If you’re in the business of generating leads, whether it’s for sales or marketing, then you know that sometimes too many leads can be a good problem to have. But if you’re not prepared for it, an influx of leads can quickly turn into a chaotic mess. So what do you do when you find yourself with more leads than you know what to do with? Here are some tips:-
Too Many Leads: The Downfall of Having More Potential Customers Than You Can Handle
If a company has too many leads, it means they have more potential customers than they can handle. This can be overwhelming for the staff and make it difficult to follow up with each lead in a timely manner.
Too many sales leads can also lead to lost opportunities and frustrated customers.
Here are some of the Problems of having a large Lead:
1. Poor quality data in the CRM system.
2. Harder to find patterns in the data.
3. Marketing spend wasted on unnecessary leads that don’t convert.
4. Sales time wasted on unnecessary leads that don’t convert.
5. The fantasy of insufficient leads when present lead volume doesn’t fuel sales goal attainment.
6. Marketing for Quantity over Quality.
7. Sales compromised their standards for following up on leads to process more.
8. The expectations of those in upper management positions often perpetuate the false belief that there are “not enough leads”.
9. Sales’ demand for marketing collateral is never satisfied.
10. Marketing’s process for generating new sales opportunities is never enough to satisfy the needs of salespeople.
11. Marketing and sales are in constant conflict.
12. Marketing is routinely at odds with the sales reps.
13. Despite an increase in marketing and sales efforts, business growth is slow or stagnates.
14. Change only comes about when something is broken.
15. The demand for meeting unrealistic sales quotas often breaks marketing budgets.
16. Too many leads can put a strain on your sales teams and increase operating costs.
17. Labels like “raw”, “marketing-qualified”, “sales-qualified”, and “sales pipeline” or “opportunities” can quickly become meaningless in the flood of activities a sales person performs.
18. Marketing teams often lose members as they advance in their careers.
19. Salespeople who only focus on closing sales will burn out and quit.
20. As the number of sales increases, so does the difficulty in calculating your return on investment. This is because 1 sale from 100,000 leads to 1 from 100.
Too many leads to follow up on can lead to many problems.
How do you know when your organization has too many B2B leads?
If you’re in marketing and sales and you realize that your lead lists are out of control, you should work together to put a stop to it.
Having more incoming calls than you can handle is like having a flooded basement – it’ll keep happening until the problem is fixed. While it’s easy to spot a flood or water leak, it can be harder to tell if there are too many leads to follow up on.
When there’s never enough time in the day, it’s only natural to find yourself chasing after more leads to grow your business. However, when there are simply not enough hours in a day, and you find yourself constantly saying “we need another lead,” it’s a clear sign that you have way too many.
Here’s what to look out for:
1. Assumptions in the volume of leads you are expecting
A response of “because 100 wasn’t good enough” to the question of why 500 more were needed is a bit obvious, but the principle is that your lead generation goals should be based on numbers, not guesses.
If you needed 12,000 new leads to reach 1,200 marketing-qualified leads that were then turned into 600 sales-accepted lead to 300 closed-won opportunities that each averaged $25,000, you could understand.
If conversions decrease or sales goals are increased, then more leads are needed. Simply assuming more will come is not enough.
2. Lack of Conversion Rate models
If you’re not keeping track of your lead gen, how can you be sure you’re targeting the correct number of leads to hit your projected sales goals?
You don’t need to have complete end-to-end data to make accurate forecasts. Of course, having a high data quality is a big help.
You need to have clear metrics in place to measure your sales process from lead to sale.
You can model your sales process after , or if you’re just starting out, you can focus on tracking things like your conversion rates, your sales qualification rates, and your sales opportunity close rate.
As long as you’ve established clear stages of your sales process, you can track the revenue generated from each.
This model is useful because it allows you to understand where the demand for more sales is, and where to focus your efforts. This can be especially useful when you’re trying to generate new leads to increase sales.
3. Negative or neutral sales and marketing efficiency
More sales is not the ideal scenario for sales and marketing. If more sales are a result of more lead gen, it’s only more of the same.
If you increase your number of closed deals and your amount of qualified marketing leads into the same proportion, you will likely be working twice as hard.
If you want to be more efficient in your sales and marketing efforts, aim for more deals from the same number of leads. Or, if you’re really good, try to increase revenue while reducing the number of leads. Either way, you’ll be moving in the right direction.
This efficiency comes from knowing the critical members of a buyer group, engaging with them productively, and using your resources efficiently by not wasting time on lower-probability prospects.
If you want to get more out of your sales and marketing, then you need be more effective at what you do. Instead of just doing more, you should instead try and be more effective. By being effective, you can increase your revenue without putting in more time and effort.
To combat the glut of sales calls and emails, sales and marketing should operate in a more thoughtful, calculated manner.
While you may have a lot of leads that are coming in, if you’re unable to respond to them quickly, then it’s likely that your operation isn’t sophisticated enough.
Start by going back to your business plan. Figure out your expected average conversion rate and your estimated average value of a deal. Then, figure out your projected number of sales from the number of qualified opportunities.
If you’re not getting enough quality leads to contact, it’s time to revisit your lead gen strategy. This includes improving the content of your marketing materials, creating more touchpoints with your prospects, or changing the kinds of questions you ask. By making these adjustments, you should be able to increase the number of qualified contacts you get.
The goal should be to have an effective and efficient system around leads, rather than inflating and exhausting lead production.
Conclusion
If you’re finding yourself with too many leads, don’t panic! Just take a deep breath and follow these tips on how to handle an influx of leads. Prioritize your prospects, get organized, and delegate tasks if necessary. With a little bit of effort, you’ll be able to manage all those leads in no time!
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