subject: Lead Generation: Do You Have Too Many Leads? [print this page] Lead Generation: Do You Have Too Many Leads?
The question of having too many qualified leads in your kitty sounds absurd, does it? However, that is the very question that is baffling the lead generation industry at present. How many leads can you consider as enough? Surely, the lead generation companies would ideally say, the more the merrier. But can you tackle all those leads with the manpower that you have?
Sales lead generation always had the highest regard for numbers. The high numbers of qualified leads always pleased the bosses and got kudos for the outbound call center agents. Now, with changing metrics of business, nobody is willing to accept things at face value. Numbers are not the sole criterion of business lead generation. There's more to it than meets the eye. Let's dig deep.
Let's start from social media. Sales lead generation is increasingly using the social media networks to generate leads. The marketing lead generation agents try to network through adding friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. They communicate with the added friends and followers. But you can't touch base with all of them! You have to choose here. There's no point spending your time interacting with friends and followers who are not going to be useful for your business anyway.
There is no doubt that by chasing too many leads here, you are doing more harm than good to your sales lead generation campaign. It's always a wiser idea to nurture a few leads and see them convert to sales than run after too many of them and watch them all grow cold because you just didn't have enough manpower or time to follow up.
If you are considering lead generation through telemarketing, you will have to contend with the number crunching, too. Telemarketing leads can turn cold turkey sooner than you would anticipate. If you saddle your call center agents with too many follow-ups, they will try to push things or just fall short of touching base with everyone. In either case, the sales lead generation is looking down the barrel. It's tough as it is to get those leads.
If they don't convert into sales, they stand as nothing but just wastage of your time. I'm not suggesting here that you cut out the option of covering wider grounds to try out business lead generation. You can do that but when it comes to drawing the net back, make sure you only have the prized catches in your net. Trying to pull in everything would mean that the bigger trout will slip out into the sea you painstakingly pulled them out from.
The trick is to know your apples and place them in appropriate baskets. Rank your leads in order of priority. Work on the weaker links. A major part of lead generation is to know where you need to focus. Concentrate on a selected batch of telemarketing leads or web leads. When you know where to hit on, you can do so without wasting your time or resources. Just make sure that you don't have too many leads on your platter. That makes life tough for lead generation campaigns
