Looking to grow your business, let's look at the quantity and quality of your leads
When the day arrives that you want to sell your business, the acquirer will place a meaningful portion of their purchase price on the future potential they believe your company has. During due diligence, you’ll want to be able to prove to them that your company is rich with both quantity and quality of leads and that your team also has an excellent discipline for managing them.
To enhance the leads your company generates and the management of them, here are some great questions to sit with your sales & marketing team to discuss:
- Do we track quantity of leads we get as well as the quality of them? You don’t want to confuse quantity of leads coming into your business with quality…quality means they are truly leads from your target customers.
- Do we track quality of leads in terms of how many we receive that are for our target customer versus leads from customers that don’t fit our target?
- Do we have an effective tracking of our win/loss rate related to the leads? And do we track our win/loss rate for new customers versus repeat customers as the repeat win rate should be much higher?
- Do we effectively triage leads when they first come in so we apply the appropriate focus on the larger more strategic opportunities?
- Do we track our leads through the various stages and do we have metrics telling us what the conversion rate is at each? Leads start as Suspects, then move to Contacts, then move to Prospects and then move to Customers. Do we track our leads through these various stages to know when the majority drop out?
- Are we tracking only the leads that we have outstanding proposals/quotes for or are we also keeping tracking of target markets/customers we don’t yet do business with but one day we want to? In other words, your sales opportunity pipeline should not just include the leads your sales team is working on but it should also include markets/target customers you could work one day when you have the resources to do so.
- How effectively and timely are we following up on leads – do we know each day/week how many leads came in that we still haven’t gotten around to following up on?
- Which of our lead sources (internet advertising, networking, cold calling, magazine/tv, etc.) if generating the highest quality of leads?
We often hear new clients talk about needing more leads to support their sales targets. After detailed discussion and analysis we often find the real problem isn’t the quantity but it’s the quality of the leads (meaning leads are coming but not from the target customer) and/or the company has a poor lead management system and process which means the company is paying to get leads but not managing them well.
Give your future yourself a gift today by evaluating the quantity and quality of leads your company is generating and how effectively your company is managing them. Making improvements could enable your sales and help excite a future acquirer in seeing this discipline embedded in your business.
