By Jonathan Farrington, The JF Consultancy

There are so many sources of leads that the process of generating leads can sometimes cause sales people to feel overwhelmed when tackling this vital sales activity.

Every organisation is unique and can employ a variety of approaches in their quest to attract the attention of their target market. (This will become even clearer once you have created your Ideal Customer Profile). That’s why it can be extremely useful to invest some time analysing which lead generation initiatives worked well in the past, why they worked well and what improvements can be made to optimise their effectiveness.

There are three areas that you may want to consider that can help evaluate different lead generation initiatives with greater objectively.

1. Effectiveness – which lead generation activities produced the most quality leads?

2. Cost – what were the tangible costs for each lead generation initiative?

3. Time – how much time did it take to initiate and follow-up on each initiative?

1. Effectiveness
● What number of leads were generated?
● How many of these leads became qualified prospects?
● What business was generated from these leads?
● What is the projected probability of business generated from these leads for the next 12 months?

2. Cost
● How much did this lead generation initiative cost?
● Using the number of actual leads generated, what was the cost per lead?
● What profit contribution was made from leads generated over a 12 month period? (Gross margin from sales, minus the cost of the initiative.)

3. Time
● How much time did salespeople invest in following up on these leads?
● How much time did they spend on leads that did not become qualified prospects?
● What was the cost of salespeople’s time spent on this lead generation initiative?

Whatever lead generation initiatives your organisation chooses to implement, sales people can leverage these opportunities if they are able to provide timely follow up within five working days from receiving each lead, because people’s interest cools off after time and many will forget that they even registered their details with your organisation.

Results from direct marketing can be transformed by combing this approach with a phone-based strategy. If your sales team are currently sending out letters and literature to generate leads, this approach can be much more effective if the letter/literature is followed up with a phone call within three days.