Well, almost everybody. One international networking group refers to leads as "a four letter word," strongly suggesting that referrals are far better than leads.

But of course everybody else just wants more leads.

That's why sales people hungrily gather cards at a trade show.

And then of course the cards are stuffed in a drawer, left there for six months and finally thrown away.

Marketing people want more leads. They buy up databases left and right, "normalize" them, "dedupe" them, study them, upload them into the company CRM system, and then wonder why nobody is using them.

80 to 90% of all leads are never acted on.

They're simply stuffed away inside the company CRM system and then ignored by both sales and marketing. They just fall on the floor dead, with nobody paying attention to them and the money spent to capture these leads flowing down the drain!

Here's the problem - nobody is accountable for good leads. Marketing is tasked with delivering more leads...after all, that's what the sales organization is demanding. And so marketing provides more leads. Unqualified leads. Dead leads.

Sales people, on the other hand, are sick and tired of getting these lousy unqualified, dead leads. What a waste of time! No wonder they ignore those leads.

Where are the good leads?

Here's a tip - you won't find good leads in a database. It takes work to convert an entry in a database or an inquiry from a webform to a qualified lead that's worth handing over to a highly trained (and paid!) sales person. It takes work to hold onto and to develop the lead before it's handed off to sales.

For B2B sales, marketing should develop a lead for at least six months before passing the lead to sales. Otherwise, the lead simply isn't ready to have the initial sales conversation.

It takes work to track the value of a given source of leads and to follow the progress of those leads through the sales process. It takes work to determine the lifetime customer value of a lead from a given source. It takes work for the sales organization to provide useful feedback to the marketing organization so that they can deliver better leads.

It takes work to get sales and marketing to play nicely...to get them both working toward the same goal of building company revenue, rather than the high-impact aerobic exercise of finger pointing.

Want good leads? Get to work!

Thanks for reading!