“No not these leads, I want those leads…”

“No not these leads, I want those leads…I want the Glengarry leads (a bunch of them).”

As sales managers or executives, what’s the most common request we hear from sales people?

“Leads! More leads!”

What they’re really asking for is not just more leads, it’s, more, more qualified and DIFFERENT leads… the Glengarry leads.

It almost never matters which leads we have, they aren’t the ones we want.

Here’s something I’ve dealt with first hand. I’m not sure if this makes me want to laugh or to cry.

Until recently I was a VP of Sales for an international technology company. One of our more senior sales representatives was struggling. Let’s call him Paul. His forecast was thin and his pipeline was weak. Paul was concerned about his quarter and he asked for help.

Good on him for being at least a little proactive.

Paul wasn’t into prospecting. He’d wait for in-bound leads from Marketing.

Since we already had a group of Business Development Representatives (BDRs) that handled incoming calls, it was fairly easy to change the BDR role slightly so that they did more qualifying. We gave them the training and tools (including scripts, templates, etc.) to do the job properly.

The result was that fewer leads got through the funnel, but they were definitely more qualified.

How do you think this translated to Paul’s results?

Surprise! Paul’s results did not improve in the slightest. In fact, they got worse.

Neither did he dedicate any more time to prospecting. Instead, complained that he wasn’t getting enough leads!

Paul then proposed a different idea. Since he was a senior sales representative (higher base salary, higher commission, and higher quota), he was focused on larger companies. Paul wanted to be allowed to sell to our smaller company prospects as well.

It should be noted that our company’s sweet spot was in smaller companies. These sales cycles could be pretty short; from a few days to three months.

Paul argued that as a more senior sales representative, he would be able to drive tons of business in those smaller companies and close a greater volume than our representatives that usually sold into that space.

We agreed to do a test. We began to give Paul a bunch of those smaller-company leads.

Any guesses how this went?

After one quarter, Paul had not closed one deal. Not one. He also still had done no prospecting.

When we sat down to have our difficult conversation, Paul said that those smaller company leads were, “not worth my (his) time”.

A Sales Professional should expect to generate at least 25% of their business through their own prospecting efforts.

There will always be good leads and bad leads. The bottom line is that all leads should be treated with respect. As sales professionals, the best leads are the ones that we come up with ourselves.

If somebody else gives us a lead it really is just a contact or a suspect until we’ve vetted it and if we don’t like the leads we’ve got, then we need to go out and get some other ones.

What would we do if Marketing disappeared overnight?