CHAPTER 22
The No-Lead-Left-Behind Sales Process
Every salesperson needs to employ a No-Lead-Left-Behind policy.
This means that you, a salesperson, have to embrace the attitude that a sales lead has value until it is proven otherwise and that the only way to quickly and accurately define the potential of that value is to reach out and engage with the customer making the inquiry.
It may be tempting to read this and tell yourself that lead follow-up isn’t a problem for you. But a number of studies suggest otherwise. I believe that it is important for you to understand the magnitude of the problem because it ultimately will be up to you to fix. Management can put into place all the procedures it wants to improve follow-up, but until you buy into it, things aren’t going to change.
The state of sales lead follow-up is not good. As referenced in the previous chapter, some studies found that, at the high end of the range, roughly 70 percent of sales leads are never contacted by a salesperson. On the low end of the range, seminal studies like the MIT Lead Response Management Study found that 37 percent of sales leads were never followed up. Personally, I think that anything above 0 percent is extremely problematic—and completely unnecessary. No matter which end of the statistical spectrum you subscribe to, the bottom line is that sales lead follow-up suffers from inattention and ineffectiveness.
Another key finding of the MIT Lead Response Management Study was that it is not enough to simply follow up. The effectiveness of follow-up is directly tied to how quickly it occurs. The study demonstrated that the longer you take to follow up, the less likely you are to actually contact the customer. The researchers found that salespersons are 21 times more likely to contact a customer if they call to follow up within five minutes of receiving the lead versus 30 minutes. In short, whatever priority the customer has placed on talking with you will begin to wane immediately after reaching out to you.
This means that the potential value of a lead begins to drop almost as soon as the customer sends it to you. The MIT study found that the average time to follow up a sales lead was 42 hours. If you were 21 times less likely to contact the lead if you waited 30 minutes to call versus 5 minutes, how many times less likely will it be that you can actually contact the customer if you wait the full 42 hours? As mentioned, I was a history major, so I’ll leave it to you mathematicians to calculate the solution. But I can tell you this: The answer is going to look at lot like never.
One final point on this subject: Let’s split the difference between the high and low end of the follow-up spectrum and agree that approximately 50 percent of sales leads are not appropriately followed up. Now consider the projection that $171 billion was spent in the United States on various forms of media to generate interest in products and services among potential customers. If salespeople preemptively deem 50 percent of the leads generated by those dollars unworthy of follow-up, then roughly $85.5 billion was essentially flushed down the drain due to sales inaction.
So what’s new about that? Haven’t salespeople always possessed an inherent skepticism about the value of marketing-generated leads? Yes. And there may have been a valid reason for this behavior in the past. But an in-bound sales lead today is a very different creature from the sales lead of the past, and it demands a different proactive response. Hence No Lead Left Behind.
First, sales leads today are not your daddy’s sales leads.
A 2010 study showed that more than 90 percent of all B2B customers conduct some form of online research on a product or service before they engage with a salesperson. This means that most potential customers have initiated their buying process well before ever talking with a salesperson.
Prior to the widespread adoption of the Internet as a means to both promote and research a company’s products, potential buyers had few sources of information about a company or its products. So-called bingo cards used to generate many sales leads. Bingo cards—aka reader inquiry cards—were postcards bound into the seam of a magazine that listed the names of the companies that were mentioned in the editorial or advertising in that issue. Readers circled the names of the companies whose products they were interested in learning more about, tore the postage-paid postcard out of the magazine, and dropped it in a mailbox. A fulfillment house processed the cards and passed the reader’s name on to the relevant company.
The value of the bingo card leads was pretty low. Most came from people who were merely curious about a product or service, and without the Internet to easily supply this information they had to reach out to the company to learn more. In this environment, it was rarely worth the sales effort to sort through the 99 percent of the “leads” that were just tire kickers in an effort to find that 1 percent who might be qualified as a prospect. (A study of bingo card effectiveness reported in the Journal of Direct Marketing found that “Advertisers’ response to requests for information via bingo cards tends to be very slow, if they respond at all.”)
The situation has evolved for the better for both buyers and sellers. The Internet provides a low-cost, low-touch means for companies to deliver detailed information about their products and services to any interested party. As a result, the merely curious information seeker no longer has to reach out to a company and consume its sales time just to satisfy basic curiosity about a product or service. Today, your customers are doing their research and reaching out to sellers asking, “Sell to me, please.” But salespeople continue to act as if all inbound sales leads were coming from bingo cards (or were contaminated with radioactive waste).
In fact, the Internet and the widespread acceptance of the basic compact of permission-based marketing between buyer and seller mean that information seekers who reach out to companies today are much more likely to be valid sales leads. (Please note that I am saying “leads,” not “qualified prospects.”) People who fill out a web form on a website know that they are giving that company permission to fill their inboxes with a carefully calibrated sequence of automatically generated e-mails that are designed to engage and sufficiently qualify their interest. Knowing what is in store for them (i.e., a call from a salesperson), most people don’t casually fill out multiple web forms on a company’s website unless they are prepared to engage with a salesperson.
As a result, the inbound leads that a company receives are from a different audience than that of 10, 15, or 20 years ago. These are valid leads from people who have done their homework and deserve a response by sales. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen as often as it should.
The mathematical logic behind sales lead follow-up is overwhelming. We have already established that I’m no math genius, except when it comes to calculating the size of an order and the commission earned on it. That is one of those skills you learn early in your sales career that will stick with you forever. The same is true of the math of sales lead follow-up. It’s what I call the Immutable Multiplier Effect. If you keep your conversion percentage (leads to orders) level and double the number of sales leads you follow up, what happens? That’s right. Your sales will increase proportionally to the number of sales leads that you followed up.
If you are looking for a way to increase your sales, this is the most obvious method. If you’re hungry to succeed, or maybe just running behind on your quota, start digging into the leads. I had a client with three-quarters of the sales team underwater with quota. The CEO brought me in to help him figure out why they were struggling. It quickly became apparent that the salespeople weren’t following up their leads. Most had made the decision that the leads they were receiving were worthless. Instead, they were risking significantly greater amounts of their time trying to prospect for new customers. Once they understood the multiplier effect, they began to treat their leads with respect and produce better results. Not everyone became a superstar, but everyone’s sales increased.
Follow-up is on you. It’s a process that only you can own and that every salesperson needs to master. Your managers can put metrics into place to measure it (and they should). But at the end of the day, you have to make it happen. The actions you take will spell the difference between converting a lead into a potential customer or having the opportunity passed to a competitor.
Commit to leaving no lead behind, and you’ll soon be getting ahead.