A great DemandGenReport article by Kenneth Krogue, President of InsideSales.com titled Picking 5 Of The Top 5 Time Wasters of Inside Sales & Lead Generation simply echoes our belief that spending more on building better lists translates to spending less time looking for people and more productivity. Among the ‘5 Time Wasters’ that Ken brings across very well, the first of them is relying on “Poor Lead Generation Resources”. Here is a paragraph from the article:
TIME WASTER #1: Poor Lead Generation Resources
Why cold call if you can have inbound leads generated from an effective marketing campaign at a fraction of the cost? Our biggest and best clients take this seriously and use web, radio and television outlets to provide sustainable and scalable sources of qualified leads.It’s all about the leads. We don’t see nearly as many successful companies leaving the lead generation process to their sales people. If you don’t provide pre-qualified leads, at least provide your sales teams with good lists to call. Good lists cost roughly 5% to 10% of the money you spend on labor costs and can increase results dramatically (we have seen results as high as 1300%), yet some companies we studied left their reps to spend as much as 40% of their time looking for someone to call. Not only are you wasting your most valuable resource—your sales team—you risk losing your most effective sales reps to companies that are willing to give them a higher rate of success by providing warm leads.
We also advocate using dialing technology to triple or quadruple the contact rates of new leads and allow
salespeople to spend less time between conversations with decision-makers. Dialers that connect your sales reps to a live call as soon as he or she has ended another call will keep your sales reps busy making sales—increasing their success and profitability.Best Practice: Invest in good leads or lists. The Internet is already the fastest growing and least expensive source of leads for almost every business. Create an effective website and generate leads.
A quality list for you sales team is worth the extra cost in terms of budget or time. Spending time on a poor list where you have to look for people, dont have complete contact information and eventually reach people who are not the right people to talk is pure waste. Work with good data and you will get better results. Read on to check out the Ken’s other 4 top time wasters for inside sales and lead generation here. If you find your inside sales team spends too much time trying to locate decision makers and people to speak to, build a good list now!