LET ME START BY ASKING if your company needs to buy sales leads in order to make sales? Isn’t making sales what sales people do? Without a Business Development Team aka Product Development Specialist who works in conjunction with a Marketing Department to help the sales staff bring to bring your product or service to the buying public the salesman is handcuffed by his own company whose job it is to make sure he has all the necessary tools to go out there and drive business forward.
In the absence of Business Development/Product Development Specialist in conjunction with Marketing Department the/your sales people are running around knocking on doors while also making upwards of close to 100 cold calls per day still with no tangible results to show. Frustration begins to boil over like a tea pot filled to them brim with water sitting a burner that has too high of a light under it.
There are companies who exist by supplying sales metric information (leads) to those companies that sorely need them. Using data in addition to their own sales staff creating a list of prospects who potentially need or want your product or service. They work with their client (the company that need the leads) by developing a carefully zoned in target market.
Having a steady diet of prospects to “pitch” will undoubtedly help starving sales people but is that enough? Your competitors already have a leg or two up on you in terms of new offerings they have already rolled out. It would behoove the sales person to get a hold of whatever information he can about this hot new product on the market and come out with an improved version with more aggressive pricing modules. Everybody wants to pay less and get more. This is your hook to reel in those type of potential customers or who may be a disenchanted bargain hunter who is looking for a “better deal.”
The problem with these leads or the companies that produce them is that the same list is being circulated all over the place effectively waiting for your sales person to put his foot into the mouse trap that has been camouflaged for them by angry prospects who have been pitched by everybody under the sun that does what you do. The list is for intensive-purposes is so stale it has reached the point o f growing white moldy spots all over it. Few list companies will not oblige by sending you yet another beaten to death list under the pretense this is a fresh list that nobody else has. Poppycock! That new list has already been around the block several times over.
Your company still has glaring need for leads but has sullenly concluded these lists where not the answer for you but the list company turned a healthy profit at your expense. So where do you go from here? Roll-up lists of the rosters from some of your competitors are more cost effective plus they work well. The only drawback is that in order to avoid anti-trust violations you need an independent solicitor to bring some of their people (customers and employees) under your umbrella.
To digress for a moment it is a sad state of affairs if your company is wasting precious business capital on what amounts to high quality bird cage liner, cat litter box liner while also serving as a very effective tool to clean up after your dog with the purchase of these lists. Budgets can be strained to the point where building a high-powered sales team is not possible but that is not to say you cannot come out on top.
In sports you will often hear a player whose team has just lost a critical game say “they wanted it more than we did.” Wanting it more means you will invest your capital wisely into new resources. Savvy IT people (don’t let them near a prospect or you will live to regret it) can often customer design a system that is exclusively your own.
Lists are an admission that you can’t do what is necessary in order to succeed so you decide to try the easy way out by investing in failed methods of the past. During my years in the mortgage business as well as during my tenure as a recruiter I found places (supermarket billboards, railroad stations and alike) to put up flyers while doing an event during the time when a food demonstrator is there. People flock to you.
Using your brain trust you can build a following with putting a drain on your resources. You go where your competition doesn’t go. The crazier your low budget (if it comes to that) schemes are the better chance they will work.
Anybody and everybody in all aspects of your personal life can be a prospect or lead you to a few. Talk to people. Be it on the train, bus or street you have to talk to people. Work in the same manner as the politicians do when they are running for office which is to say get your name out there!
Does your company need to buy sales leads in order to make sales? In my opinion that is based on my experiences the answer is an emphatic NO!
