April 23, 2002

How to move up the sales lead value ladder

by Dave Stein, The Stein Advantage

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Dave Stein's new book, "How Winners Sell."

Salespeople learn of impending sales opportunities in a number of ways. Some leads are temptations disguised as opportunities, as when your company is included in an evaluation only to validate an earlier decision to use your competitor. Others are situations in which, having nurtured an opportunity for years, you have the inside track. Most lie somewhere between these extremes.

The sales opportunity spectrum
Level 1: You check your snail- or e-mail box and find an RFP (request for proposal) or an RFI (request for information). This is usually a bad sign — a signal that the train has left the station and you haven't even bought your ticket. You've probably heard a colleague or sales manager say, "If you haven't written the RFP for or with the prospect, your competitor has, so winning is somewhat less than a remote possibility."

Level 2: You receive a photocopy of a "bingo card" from a magazine ad your company placed. Before you decide that the quality of such a lead is about as low as you can go, please realize that some sales professionals, due to situations beyond their control, would love to have this kind of lead — in fact, any lead.

Level 3: You get an e-mail alert from an online service where you've registered your company's products or services. As you become more and more adept at using the Internet to advance your sales and business plans, you'll find new sources every day for potential clients.

Level 4: You receive a form from your internal sales or lead generation team. Rarely do I find an organization that has created an effective, integrated, closed-loop approach to generating, following up, and closing leads. Many companies just haven't figured out how to do this.

Level 5: An "independent" consultant, retained by an unnamed company to help them procure a specific product or service, contacts you. If your company has a good history with this consultant, that's good news. Otherwise, you're little more than column fodder, helping the consultant fill out a spreadsheet that will show why you shouldn't be selected.

Level 6: You get a call from a current customer inviting you to participate in an evaluation. This is bad news: it means you're on your way to losing the account. Once your competitor is in the door, you're on the defensive, which is not a good position to sell from. This happens often — more often than it should. The cause is almost always ineffective account management.

Level 7: A client drops you a note: one of his customers needs what you sell. Such a lead is often high quality, for two reasons. First, you may get in the door early enough to help the prospect formulate criteria for the buying decision; second, being introduced to an executive by one of his business associates is one of the surest ways to get an appointment, along with instant credibility. Winners make a habit of asking their clients to refer them to others in their business circle. That's a great way to get high-quality leads.

Level 8: Your personal marketing campaign, aimed at the twenty accounts you want the most, yields a solid lead. Maybe you've been reading Tony Parinello's book, "Selling to VITO," or using some other highly-focused, value-oriented approach to get the attention of high-level industry executives. If so, it worked.

Level 9: Using your knowledge and experience in the industry, you find an unmet need, one either known or unknown by the company, in an existing account. This is high-level action — it's where the top guns, the sales winners who earn a million dollars a year, play. Once you've established yourself as an expert, you can follow your network into companies you've never sold to but where your reputation precedes you.

Look for the pattern
To understand the source and quality of your business, categorize your past three years' wins and losses by lead source. You should begin to see a pattern that can help you reshape your business development approach. For instance, if you find that bingo cards lead only to sporadic deals, you may decide not to waste any more time with leads from that source. You may discover that leads from a regional auditing firm resulted in several lucrative sales; obviously that's a source of leads you need to spend more time and energy on.

Analyze this information and decide whether you are fully leveraging your client relationships, your inside sales capabilities, your partnerships with other suppliers, your marketing campaigns, and, yes, even your somewhat rusty cold-calling skills, if they are appropriate. Figure out what strategies you need, and which supporting tactics, to move up the sales lead value ladder toward higher-quality leads.