Measuring the Quality of Your Sales Leads
In my recent webcast, Perspectives in Teleprospecting - A Closed Loop Strategy, I talked about the importance of having a closed loop feedback process in place to track all of the qualified leads that your telesales team is uncovering. When you are investing time and money in a lead generation program you want to be able to prove the effectiveness of your campaign and make sure that all of the qualified opportunities that your team is passing over to sales are being nurtured appropriately.
When we instituted a closed loop process a few years ago we noticed a higher level of accountability from the sales reps that we were passing leads to and our client’s project engagements became longer.
We implemented a process where we would send a very brief email survey out to the sales rep that received our lead after they had the introductory call with the prospect. This gave the sales rep an opportunity to let us know if they were able to connect with the prospect and if the information we gathered during our qualification call was validated. It also gave them the ability to give feedback on any other questions we could have asked to make the lead more qualified. This process held the sales rep accountable for following up on the opportunity that we generated and also gave them piece of mind that, if it was off target, we would refine our messaging/qualification questions to reflect the feedback that they gave us. All of the feedback that we received was tracked and reported on at the end of each month so that our client could see what percentage of feedback was positive, how many of our leads were moving forward in the sales process, and which reps were best at giving us feedback. One of my clients, at the end of a quarter, noticed that one of their sales reps had only given us feedback on 45% of the opportunities we passed over, whereas another rep had given us feedback on 90% of all the leads we uncovered (industry averages suggest that you should be receiving a minimum of 75-80% of feedback on all of your passed leads). My client decided that they wanted us to scale back our prospecting in the one sales rep’s territory and focus more attention on the other sales rep who was more engaged in the process. This was a strategic decision that they were able to make based on data that we didn’t have before implementing a closed loop strategy.
I have also seen an increase in the length of time our clients engage in a teleprospecting campaign with us since implementing a closed loop process. Before we started following-up and tracking all of the feedback on our leads, our clients sometimes had a hard time justifying their budget if their sales team hadn’t closed any business during our pilot program. Now we were able to accurately report on the percentage of positive feedback that we were getting from the sales team and exactly how many of our opportunities were moving forward in the sales process (how much on pipeline/forecast). This provided our client with some compelling ROI numbers that helped justify additional budget to continue the campaign. Often times this was data that hadn’t even been entered into our client’s CRM system.
If you have an inside sales team in place, or outsource this function, it is important to track what is happening to all of the opportunities that are being passed to sales so that you have an accurate picture of the effectiveness of your lead generation campaigns.
What do you do to measure the quality of the leads you receive or send over?