Sales

How Can You Tell If Your Sales Leads Are Being Exhausted?

May 16, 2012

Any sales manager will recognize the scenario: You’ve uploaded a group of leads and shortly thereafter your reps come to you asking for more. Before going back to the well it’s your job to follow up to determine whether all of your leads are in fact being completely exhausted.

How can you tell if your sales leads are really being exhausted? To find out OpenView Venture Partners Senior Associate Devon McDonald suggests tracking the following four areas in your CRM:

  1. Open Leads: Are your reps asking for more leads when there are still leads in open status? Those open status leads could be worth revisiting.
  2. Contacting Leads: These are leads  that have had a touch point made against them – a call or an email, for example. Has a follow-up been scheduled? If not, these leads may may slip through cracks.
  3. Qualified Leads: These leads should be your highest priority. They’re interested, but not quite ready for the next step. It is absolutely crucial that follow-up tasks and touch points be scheduled in order to assure these aren’t left to go cold.
  4. Unqualified Leads: Sometimes lead qualifiers can be too quick to list leads in this category. Make sure to add field in your CRM for reps to include why they are listing the leads in this category. As the manager you should review these leads on a weekly basis.

For more detailed advice on how to determine whether your sales leads are being exhausted, watch the short video. And to read more about successful sales lead qualification, head over to the OpenView Blog for more a series of posts on the subject from Devon.