Okay okay we’ve all heard it or said it, “these leads are trash”. We’ve also heard that great sales people will close deals regardless of leads.
When I was getting started in sales, there was a large group of college graduates in our office getting started on the phones. There were different “verticals” that were assigned randomly (construction, health care, finance, etc) and the leads assigned would reflect that.
I had a buddy of mine get the worst vertical you can imagine....farming. We were slinging payroll at the time and my buddy was great at building rapport and had done very well at his previous sales gig.
My buddy would make 100+ calls a day and was met with 80% bad numbers, 10% voicemail, 5% they had died or went out of business and the rest was actual farmers. Over the course of 6 months I watched my buddy struggle so badly trying to sell payroll to farmers that he was put into a PIP and eventually let go. The worst part is they wouldn’t let him change his vertical.
So the question is, at what point do you do you make a serious case for better leads when what you’re working with is absolute trash?
53 comments