LET´S TALK ABOUT DEMAND- & LEAD-GENERATION! AGAIN? EVERYTHING SAID ALREADY? NOT AT ALL! READ PART 1 BELOW.
What are sales leads good for and are they good for anything at all? Well, many, especially sales people across all industries, are still doubting that. To be honest, sometimes for good reasons.
As a matter of fact, there is a huge incremental sales potential in leads, supposed that the purpose and goals and objectives tailored to the strategy have been clearly defined, set up, and executed. When the leads are being generated and handled in the right way. When they are considering the customer and not the self-centric feeling of the marketing guy. And, finally, when programs are designed as they should be designed, and executed in the right way.
One wouldn´t believe how many things you can do wrong here that crash your campaigns, waste your resources, and finally don´t grow your business… Marketing ends in itself.
Sounds all simple or trivial and doesn´t happen? Would be the case if the reality didn´t prove the opposite every day… I and I guess you, too, can see it every day.
It´s starting with a deep misunderstanding. There has been an area of conflict between sales and marketing since both have been existing. Almost everybody who is in sales and marketing has experienced that.
Marketing thinks that they are the basis for all incoming sales, because, without their promotions nobody would know about their products and therefore nobody would buy them. And they are generating all these wonderful leads for the so ungrateful sales force, completely missing that in many cases it´s just a unqualified mass of leads that the sales force can´t really handle and that doesn´t mean anything to them.
Sales, on the other side, thinks that they really know their sales territory and their customers (whereby the customer is not seldomly a couple of guys in a company whom they are drinking a cup of coffee with from time to time. A little provocative and exaggerating, I know). They think they know exactly what´s going on, and that it is them and only them who are bringing every single order in without any other help. They don´t need anybody else cause they have talked to every single customer personally.
Interested? More about leads to come soon in part 2 …
Josef W. Flossmann, EMEA and Demand Generation Practice Director— Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide, Munich
