Just read a fascinating article about lead generation. The premise is simple: the time that sales people spend chasing leads and cold calling is often equivalent to (or in many cases multiples of) any company’s entire marketing budget. It makes sense. Six digit earners should not be prospecting. They should be networking, building relationships, and CLOSING.

I’ve seen this play out with more than one client over the years. An organization is sales-centric, but wants to spend frugally on marketing. On the surface, it makes some sense. Give your sales people the tools to reel in the clients – but walk the fine line and spend as little on branding and marketing as possible (because your sales people will do some of your marketing for you). The problem, however, is that sales people make for expensive marketers. And time spent prospecting is time not spent doing the hard work of nurturing currents for more repeat business and referrals.

If this sounds familiar, check out the article here for more. It’s a valuable read for any sales-oriented company. The author, a well-known B2B marketing guru and blogger, offers four steps to diagnosing if your sales lead generation process is air tight:

1. Measure how much money your sales organization really spends on demand generation.
2. Determine the revenue capacity that would be available if your sales team spent more time working opportunities instead of looking for them.
3. Share these findings with the executive leadership team and propose an experiment in collaboration with sales, finance and your CEO to improve sales’ financial performance: supply a sales team with a sufficient volume of sales-ready leads so that their time spent prospecting is cut in half.
4. Compare the revenue performance of the pilot team with that of their peers.

Enjoy!