Sales Mistake No 8: Absence of a lead generation mechanism

Whether you are selling double glazing or legal services, selling is a lot easier if you have a queue of half interested prospects waiting at your door. Just imagine it. You, your sales team, have a queue of prospects that fall into your target market, just waiting for you to pitch to them…

So is this the queue you face every morning?

Probably not, because at this stage of the economic cycle, most businesses find they have fewer prospects to sell to, and this puts pressure on pricing and margins. You might have found this too.

How to address this? In our experience, prospecting and lead generation is low down on most sales managers list, which is a missed opportunity. Installing referral-generating processes into your business systems, targeting sellers for prospecting and lead generation, will all contribute to a proactive culture of hunting for new business and is a key responsibility for sales managers.

At an operational level, the best prospects are those that your sellers have worked to create for themselves. If you are unsure about this, you may never have handed out the five hundred leads that were collected at a tradeshow at huge organisational cost. Leads are valued more by sellers when they have created them themselves because they know what context to put them in. When a top customer says “have a word with so and so”, your seller is going to call them, whereas “here’s some names we’ve found on a list”, they’re going to stay on that list, because without context, they’re just someone else’s list of names.

We run workshops to help sellers recognise the value of collecting referrals, we also develop lead generating processes with sales managers and directors.

If your sellers can’t tell you three different ways that they are generating leads and prospects, they are probably losing the proactive approach that is essential to successful selling. Try asking them, and see how long it takes to get an answer.

Because if they don’t have a queue, who are they selling to?