Prospecting is a marketing function

Hi Donnie,
Yes,prospecting is a marketing function. Leads are provided to sales by the marketing group, the sales function is to sell or convert the leads into customers (purchases). Prospecting requires a large amount of time to generate a few qualified leads. This large amount of time is a "bite" out of sales activity time. Sales should be spending a good 85-90% of their time on direct sales activities, not "fishing" for qualified leads.

Sorting the wheat/prospects from the chaff/suspects is "qualifying" not "prospecting".

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OK, generating (prospecting) and qualifying leads are both marketing functions. Having come from both a marketing and sales background, I know that larger companies are set up to perform these functions in this manner. Smaller companies may mot have the man power to operate in this manner. A sales persons time is most effective if they begin the sales process with a qualified lead, not in having to waste time finding out if the lead is indeed qualified. This is inefficient use of sales time.

I think smaller companies just don’t have the brainpower to figure out how much they are wasting on chasing suspects. Or… They hire salespeople on straight commission, and the company doesn’t care about how long it takes to convert those losers into clients. After all, salespeople pay their own expenses and run their own cars to the ground during the conversion process. Maybe that’s a huge contributor to the huge salesperson attrition.

Most smaller companies refuse to make an upfront investment and design a lead generation programme, and they condemn the sales force to do cold prospecting grunt work.

I know several people who showed up at 9:00am on their first days at work, and at 9:05 they were given the Yellow Pages with a “get dialling” instruction from their sales managers.

And in the 21st century every peasant has automated the wheat/chaff separation process. Hey, I used to be one of them. Maybe companies could hire a few peasants to help to design such a process and help out the pompous MBA suits.

Thoughts?

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Let's consider what the word "Prospecting" really means looking for nuggets of gold. Just suppose we were to use the techniques of the Klondkye prospectors we would search for nuggets of gold - would we say it is someone's elses role to tell us where the gold is - and then go and mine it - no we would use all teh available resources of research to find where it is best qualified place to search and then extract the gold. The best nugget is the one I find myself!

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Great analogy, Colly. And even these people had there tools (pendulums, etc.) to assist them to locate the gold, so they would know where to dig. They didn't just start digging randomly.

My three nuggets of the day are the top three podcasts at http://800ceoread.com/podcasts/.

Hopefully, some of you find them valuable. Great discussion on big company dynamic and lead generation for complex sales.

In a perfect world, sales reps would have good quality leads to be working. You have a quota, and are expected to meet that number, regardless of the quality of the leads you get from marketing. If you're numbers aren't great, and you're not out doing your own prospecting, you'll likely lose your job.
No sales manager wants to hear, that marketing isn't getting good leads. The expectation in most companies is that you should know your territory well enough to go 'find new business'.

Susan

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How do larger companies set up their marketing departments so that they handle "qualifying" too? Do they have staff who screen all leads or something?

But isn't it a worthy objective to thrive for perfection even if we know we can never reach it? We still can improve and reaach some kinf of personal team-wide, and organisational excellence?

Personally I have a pretty low opinion of idiotic sales managers who manage their salespeople by quota. Quota is an effect. What are the causes of reaching or not reaching quota? Emotions.

But managing by quota is easy. It requires no brain. That's good news because most sales managers don't have any anyway (brain I mean). I they had any, they would know that by managing the overall feelings of the sales culture, they can spur their people to higher performance.

But coaching salespeople to peak performance takes work and brings in no instant money, while woefully ignoring long-term results. What is the policy about salespeople in most companies? Bring them in, burn them out and dispose of them. Hence, high turnover.

The same method that rotten b.a.s.t.a.r.d Stalin used in WW2. He sent out his troops hungry, thirsty, under-armed. Anyone who turned around or hesitated was shot. Most sales forces work this way driven by the sales managers' overarching greed for higher commissions.

In my experience the ingredients for high performance are passion, energy, enthusiasm, excitement, etc. And since most sales managers have become sales managers as a result of being high performing producers, it's only fair to say that the majority of sales managers know no more about leading a sales team than a goat knows about how to make cheese.

Sad? Yes. True? Yes... More often than not.

And as I've mnetioned many times, the main culprit for low performance is the commission structure. It kills teamwork and ambition.

For mor, read... http://www.varjan.com/articles/sales...problems.shtml

Yeah, I'm biased. (And a horrible opinionated European)

Thoughts?

[quote=Bald Dog]But isn't it a worthy objective to thrive for perfection even if we know we can never reach it? We still can improve and reaach some kinf of personal team-wide, and organisational excellence?

Personally I have a pretty low opinion of idiotic sales managers who manage their salespeople by quota. Quota is an effect. What are the causes of reaching or not reaching quota? Emotions.

But managing by quota is easy. It requires no brain. That's good news because most sales managers don't have any anyway (brain I mean). I they had any, they would know that by managing the overall feelings of the sales culture, they can spur their people to higher performance.

But coaching salespeople to peak performance takes work and brings in no instant money, while woefully ignoring long-term results. What is the policy about salespeople in most companies? Bring them in, burn them out and dispose of them. Hence, high turnover.

Therein lies the issue. US companies are run quarter to quarter (some, like GE month to month). In Q4 there are daily pipeline calls. They don't care about 5 years from now, they care about today. I have friends put on 'work plans' after a bad quarter. There's no interest in people development, only shareholder return.