Is Lead Gen a Waste of Time?

If you've been selling for any amount of time, you've been there. The panicked manager calls the team together for a call block. 'Work the phones; generate leads; we need more in the pipeline to hit our numbers!' Sadly, not only have I participated, but I've led such panic-induced strategies. What I learned:

I was doing it wrong! In the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, one of the famous printable Alec Baldwin quotes is:

These are the Glengarry leads. And to you, they're gold, and you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away.

The sales team wasn't hitting their numbers, so Alec Baldwin came in to "fire" them all to earn their jobs back. (Not a recommended strategy.) But Baldwin's point about wasting the leads was not far off track.

Let me explain. We put a great deal of time and effort into LeadGen. It's become the buzzword in sales for the last several years. When times are tough, generate massive amounts of leads; that's the answer! Not. When it comes to leads, it's quality over quantity. I get it, it may look good to the suits to say you had a call block and generated 100 new prospects, but check back in six months and see how many converted. Likely less than 5%. All that time and energy, not to mention pressure and stress, were spent generating leads. Leads aren't the answer.

What we should focus on are strategic conversations with qualified prospects. I would much rather have my sellers have five strategic sales conversations a week with qualified prospects than generate 100 new prospects that go nowhere.

First and foremost, we must determine what a qualified lead is. This can be an excellent topic for discussion at a sales meeting. The obvious place to start is your current customers:

Why do they buy from you?

What is their profile?

What type of business?

Who are their customers?

What is their attitude towards marketing?

Those are just some starter questions. What you are trying to do is determine the "traits" of your current customers. Similar to finding good sales talent, you must know what you're looking for. So, by identifying the traits of your current customers, you will have the "ideal candidate" for your marketing team to focus on finding. Once you have the ideal prospect in mind, start tracking the only thing that matters in prospecting: Progress. By progress, we mean: Scheduled meetings. If you're not important enough to be on their calendar, they aren't significant enough to be in your pipeline.

Strategic conversations about pain points and impact – if they are willing to share their pain, you can create solutions.

Overall engagement. Do they respond to phone calls, emails and texts? Are they interested in our research, ideas and solutions?

Yes, sales is a numbers game. That does not mean it's a volume game. It means talking to the right people about the right things, the right amount of time. Nobody has time to waste, so instead of a call block generating leads, how about a group discussion to identify the best, most qualified prospects in your market?

No, LeadGen isn't dead. But it's like hope. Hope without a strategy is just a dream. But hope (LeadGen) with a carefully crafted strategic approach is the answer to more conversions. Strive for quality over quantity: fewer leads, a better fit and a well-crafted strategic approach to nurturing and providing value and scheduled conversations that help them convert from interest to intent to investment. That's how LeadGen/prospecting can become strategic, and your growth becomes a carefully crafted system rather than a panic-induced call block.

Think Big, Make Big Things Happen!

Jeff Schmidt is the SVP of Professional Development. You can reach him at Jeff.Schmidt@rab.com. You can all so connect with him on X and LinkedIn.