Top 5 Challenges in Generating Quality Sales Lead

Tough world of Sales Lead

What are the Top 5 challenges in generating a High quality Sales Lead?

High Quality Sales Lead is what a sales rep wants and in my first post in the Lead Management Blog Post series, I covered what are the Top 7 Qualities of a Perfect Sales Lead. It’s easy to demand that this is what is needed, but it’s equally important to look at the challenges in generating High Quality Sales Lead, day in and day out.

In the second post in this series, I am covering five main challenges which becomes a roadblock for Marketing team and comes in the way of an ideal sales lead. So let’s dive in:

1) How to handle the duplicate accounts/ contacts existing in the system? How can we prevent new (duplicate) accounts/ contacts getting created? How the logic should be in place to get the new lead getting tagged with the existing account/ contact? How to eradicate duplication in lead data?

There can be “n” number of permutations and combinations on how a contact can be written and which results in multiple contacts from multiple organisations getting recorded in the system (when in reality it’s ONE single contact from one UNIQUE organisation.) Is your automation system configured to merge all the duplicates, clean up the wrong information and present that data to a sales rep where they don’t cry hoarse that everytime there are inquiries from one organisation, each time the system creates a new account and then tags it with the new account rather than plugging that lead with the already existing account in the system. Does this sound familiar? I can see you nodding!

2) Are the lead details complete with the information? Is missing details in the lead an eyesore for a sales rep?

There are many reasons which cause this. The data flow does not happen seamlessly from marketing automation to sales tool which lead to many cases where a lead does not have all the information needed to contact that lead. Are your systems equipped to capture job title, department? Are your automation tools capturing the comments which a prospect mentioned in the form and in a legible format. Are you able to present the gold mine which your chat transcripts hold? Is your team trained to input the right details? Imagine dump of text appearing to you and sales rep has to break his head and spend at least 5 min to make sense out of it.

3) Do you have a team who calls up the prospects and qualifies as per BANT? Are there any filters in place which qualifies what your marketing automation tool is generating and what should reach to your sales team? Is the pruning system well in place?

Who needs this as we are letting our system churn leads with missing details, duplicate leads, whoever submits a form, contacts us via chat, lead nurture streams nurture them, and marketing is pushing everything to Sales w/o any human validation! If there is no mechanism to separate wheat from chaff, then you should not fret over declined ratio or heaps of unattended leads in the queue.

4) Were all the teams involved when the lead architecture was being planned? Were all the nuisances on the data flow, what gets captured et al discussed? Are your different tools (e.g. the one which you use for chat, creating surveys, post sales service etc) integrated with your central automation system?

This is a lot but very important when you want your automation tool be super effective in pushing the “right leads” , capturing the information which you have intended and assigning those leads to the right representative as intended. You can not afford to ignore the tiny bits on e.g. how the formatting of notes will work and the data input is equal to data output. Situations like where you have configured everything perfectly in the marketing automation tool, but the result is not the same in your sales tool need to be watched out for.

5) If once more I see, twenty contacts becoming twenty leads from the same organisation, I will hammer myself.

Do you have a logic in place to create a chart for all the contacts present in that organisation in your marketing/ sales tools which are hitting your system as leads? How many of them are involved in the purchasing decision? How many are actually working on your product and using it day in and day out? Is there any view which captures this information for a sales rep and provide him with this intelligence?

Using the analogy of farming, weeds need to be removed regularly so that you get the right crop in the end. Lead Farming is where your bridge always comes to your rescue and constantly prunes the lead queue so that a sales rep spends time on High Quality Sales lead resulting in better conversion.

This is the end of my second post in the Lead Management Blog Post Series and my next post will talk about Marketing’s achilles heel.