The economy today is more difficult for businesses to navigate and to survive, than it's ever been. Buyers are more than willing to part with their money than they ever have before in recent memory. With businesses desperate to find customers who might be willing to pay for purchase, they usually go on overdrive, trying to find leads. Generating leads, they call it, is one of the most popular activities that businesses can indulge in. But does it really help? Does generating leads somehow guarantee to you that there'll be more purchases?
It certainly does in lots of leads. Your efforts at generating leads will pay off certainly if you try hard. But this isn't as good a thing as it might first seem. When you try very hard to indiscriminately get leads for your business, you'll end up with a lot of meaningless ones. Your sales representatives will be swamped with these meaningless leads, they will often have to waste their time trying them out.
The only way in which generating leads is good for your business is if it manages to turn out high-quality leads - not just anything. Unfortunately, most companies don't realize this. They get all caught up in how generating leads for their sales reps to follow has to be a wonderful thing. They mistake being busy for being productive.
Surveys done at companies like this find that sales reps here only manage to actually sell to one out of four people when they follow those leads. Only about one in four sales reps appears to be satisfied with the quality of leads that he gets from his company. It can hardly do to antagonize your sales force like this.
There's another study too about what happens to all those leads that salespeople get every day. Apparently, four out of five of those leads don't pay off. In short, it just doesn't make any sense to go about generating leads and dumping them on your sales personnel.
The focus, when generating leads, should be on getting quality instead of quantity. Making a sales lead payoff in the form of actual sale takes time. It requires the marketing manager to stick at it. In other words, marketing managers need a lot of time to snag a customer the right way. They can only do this if they get no more than 4 to 5 leads a day.
There simply isn't enough time for anyone to check all this out. The moral of the lesson therefore is - never swamp your salespeople with too many leads, you only succeed in demoralizing your sales force.