How Many Leads Should Your Inside Sales Team Work At One Time?
I think it is pretty common for us to feel we are not doing all that we can to follow up on potential sales opportunities. Don’t get me wrong, we can all appreciate having an abundance of leads that your inside team and outside reps can work, but how many leads are too many leads? It’s obviously a good problem to have, but if you are not adequately addressing those leads in a timely fashion they will eventually turn into junk.
So what’s the answer? Either you hire more people to keep up with the demand, or come up with some kind of process to determine what lead is truly worthy of follow up. While there are many marketing automation tools out there that can help this process along, from what I’ve found some leads require a human touch to materialize into an actionable sales opportunities.
Maybe the first question we should be asking ourselves is -When does a lead actually "expire"? It seems the perception of when a lead should be followed on up can vary wildly. I’ve heard marketing and sales folks tell me that follow up should be no more than a week after a lead has been received, while others have said 30 days. The hard reality from what I've seen is large percentage of people (especially outside reps) very rarely follow up on the hottest leads within a week. While a month seems far too long to wait from my perspective, it isn't uncommon for sales reps to hand us off leads to follow up on from an event that took place 6+ months ago.
Most of the time follow-ups seem to be predicated upon where the lead came from. Rule of thumb for me is any inbound marketing lead should be followed up on within 24-48 hours, whereas tradeshow leads can age a bit more than a week. The reason being is that every other vendor (and their mother) is following up within a week of the event and the prospect most likely hasn't had the chance to settle in from their time away from the office to even entertain the thought of a sales call.
Point is, every marketing and sales team needs to have a process in place to anticipate the amount of leads they should be seeing monthly based on the amount of webinars they are hosting, events they are attending as well as leads as they historical see from their website from month-month.
For example, at AG each of our reps average 100 activities a day. Typically that means we are disqualifying/dispositioning at least 10 prospects a day. Logic would tell you we need 10 additional leads to offset what we are running through on a typical day. Over the course of a month that means my inside reps need 250 solid leads to follow up on. Keep in mind this doesn't include the person who downloaded a whitepaper and their names happens to be Mickey Mouse. The parents of that poor guy are very cruel...oh if you need his number he can be reached at 123-456-7890....
If you haven't done so already, with 2011 upon us, it's time to come up with a lead follow-up strategy. The first two steps should be to put a definition around what your sales and marketing team considers a "solid lead" and then determine the amount of calls you feel are necessary to keep up with the volume. I'm not saying it can be an easy process, but if you follow the first two steps you should feel some confidence that your leads are being adequately followed up on in a timely manner.