“The only question is whether you’re going to do it today or tomorrow. If you keep saying you’re going to do it tomorrow, you’ll never do it. You have to get on it today."
- Warren Buffet
I got a question last week after my post about finding contacts from email. The person asking said the information was great but who should own lead generation, marketing or sales? My response was pretty simple:
You do what you do to succeed. Success is your job.
Whenever I hear arguments about who owns what, I am mystified. Some deflect and will say “not my job”. Others will cast blame and complain that others are “not pulling their weight”. Then there is the silent majority, afraid to say anything which will direct the spotlight in their direction.
If you are in sales (and I am guessing that would be most of you reading this), they you have a quota and are responsible for bringing in revenue. That depends on getting enough leads so that there are enough opportunities that lead to paying customers.
When it comes to leads, most people put that in the realm of marketing. That is totally sensible as branding, events, public relations, and broad outreach are all in their wheelhouse. The output of these activities are leads that are cleansed, assessed, and forwarded to a team to qualify into sales leads. Sometimes the team that qualifies marketing leads (Sales Development) is also part of marketing.
Now maybe that is working well in your company. Perhaps you are drowning in high quality leads and that business is so good that you do not even have time to follow up on all the activity. But if you believe that, I also have some nice beachfront property to sell you in the middle of the Gobi Desert.
The single most common complaint I hear from salespeople is not having enough leads. Way back when the Enterprise Sales Forum did some surveys, lack of quality leads was cited by over 79% of respondents as the biggest challenge. The next highest response was bad managers cited by 52%.
So ask me again who owns lead gen?
Sales used to be a full-stack kind of job. I am borrowing the term from the software developer world, but essentially I mean a sales rep that can prospect, manage the sale, close the business, and help the customer post-sale to ensure a successful outcome. As you can imagine, that is a huge amount of effort and time, which takes away from doing more selling and closing.
The solution that many organizations came up with was to separate the sales role into more discrete functions. Nowadays, especially in SaaS companies, sales development reps (SDR’s) do prospecting and qualifying, account executives manage and close the opportunities, and customer success and account managers support the post-sale.
With more groups, there is more complexity, communications, and hand-offs required. Because these groups are often in different budget reporting lines, incentives are not always aligned. Usually there will be some amount of infighting and politicking that goes on to justify, blame other, or obscure truth.
If your objective as a salesperson is to close deals however, none of this internal rat’s nest is helping you. Essentially your success is dependent on marketing generating leads and SDR’s to sift the good leads from the bad. Hopefully, that works well enough and you can eek out an existence that gets you at or close to your quota waiting for leads that come tomorrow.
As Warren Buffet says however, it is better to get on it today and seize the opportunity. Sales, more than any other profession, is about making things happen. Without action, there is no revenue.
The core job of sales therefore is prospecting. It really does pay to be proactive and research your territory and accounts. You need to be reaching out and connecting to key influencers and decision makers in organizations you are targeting. Seek out networking opportunities, whether in-person or virtual, to strike up conversations with relevant professionals.
Right now, much of that networking is gone, but it is not lost. While the in-person events are not happening during the lingering pandemic, there are other means of networking in a virtual world:
Using LinkedIn – Most of the people you want to connect with will be there. Word of caution here is that everyone is doing this and it is causing a backlash. If you take the approach I outline in my post on LinkedIn prospecting, then you will differentiate your approach and generate better results in your LinkedIn relationship building strategy.
Using Other Social Sites – If the people you sell to are elsewhere (due to industry or country preferences), then use the same approach as I outline for LinkedIn but on these other sites and adjust to fit the connection strategy of those sites.
Draw People to You – How can you build inbound? You do this through creating relevant content. This is long-tail, but if you remain dedicated, the strategy yields incredible results. I launched a newsletter and blog called DEVBIZOPS when I was at Stack Overflow. It is still going strong with over 150 post and over 3,500 subscribers that has become an excellent source for leads and referrals.
Host Virtual Networking Sessions – Setting up chats with relevant industry people can build instant trust and credibility. I did a session over Zoom with four engineering leaders. It was a huge success with over 100 viewers and built trust with these leaders. I now use Run the World for this and it is an awesome tool for hosting interactive networking sessions (you can sign up for a free account).
There are plenty of other prospecting ideas if you are creative. You are not just doing prospecting and generating leads though. You are also building trust, credibility and rapport with people you are selling to in the industry you sell into. You are taking the tactical approach and elevating it to becoming a core part of your strategy.
I cannot emphasize this enough though, do not only rely on others to generate leads for you. Be hungry and do your own hunting. Be willing to be experimental as well in finding unique ways to draw in leads. Your success in reaching and smashing your quota depends on having the right leads and enough of them. Isn’t that enough to spur you into action?
Happy Prospecting!
Mark Birch, Founder of Enterprise Sales Forum
If you found this essay personally helpful, I encourage you to sign up for this newsletter where I share thoughts on the state of B2B sales, practical tips for improving your sales acumen, and upcoming sales talks across the global Enterprise Sales Forum community.