In this interview, Peter Winick talks with sales author and Zero Time Selling founder Andy Paul about the pervasive problem of sales leads being ignored. Paul cites industry statistics that roughly half of all leads are never followed up, costing companies billions in wasted marketing spend. He attributes the neglect to salespeople’s insecurity and a bias toward leads they generate themselves. To counter this, Paul proposes treating every lead like a scratch‑off lottery ticket and committing to a 100% follow‑up rate, ideally within 30 minutes of receipt. He demonstrates the impact with simple math: doubling the follow‑up rate from 50% to 100% can double sales even if conversion rates stay constant. A real‑world case study shows a mid‑size firm that began responding to all leads within 30 minutes and doubled its revenue over three years without adding staff. The conversation emphasizes that consistent, rapid follow‑up is the easiest and most effective way to grow sales.
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Peter Winick here today with Andy Paul. Andy is the founder of Zero Time Selling and the author of Zero Time Selling, one of 2011's top 3 sales and marketing books. So Andy, leads, leads, leads. Leads are the lifeblood of every sales organization.
Yes.
Leads are the source of contention Between almost every sales and marketing team.
Yes.
You know, from what you're saying is, is they're dying on the vine. How could that, you know—
Yeah.
Is it Glengarry Glen Ross? I always get the shit leads. It's like, what's— is that every sales guy's mantra? What's up with leads?
I think you're— I think there's an element of truth in that. So, right. So the statistics are, you see a range of statistics. And I, the most extreme one I saw was at a conference recently. I forget who gave it as I think Gerhardt from SellingPower gave this, that 81% of sales leads are never followed up. And I've seen it as low as 30%. But somewhere in that range, so I like to use 50% as my number.
Half.
Let's just say half of sales leads are never followed up.
So everything we see from a marketing perspective that's about lead generation, half that money's going down the toilet.
Half that money, the billions of dollars that people spend on search engine marketing and all social media, lead generation, brand building, right down the drain. Because they're not being followed up. And so the question is, to your point, why are they not being followed up? And I think part of it is, yes, there's this built-in skepticism on the part of salespeople that the only good lead is a lead I develop myself. And I see this. I go on discussion groups on LinkedIn and read through those discussions, and there's these 20, 30-year vets, you know, sales vets, they're sales pros with big titles and seem some sort of accomplishment, and they're all saying, yeah, I only trust the leads I develop myself, which to me is just Literally insane.
So, but that sounds like an insecurity, or why would you only trust the ones you develop? Why, if I'm a sales professional, the more leads the better. I don't have an ego.
I never did either. I mean, to me, you know, getting a lead was like getting a key to an ATM machine, right? I mean, somebody was reaching out, they wanted to talk to me, why wouldn't I talk to them? And I made a habit from the beginning of my career never to prejudge a lead. And so, yeah, are all leads great? Not necessarily, but what happens is people eyeball them. That's where a lot of leads go, yeah, as you said, that's a horrible lead, that's a bad lead, I'm not gonna follow up, blah blah blah.
Everybody from New Jersey doesn't buy.
Yeah, no one from New Jersey buys, that's a bad lead. And that's ridiculous, right?
So what do you do?
So what you do is you treat every lead like a lottery ticket.
Okay?
And so I say that you have to follow up on 100% of all leads. And again, treat them like a scratch-off lottery ticket. You don't know, it's an opportunity to win, you don't know what you get until you scratch the wax off the front. And I like to give the statistic when I give speeches is that there's $24 billion worth of scratch-off lottery tickets sold in the United States every year. And are you trying to tell me that $12 billion worth of these are sitting unscratched in a glove compartment or on somebody's desk at home?
They're all scratched off.
They're all scratched off. They don't get scratched off till they get— they can hardly get to the car before they scratch them off, right?
Right, right, right.
So a sales lead is the exact same thing. It's an opportunity to win. It's an opportunity to win big. And yeah, not everyone is going to be a prospect. That's fine. But you don't know till you go talk to them. And even the ones that you eyeball and say, ah, that's not for us, I throughout my career have always called those people and I'll talk to them. I'll qualify them. I'll confirm that they're not the opportunity that we thought they were. But then I ask them, like any good salesperson, well, now that you know a little bit about my product, Mr. Prospect, can you think of somebody that you might know that could use this product or service at another company? And I can't begin to tell you how many orders I got throughout my career just by that simple question of following up. That I asked of somebody that wasn't a qualified prospect for my product or service.
That's amazing. So as basic as it seems, taking the average organization from 50%— 100% is ideal, perfect would be mind-blowing— but if you can set targets and work with them to get them from 50% to 60% to 70% to 80%, how does that impact your clients?
Well, what happens is it's the easiest way to grow sales that exists. So if you're a small, mid-sized business and you've got these leads coming in and you're not following up on them, let's just play Let's play a simple math game here. Assume you're converting 1% of your leads into orders. Now there's some statistics around that that think that's about right for most companies. I think it's a little low, but let's take 1%. And let's say today that you're only following up 50% of your leads. So what happens if a month from now we've got you on a program that you're following up 100% of your leads and you have the same conversion rate? What happened to your sales?
2%. You doubled them.
You doubled your sales, right? So even if your conversion rate is 1%, Follow up 100% of your leads, you're gonna get more orders. So I'd like to give an example of one client I had that wasn't following up 100% of their leads. We got them to do that, and we got them to follow them up quickly, provide the right information the customer needed, and they got to the point where they were following up all their sales leads within 30 minutes.
30 minutes?
30 minutes, okay? And that's a mid-sized company. They weren't getting thousands of leads per day, but enough that they had a sales team of 6 people inside that could do that. Follow up all the leads within 30 minutes. Within 3 years, their sales had doubled without adding any salespeople, without changing their product mix at all.
So following up on all of them and doing it quickly.
And doing it quickly. That drove a sales increase. Every company can do that. Every company can follow up on 100% of their leads. If you keep your conversion rates the same, the math plays. I mean, I don't always think sales is a number game, but this is one place where the numbers don't lie.
