To improve lead quality and eliminate wasted sales time sales managers should address six areas…

1. Clean up the prospect data warehouse. Typically companies maintain lists of leads in multiple places – A CRM or SFA system, an Excel spreadsheet and old databases. Quite often these lists include names that are no longer are qualified, are duplicates or are for products the company no longer sells. The first step in sales opportunity management is to put together a single, clean, de-duplicable database.

2. Enhance the data. In other words, determine whether the names on the list are fully qualified. Anyone who isn’t should be on the list should be removed from the database to an archive.

3. Segment prospects. Next, determine which leads are of interest by breaking them down into segments. For example, if a direct mail piece to 1,000 people received a 5.0% response rate, instead of targeting all 50 names with equal energy, break the 1,000 names into segments with each segment roughly matching company size, revenues, industry, location and so on. Then assess which group gave the most responses. In this way the sales force can prioritise which leads to follow up on first.

4. Qualify and nurture opportunities. Look for the prospects who are ready to buy now and nurturing those who will be ready to buy soon. There’s a general rule that roughly 5.0% of a market is ready to buy at any given point in time. So if the sales cycle is 90 days, 5% of the leads will be ready to buy during the next 90 days, another 5.0% will be ready to buy within 180 days and so on.

5. Educate your salespeople. In most companies there’s a chasm between the group that generates the leads and the group that works the leads. This step aims to plug that hole. When a lead is ready to be handed to a salesperson take time to explain and educate the salesperson about the lead – everything from company information to the lead’s personality, voice tone and how he or she should be approached.

6. Validate your opportunities. Next, figure out what happened to the opportunities that weren’t closed so that the company can determine whether there’s a problem with an individual salesperson, with some aspect of the product, with a territory or something else.

If you follow this process you’ll find you sell more and need fewer salespeople. The reason is that the process takes the burden of extraneous tasks off the shoulders of salespeople and allows them to spend 100.0% of their time doing what they do best – sell!