Sales Intelligence on Inbound Leads: Exponential Productivity Gains

Calling Every Inbound Lead is a Huge Productivity Buster

Inside sales teams waste a tremendous amount of time calling on leads generated by the website, trade shows and other channels. Even once the lead has provided his or her contact information to the company, it is far from certain that the person wants to hear from a sales rep or even has the authority to make a purchase.

This common situation is a big source of very low sales rep productivity – and low conversation rates.

Discover the Person Behind the Lead

Before calling a lead, sales reps try to discover as much as possible about the person he or she is calling. Some of the most important facts to learn include:

• What are the person’s specific job functions?
• What relevant products and technologies does the person use at work?
• What conferences and other professional activities has the person recently been involved in?
• Are there other people in the company who may be even more relevant to call?

If the answers to these questions indicate a promising phone call, then the sales rep is on the right track and equipped with some valuable door-opening knowledge. If not, a great idea might be to find one or more truly likely buyers in the account (i.e., decision makers who likely feel the pain your product or service is solving). We call this “lead expansion.”

Lead Expansion: Uncover the Most Likely Buyers in an Organization

In more than 50% of cases, the company from which someone made contact with a business will be a relevant target account. However, the particular person who made that contact is frequently not the most relevant person for a sales rep to call.

It is important to uncover who the truly relevant people are at every organization from which a sales rep has received a lead. Researching other people in the organization in order to discover their roles, job functions, technical areas and so forth will often highlight the best person or people to contact.

Really Want to Save Time? Automate!

Nothing that I’ve written here is news to savvy sales reps, who already use all the tools at their disposal to learn about every inbound lead before making their calls. However, the time involved in this research saps productivity in a really big way.

This is one of the main reasons we created Leadspace: our software automatically aggregates detailed sales intelligence on inbound leads (displayed within the Salesforce Lead, Contact or Account page itself) – and also uncovers all of the most likely buyers for the company’s particular product in that same account – within just seconds. No inside sales rep who uses it will ever go back to living without it!