Often the employees of a B2B lead generation company feel over-pressured due to the unrealistic goals that seem unattainable despite their best efforts. There is a feeling that the management of the B2B lead generation company is deliberately setting such high goals to constantly keep them on their toes. However, this is never the case for managements always want their teams to succeed and they have nothing to gain by having such malicious intentions. After all, successful prospecting only paves way for increased sales and enhanced profits.
Faulty projections:
One basic reason for setting unrealistic reasons is that the management of the B2B lead generation company tends to underestimate the sales cycle length, which is the time taken from lead generation to closing the deal. This results in setting up of goals, both for lead generation and sales, quite unattainable leading to frustration among the employees and the management.
Evaluating sales cycles:
Any lead generation organization comes across three types of business leads: cold call leads, in-bound leads and referrals. All three have different cycle lengths due to various factors involved, cold call leads usually have sales cycle lengths twice as long as the other two. The problem arises when the management fails to recognize this basic difference and pools all three together and takes an average for making the sales projections. Since the number of cold call leads outnumbers the other two by a long way for most organizations, this average business gives an impression that a business lead is not progressing anywhere while the reality might be the opposite.
Shutting down a program too early can be detrimental for a B2B lead generation company. Developing a process that accurately forecasts the cold call leads and clearly distinguishing these leads from in-bound leads and referrals is imperative. If you have a process that measures the sales cycle lengths accurately, you have already begun on the right path.