B2B Lead Generation – How to Make the Most of Your Salespeople’s Time.

Posted by JasonB on July 28, 2009

What is the most effective use of your sales resources?  Is it generating B2B leads, closing new prospects or working with existing customers?

 Consider the following: 

• On average, salespeople spend about 20% of their time selling.  The remaining 80% consists of prospecting, servicing existing clients and administrative duties.  This means you’ve got a highly skilled and highly compensated individual spending 20% of their time doing what they do best. 
• To secure 1 new client, the average salesperson usually needs to pursue 100 suspects (potential, yet unqualified targets, a.k.a., cold leads).
• A minimum of 6.7 “touches” are required to maintain “top of mind” awareness with potential customers.
• Key decision makers are frequently unknown…someone must spend time/effort identifying & qualifying each target.

The answer is that your sales resources should focus their time and effort on CLOSING new business and working with existing customers, while a dedicated prospecting resource should focus on identifying, qualifying and verifying leads for your sales team.   Having a dedicated prospecting resource, whether internal our outsourced, can have a dramatic impact on your filling your sales funnel with B2B leads and the amount of business your sales team closes.

Generating qualified B2B leads is a numbers game, as is closing them.  If a salesperson must talk to 100 suspects to generate one new client, then it would follow that to generate 10 new clients, 1000 suspects must be contacted.   Assuming it may take 2-5 calls to reach that prospect, you’re looking at thousands of calls to secure 10 new clients.   That is a lot of activity.  In fact, it can be a full time job. 

A resource focused solely on prospecting can manage that number of prospects, if they have a structured process.  Their time needs to be spent on 3 primary activities:  Identifying/cleansing prospects, making an initial introduction, and nurturing qualified leads.   Any time a prospect shows interest throughout this process, they can be passed to the sales team to follow up.  

This division-of-duties will:

1. Increase the amount of leads in your sales funnel
2. Allow your salespeople to focus their skills on legitimate opportunities
3. Ensure leads that are a fit for your service, but not ready to talk, continue to receive communication until they enter the buying cycle.

Assuming your sales closing rate remains constant, calculate how many new opportunities your prospecting resource must generate to pay for themselves.  If you have a process in place whereby your prospecting resource can achieve those numbers, you have the makings of a powerful new-business acquisition team. 

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