This is your year. You have a strategic marketing plan in place. You hired an awesome sales team. You have an awesome product. What more can you ask for? You will have an awesome year. You will meet your goals. You’re confident. Your team is confident. You’re fired up and ready to go!

And now it’s the last quarter of the year…. How did that work out for you? Did you make your sales goal? Did you hit your revenue goals? What went wrong? Why did so many leads fail? How did a good prospect turn into a dead lead?

We talk to companies everyday with the same fiery optimism in the beginning but for some reason it didn’t work out as plan. With the spooky season ending we thought this would be a good time to talk about walking dead leads.

What is a Walking Dead Lead?

  1. A lead you’ve been chasing for months and not making any progress.
  2. A lead that has legs but is not going anywhere.
  3. A lead that started off well but has fizzled out over time.

It’s extremely important to first review your internal processes.

Ask yourself:

  1. How do leads flow through your sales and marketing ecosystem now?
  2. Who is responsible for the types of lead generation campaigns that you are running?
  3. Where do your leads come from? Internal telemarking, do you buy lists, marketing companies etc.
  4. List all the sources. For example, Inbound Marketing, Landing Pages, Webinars, Telemarketing, Tradeshows, Direct Mail etc.
  5. How are the leads transmitted from marketing to sales? CRM, Excel, email, etc.
  6. Who at your company is in charge of this process?
  7. How do you measure lead follow-up?
  8. How do you track from sales lead to closed sales?
  9. How consistent is your sales team with it’s messaging in the sales process?
  10. Do your sales reps have appropriate tools and collateral to properly advance a lead towards the point of sale?

How do you recognize if a lead is dead?

You need to first recognize when a lead is dead. Salespeople have a habit of chasing bad sales lead thinking they can turn them into a hot lead. There are several signs you should pay close attention to.

  • You talked to a contact and had a really good conversation and you’re almost certain this will move to the next step. Now, all of a sudden phone calls are not returned in a timely fashion. You’ve left messages and he’s just not getting back to you within 48 hours to at least acknowledge that you called; you’ve probably got a dying or dead lead.
  • You call the contact over a course of a few weeks and the status has not changed. If the status of your prospect is not improving , either because you’ve done nothing to improve it, or the buyer isn’t interested in moving forward, you’ve got a dead lead…or at least a lead that’s not paying attention.
  • And the most obvious of all, no next step is scheduled. If you can’t nail down a face-to-face appointment, your lead is most likely dead.

Here at the Frantz group we can help you look at what you’re doing internally and make recommendations based on the results. The good news is you have time yet this year to assess things and make recommended changes for 2015. What are you waiting for?