How to succeed when Marketing doesn’t provide you enough leads
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Sep 01, 2008 @ 02:14 PM
One of the most common complaints I hear from sales reps is the lack of enough incoming leads. I always say that the best salespeople are great marketers, and the best marketers are great salespeople. Here's what I mean, and how you can solve this problem right from your own desk.
Here's a fact of life: Marketing will never provide you with enough leads. There are many variables that go into the marketing mix, and sometimes these lead generation techniques just don't work as well as they should. When they don't, as an inside rep with a quota, you've really got to provide your own. How do you do it? There are many ways, but let me tell you about one that worked for me. It will work for you, too, and as we teach in my telesales training courses, your job is to reinvent what's not working to create a solution that will. Reps with the best sales performance always do.
When I was a sales rep, I sold development tools to engineers, but I'd get leads from marketing that listed consultants as well. Consultants never bought anything from me or any of the other reps, so standard practice was to avoid calling them. Our standard in-house joke was that they were all looking for work, so the leads were perceived as being useless. Often, though, they'd go to work for companies that were real prospects. In other words, they sold consulting services to the same people that I sold tools to. So I took these "dead" leads and started calling a few of them. Yes, they were almost always looking for work. So I started finding them jobs, gratis, by calling my prospects, and asking them if they needed consulting services, after discussing my tools, of course. I started hooking up a lot of people, which enhanced my reputation within the tools industry. The consultants all loved me, and when they landed work, told their clients about me. My sales grew exponentially. By re-examining my concept of a "dead lead" and doing something nice for these consultants, I actually got a number of them "selling" for me.
If you've got a million dollar a year quota, you're essentially a CEO running your own company. Marketing (if you have that function within your company) may never get you the leads you need to overshoot your quota, so you've got to do it yourself. The bottom line here is that if you're not getting enough leads, you've got to generate your own. Superior sales lead generation is a matter of thinking creatively and coming up with your own plan instead of waiting for marketing to do it for you. If you have one that you've found effective, share it on the blog. And add creating your own marketing plan for your territory to your Best Practices playbook.