"In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield." Warren Buffett (1930 - )

(Part 3 of 3)

Over the past two weeks we have covered the current state of sales lead generation and the "no man's land" in the sales process. The basic process of lead generation is broken in most companies. The impact of "no man's land" on sales results is staggering. Hindsight may be 20/20, but I don't think it takes Warren Buffett to tell you that if you continue current practices future results won't get much better.

So what is the solution?

The solution is recognizing that "raw leads" require filtering by someone other than sales; and that many potential opportunities require nurturing (a task not best fitted for sales—for many reasons).

How should you filter and/or nurture leads?

Ask anyone, especially a sales person: "if your life depended on making a sale, and you could use any one of the following tools (but only one) to make that sale, which would you chose"?

• Email
• Direct mail
• A telephone call

... 100% of the sales people and a high percentage of the rest of those questioned would pick "a telephone call". There are many reasons for that. The immediacy. The intimacy. The art. In the end, it is about effectiveness. Can you afford to call through the Yellow Pages looking for leads? Of course not! Can you afford to go into a death spiral of email mania and hope that your prospects call you and not the competition? Chances are many companies are taking that risk right now.

There is an expression that "nothing ever happens until you pick up the phone and make a call". It is and always will be true. I am not talking about a $10 per hour worker, or an off-shore telemarketer making low-level calls into a too loosely defined market. I am talking about highly educated, experienced professionals holding peer level discussions with targeted senior executives about business issues. A percentage of those discussions are going to yield qualified sales leads. Some will lead to longer-term interest and nurture prospects. Some will lead to market intelligence that should be fed to product development and marketing. You can't afford to have low-level telemarketers making a bad impression and limiting results to the poorest opportunities sometimes dressed up as low-hanging fruit.

There is a problem with lead generation (blog #1 in this series). It manifests itself in the "no man's land" of the sales process, Preference (blog #2 in this series). The solution is highly professional qualification and nurturing of potential opportunities—performed outside of the sales force so that sales can concentrate on closing business, not finding it.

Chances are your company is in one of three places:

1. Looking in the rearview mirror and giving up too early.
2. Looking through the windshield and wondering where you are going.
3. ... Or closing your eyes waiting for the crash ...

If you get tired of looking in the rear view mirror, aren't quite sure what the windshield view is telling you, or worse, it might be a good time to see how a focus on lead quality over quantity, an accurate and mutually agreed upon definition of a lead and effective lead filtering and nurturing would impact results.

By Dan McDade