You Call These Leads?

Author: Ryan Lallier - CEO, RepTivity @RLallier

People who downloaded a white paper:

Why do marketing departments include white paper downloads in their lead generation metrics? These are not leads. In fact, they are the farthest thing from leads. People who download white papers are not looking to buy a thing. When someone wants to buy something, they request information on the product or service. If your goal is to frustrate your sales team, continue to fill their lead queue with useless white paper downloads that do nothing but waste everyone's time.

People who let you scan their badges at a trade show:

Wow, thanks for the "hot" lead! NOT! People who let you scan their badges at trade shows are not buyers. They are not decision makers. They are "chotchkie" shoppers who will waste your time. Sorry for the reality check but, do us all a favor and don't send your sales reps the "scanned badges list" from the last trade show. And, absolutely do not upload this list into your CRM or lead queue. Bad data in equals bad data out.  Everyone knows any "hot" lead from a trade show has already been claimed by the sales rep who manned the booth.

People who attended a webinar where your company was a sponsor:

Don't you just love webinar leads? Especially those who attended a webinar on an industry topic and not for your specific product or service. Isn't it great when marketing loads up a bunch of "webinar leads" in your queue with campaign codes that read: "webinar sponsor" or "tech target webinar?"

In summary, it amazes me how many budget dollars are allocated to marketing departments. Furthermore, it shocks me how much money they waste on shitty lead gen activities like sponsoring webinars, scanning badges, giving out junk at trade shows and producing white papers. All of which cost companies thousands of dollars and produce ZERO ROI.  

This leads me to my final question: why don't executives increase the lead gen budget for sales teams and give sales leaders the power to choose which lead programs are best for producing new business revenue? Last time I checked, the sales team is responsible for bringing in the revenue.