22 Feb 2008 01:03:52 | Alan Boyer
Something I've seen over and over is that many of my clients
originally believe that marketing and lead generation is
supposed to bring "as many people through the door" as possible.
It isn't. It is about "getting the most qualified people through
the door."
I've developed a rule of thumb in my business consulting that
has helped me identify one of the big problems my clients
frequently have. The rule goes this way:
If there are * two different groups responsible for lead
generation and sales, and o if marketing success (advertising,
lead generation) seems extraordinarily high, o while the sales
close ratio is way down (maybe 1 in 10) then the chances are
that the marketing and lead generation efforts are not
qualifying the leads. The target has been to get the most people
through the door instead of the most qualified people.
One of my sales trainees ended up with an extremely high cold
calling response rate. It was nearly 90% of every live person
she could reach. She was convincing nearly everyone she could
actually talk to to explore the next steps.
She had convinced one of the other companies in the class to
hire her to do their telemarketing. The result of her
telemarketing was that she was bringing in a flood of leads to
their sales department. The problem was that the sales
department was not able to close many of these leads.
She could generate lots of leads. She could generate a lot of
interest but she had failed to qualify these people, to make
sure that they could and would be able to buy.
On one hand it proved that what we had been doing in the sales
training worked as she was able to generate so much interest. On
the other, she was abusing the influencing skills she had
developed in our class, and wasn't qualifying the people before
passing the lead on to sales.
Let me give you another rule of thumb I use. The sales process
usually is more labor intensive than the marketing and lead
generation process. If the leads aren't being qualified in the
marketing step then a lot of time is wasted in the sales process
talking to unqualified people. The sales response rates will
drop and not really indicate the true sales success.
If a sales person is talking to a qualified prospect his sales
close ratio should be in the 40-50%, or even higher, range.
However, if he is fed leads that aren't qualified, he is having
to qualify leads that should have been qualified by the
marketing and lead generation process and taking a lot of
valuable sales time. Now his sales success will go through the
floor.
So, if you see a high marketing, lead generation success and low
sales success look into the fact that they might be receiving
unqualified leads as a potential cause before accusing sales of
being failures or before providing training to the sales
department.
If, as is frequently the case, the sales department is also
responsible for generating their own leads, I've frequently seen
sales people that are excellent at lead generation but couldn't
close a deal if their job depended on it, and it does. I've also
seen excellent closers that couldn't find a lead with both
hands. Evaluate your sales team by assessing these two separate
skills. They are, indeed, two separate skills and frequently not
at the same skill level in your sales people.
About Author :
Alan Boyer, CEO of The Leader's Perspective, LLC is one of the
world's leading sales trainers & breakthrough specialists. 
