Six Steps to New Sales via Strategic Lead Generation

You're a hot new growth company with a great product, service, or technology—and you need customers. Or maybe you're an established company that's attempting to launch new products or open new markets: You've done your research and you've even managed to land a few customers, validating your go-to-market strategy.

Now the stakeholders and investors are clamoring for more deals. You've hired salespeople and they've managed to open up a few new opportunities. But the pipeline doesn't measure up to the company's revenue and budget objectives, and the cost of rapidly expanding your sales staff is prohibitive.

What do you do?

If you're like some companies, you lean on the sales force, ratcheting up the pressure to develop more opportunities, first trying the carrot and then the stick. Productivity falls off, the good salespeople leave, and the pipeline gets stuck in neutral.

Marketing then hires a telemarketing firm, which guarantees "500 new leads." The leads come pouring in and the sales team starts calling. To everyone's dismay, many of the companies contacted are outside your target market. The 500 "leads" are now more like 25.

Sound familiar?

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Brian Berlin is Sr. Consultant with Mansfield Sales Partners (www.mansfieldsp.com). He has built and managed sales teams in direct, OEM, distribution, and reseller models in the IT software and hardware channels.