What do you most want from your company’s marketing programs in terms of lead generation–quality or quantity?
Of course, you want both, large numbers of high-quality sales leads. But the sales lead tooth fairy rarely operates that way. She’s either generating large numbers of poor-quality leads or many fewer high-quality leads.
It is relatively easy to generate large numbers of sales “leads” these days. As just one example for ISVs, you can go to a list broker and ask for all the names in a particular product category–say, all the names associated with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. But such lists are usually inaccurate, out-of-date, and won’t give you many clues about which specific business needs the users have, or when they plan to mak their software purchases. More importantly, the lists won’t tell you whether the names on the list have any interest in your product or service at all.
Now, you may figure that your marketing and sales organization is so sharp and well organized that it can separate the wheat from the chaff, and find those nuggets of gold–the few highly promising sales leads from a large number of questionable ones. If your organization has that ability, more power to it, because very few are well organized that way, and for good reason–it’s very difficult to easily extract the great sales leads.
Yes, you can send emails or snail-mail packages to everyone on the list, but most business people today have all kinds of ways of filtering them out, from spam email boxes to assistants who throw out “junk” mail.
And after you are all done, what do you have? Almost certainly, a much smaller number of somewhat promising leads. So, you started with quantity, and when you were done, you had quality–maybe on the order of 10 per cent or fewer of the original leads.
Another approach is simply to go after top quality leads from the beginning. In other words, do away with that tedious and costly screening process that is necessary when you are emphasizing quantity. The best way tends to be by being super focused in your outreach message, and having some built-in kind of qualifying mechanism for assessing leads. For example, at a trade show, you can talk to individuals who spend time at your booth and, by asking a few leading questions (What problem are you trying to solve? How long have you been looking? When do you expect to make a purchase?), begin to quickly identify serious prospects.
You can even automate the process by inviting prospects to read your product content–white papers and brochures, for example. At MSDynamicsWorld.com, we can capture the names of individuals reading a company’s product content. Because such individuals have sought out your content, they already know much about your company and key products when your sales people follow up–are prequalified in important respects.
Of course, generation of sales leads is invariably a more complex process than I can fully cover here. Suffice it to say, though, quality trumps quantity, as in so much of life.
