have successfully sold essentially similar products in this manner in this channel (or better yet, you have reps that have successfully sold your product in this manner in this channel), do not make this a metric. Attempt it on a smaller scale in order to prove its success. Once you do that, you can roll it out to the company as a whole.

And don’t be afraid to change. If something starts working for one area of the company or one geographic location, spread it around!

Instituting good metrics is one of the best methods you have of ensuring the spread of, and consistency in, the use of your firm’s best sales practices so that everyone can perform as an “A” level rep.