Making Sure You’re Getting The Right Leads For Your Sales Team

Traditionally sales leads are measured by the return on investment (ROI) you get. Calculated out like this -

(( Number of Leads x Lead to Opportunity Rate % ) Sales Close Rate % )(( Average Client Revenue x Average Gross Profit Margin % ) - Total Marketing Cost ) / Total Marketing Cost = ROI %

Here's an example courtesy of the Pro Sales Connection blog to help make sense of the ROI "maths".

It's a great metric if you're an Accountant. As well as a weapon that can be used by upper management to shame and disgrace Sales and Marketing teams.

Beyond the ruthless judgement, it's an even less useful measure for leads if you're a Marketer, a Salesperson or someone responsible for those teams.

What You Measure (and Reward) Matters

After all your Sales and Marketing teams are more concerned about leads in an entirely different way.

That's often because their success (your sales and marketing teams) is not measured on lead ROI, but on conversion.

By conversion we mean - usually how many leads they are able to turn into clients along a sales pipeline. In some cases even more precisely, the number of clients who spend over a certain amount per year or month.

Even between your sales folk and savvy marketers, the way they value leads can differ.

Marketers will often have KPIs around the volume of leads they are able to create that meet some criteria.

While your Sales people will have targets based on the amount of money new customers spend, collective.

These differences are also why you can end up with awkward hostility between marketers and sales people. Just like you do between finance and marketing and sales.

When the marketers are filling up the database with leads that meet their KPIs, the sales people have a lot more to do before they are even close to making a sale, let alone their sales targets.

Reducing the gap between the needs of all these different interested parties is challenging - Senior Management, Sales, Marketing and Finance are all assessing from entirely different perspectives. And change to improve any aspect of the process is bound to make someone's numbers look really bad for a short time.

So where do you begin? With the sale.

After all if your business isn't making sales there's no point in having Marketers, Accountants, Executives or anyone else for that matter.

Providing Your Sales Team with A-Grade Opportunities

What ever problem your business solves, there are real clients who need that.

Despite how passionately you may feel about the business, it really is NOT going to be "for everyone"!

Most businesses want A-grade clients - the ones who pay on time, who love everything you do and give rave reviews.

That means that all leads are NOT equal. Just because someone meets some marketing lead generation criteria, doesn't always make them a good fit to be a customer for your business.

Building a big "for everyone" database full of names, email addresses and phone numbers does not get a steady stream of A-grade clients.

That's why marketers begin by finding out from the sales team what questions need to be asked to ensure that a lead is "qualified" (maybe be an A-grade client).

Your marketing people can only get you the right leads if they know who the right leads are and how to identify them.

Taking the a purely financial perspective towards lead generation can put you on a slippery path of spending money on things that won't work because the way they are measured isn't what matters for conversion (sales or marketing).25px

External Lead Sources

Off-shore Lead Generation

The rise of off-shore outsourcing focused on cold-calling and lead generation has given businesses a lot more choice when it comes to lead sources.

At first glance they appear to incredibly competitively priced when compared to your own marketing person (or team).

Choosing to use these services does come with some risk though.

Unlike your marketing people, the offshore guys know zero about your business, its values, brand, culture or mission.

You can give them all the documents, videos, manuals and agent scripts you like; to help them align with your business. At the end of the day they're just another "McDonalds" type business going through the motions.

The KPIs these offshore lead generation people have has absolutely nothing to do with you, your business, your prospects or sales. They have numbers they must achieve to get a wage.

That means you will need to do more work to "qualify" these leads yourself. Are you listening Mr Accountant?!

Buying Leads & Lists

Whilst frowned upon, it is still possible to buy lead databases and industry contact lists.

Depending on your morals and ethics. You may be comfortable with over-looking the fact that most of the larger ones contain data obtained through the high-profile hacks of popular websites. Data that is sold, repackaged and resold again on the Dark Web.

Their price is an indication of the quality and freshness you are getting.

If you thought the off-shore lead generation guys gave you questionable leads, then these bought leads will undoubtedly lead to regret.

It is very rare that bought leads have all of the current information your marketing or sales team needs. IMHO you may as well forget about being able to meet KPIs or sales targets if you buy leads.

Social Influencers & Community

It's not all doom and gloom.

With the rise of social media, influencers and community platforms; there are deals, strategies and transactions that can be done to provide leads that are useful.

As business models morph and change, the value of tribes of people that are open to being offered as leads in exchange for some sort of value is on the rise.

Platforms like TRIBE (an Instagram Influencer trading platform) and Brandbassador (all social channels Influencer platform) are now positioning for lead generation at scale.

These platforms and channels enable you to gather leads that know that they are being introduced to a pre-sales process and what your business, its values, brand and culture are about.25px

Rebuilding Your Sales Pipeline

Being able to take leads from wherever they are sourced. Appropriately filtering them ready for conversion by your Sales team, requires looking beyond the simple metric of lead ROI.

A prospect that experiences one "touchpoint" with your business is unlikely to be easily converted by your sales team.

There are no excuses! Every business has lots of touchpoints it can take advantage of, that can be enhanced to better qualify and filter leads for your sales team.

Once you have these new types of leads flowing into your business, have your sales people validate the leads.

Then you can ramp up your marketing campaigns with incentives and special offers. Confident that you are filtering and distilling your leads down to the best candidates - A-grade (and B-grade) clients.