Do All Sales Reps Deserve Leads?
Posted by
Chris Lang on Fri, Sep 17, 2023 @ 08:24 AM
I was talking with a sales VP the other day. This sales VP has an inside team that is doing a pretty good job delivering sales qualified leads to his 5 outside, territory based reps. Even though the inside team seemed to be producing at a high level, he came to me asking if my firm could come in and augment his team's efforts to supply leads to 2 of the territory reps that were behind on their number. As a quota carrying sales rep, my immediate answer was "YES!" But, then we started talking about the 2 areas that my team would be supporting, and after some investigation I came to a conclusion that caught the sales VP off guard. "I don't think we should give the 2 lagging territories any additional leads."
As I said, the sales effort in this particular firm is split into 5 sections based on territory. The territories were split so that each rep had about the same number of good prospects in their potential book of business. Each rep received about 6 sales qualified leads per month in addition to their own MQL lists that they were responsible for prospecting into. 2 of the territory reps were way above quota, one was right on quota and the last 2 were both well below. The sales VP, trying to give his reps every chance to succeed, wanted to pump leads from my company into the 2 underperforming areas. My question to him was, "why spend the money to ship hot leads to 2 reps that aren't performing?"
We came up with a system that rewards the top performers with leads based on their close rate. The total amount of sales qualified leads coming out per month including my team's efforts would be about 50 leads per month. The reps would receive a certain percentage of the leads based on how well they closed business the quarter before. From first to last the lead distribution went as follows: (based on 50 opportunities) Highest closing percentage rep receives 16 leads per month, second place gets 13 leads per month, third gets 10 leads per month, 4th place takes 7 leads per month and last place is handed 4 leads per month. This way your top performers can focus on what they do best, closing business, and the bottom players have to work more to develop their own pipeline until they prove they are worthy of receiving the extra investment it takes to supply them with hot leads.
In my opinion getting fully qualified sales leads is not a right. It is a privilege that you earn by showing the powers that be that you can close deals at high percentage. Why give the same amount of "A" leads to a rep with a 10% close rate that you would give to a rep with a 30% close rate? From an ROI standpoint, wouldn't it make sense to ship as many leads as possible to the reps that have the highest likelihood of closing them? Your top reps will make more money which will make them happy, and you will see a much better ROI on your marketing/sales investment.
Happy Hunting.