September 19, 2007
When Leads Stall
Selling Power offers up an article that explores reasons for bloated pipelines. That never happens in sales, does it? The article – Warning: There€™s a Gash In Your Pipeline – presents some excellent suggestions for why this happens and how to correct it.
Robert Kear, SPI€™s chief marketing officer, observes that the lead generation challenge stems partly from the erroneous view that lead generation is a quantity problem; that the more leads you can get, the better. Instead, he says, the lead generation challenge is about maximizing value awareness with the right potential buyers.
Right. It is a qualitative issue. I enjoyed Kear’s solutions offered in the article. But the last two points truly stand out:
5. Sales process and methodology. Roughly 75 percent of leads generated by marketing never get acted on by sales. And the ones that do get acted on are often selected intuitively, by €œgut feel.€ Reps need concrete processes and methodologies so they can use science, not intuition, to separate the wheat from the chaff and prioritize their efforts.
6. Individual skills and knowledge. Many salespeople lack the situational fluency to cultivate qualified leads. In other words, when they do get an appointment, they don€™t have the skills to carry out good, consultative conversations. This correlates with the recent finding of CSO Insights that 51.3 percent of companies are converting less than half of their initial conversations into subsequent presentations. And when a rep lacks the ability to move a sale forward from the initial conversation, he not only loses out on that particular piece of business, but on all the potential referrals that might have resulted from it. The bottom line: salespeople must have the situational fluency and problem diagnosis skills to cultivate leads into opportunities.
Perfect. First, a sales department without a general process is trouble That is part of the driver behind our recent article – The Structure of a Selling System. The lack of a sales process feeds into point #6. Salespeople without a process tend to over rely upon a single aspect of selling (building rapport, influencing, presenting, trial closing, etc.).
“Situational influence” is a clever turn of phrase for salespeople who lack the skills to advance a lead to a decision, whether that decision is a yes or a no. The worst response from a lead is “I’ll think it over.” That is a stall that leads many salespeople to chase rabbits down holes without a real chance of closing the deal.
Comments(2)
