Convert Leads Into Sales. Why is it that so many sales people fail to follow up on sales leads that are handed off to them by the marketing department? It never ceases to amaze me how often I hear the same complaint from sales managers and from marketing managers who are working hard to drive new opportunities in the door. Part of the issue with sales people and their lack of willingness to follow up on sales leads is many sales people have large egos and believe that anything that has been brought to them by others is probably not very good.

They have this, "I'm the king of my territory" mindset, which translates into them thinking that if they haven't created an opportunity for the company, it must not be real. It's the job of sales management to dispel this notion and make sure that your sales people are taking all of the leads that are coming to the company through its various marketing programs seriously. A good way to convert leads to sales, is to focus weekly attention on reviewing the sales leads that are coming in from marketing and from telesales efforts and categorizing those leads in getting a quick report from each of your sales people on what they're doing to follow up on the leads that are coming in.

Lots of sales people are still resistant to this process. And sometimes, it makes sense to segment the responsibility of following up on leads between field sales people who don't believe they have the time or don't believe in the quality of the leads that they're getting, and inside sales people, whose sole responsibility it is to qualify and further advance the sale with leads that are still in fairly early stages of gestation.

Most big, best in class companies in many industries have now gone to an inside sales function whose job it is to qualify and continue to nurture leads forward, until they're ready for the involvement of outside or field sales. If your company is struggling because it's not capable of getting its field sales people to follow up on sales leads, think about changing the mix of your sales o

rganization and moving some of your field sales resources into an inside sales role. Probably this means that you're going to have to replace a few people and you're going to need to do some recruiting because the profile and aptitudes of an inside telesales lead generation person are quite different from the profile and aptitudes of field sales personnel.

We find that many companies are in the process of reducing their field sales head count and shifting some of that mix towards an inside sales model because of the lower cost and increased efficiency, and teaming those inside and outside personnel together is a much more effective way to make sure that you're aligning your resources correctly and making sure that you're following up on every single lead that's coming in through marketing. Many companies are spending money on marketing but they're not following up on leads. As a result, they've got huge leakage through their pipeline and they're wasting resources on programs that are not being optimized. Think about how to make sure that each of those precious leads that your marketing department's producing for your company is followed up on in 2006.

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