Who Needs Leads?

Who Needs Leads?

By Mark Helfen


On Monday June 8, David Tabor will speak to the SDForum Marketing SIG on the topic "Who Needs Leads?"

Despite the provocative title, Tabor is not suggesting that you throw out all of your sales leads. But he will explain how they need to be looked at in a different way. According to Tabor, 95 percent of your leads are worthless, and the job of sales and marketing is to find those that have value and use them start a sales cycle.

Tabor is the CEO of SalesLogistix, and the author of a new book, Salesforce.com Secrets of Success. His consulting firm specializes in "re-implementing broken Salesforce.com implementations."

"We don't do initial implementations," said Tabor. "People don't want to listen until they've tried it and goofed it up." Their thinking needs to change to reflect new ideas of how a sales force needs to in today's environment.

Sales management is too focused on getting more leads. They are very low value, a "low grade ore," in Tabor's words. Marketing management gets incented to just generate more numbers, and "leads will never make a sales guy's numbers." Its how you manage them to get sales cycles started.

Since most of the people attending the marketing SIG are primarily focused on marketing, I asked what benefit they would get from the presentation. Tabor has been doing technology marketing for more then 20 years, and has been marketing VP at a number of technology companies. He has experience in both the sales and marketing roles.

Marketing objectives change under Tabor's methodology.

"The right way to generate more business is for sales and marketing to both work on exactly the same measurement - revenue, not leads." Sales and marketing must act as one cycle. Just generating more leads doesn't get results.

Tabor will bring copies of his new book to the meeting.

You can find the meeting location and details on the SDForum web site, here.

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Mark Helfen is a journalist, writer, and marketing consultant. He can be reached at mhelfen@wordpixel.com
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