Jason M. Lemkin discusses the difference between lead-rich and lead-poor sales environments, arguing that while lead-rich settings generally reduce churn and help reps hit quota, too many leads can cause neglect of lower-priority prospects. He defines lead-rich as having more than enough leads per rep and lead-poor as having too few to hit quota. Key recommendations: limit a typical inside-sales rep to around 50 good leads per month, implement an SLA to reassign unhandled leads, and consider a dedicated "cleanup" rep to work neglected leads.
Questions this video answers
Jason M. Lemkin.
August 11, 2021.
About 50 good/decents leads per month.
Put an SLA in place so unhandled leads are routed to another rep; consider a dedicated "cleanup" rep to work those leads.
Chapters
One topic we've only briefly touched on on Saster that deserves a lot more ink and time is lead rich versus lead poor environments. Because I think this is one of the most important ways to get more revenue out of all the good hard work you're doing. Getting leads into the company and getting this right is a mistake, actually. I continue to make as life goes on and I work on and with more and more companies. And what's the difference? Well, roughly, a lead rich environment is when there are sufficient leads to each rep that they don't really follow up with all of them. And a poor environment is where there's barely enough leads, maybe not even enough leads for a rep to make quota. And I traditionally have liked lead rich environments because I love an environment where every salesperson can make or exceed quota. I love the energy there. It creates low churn and low turnover. People recruit their friends when there's enough leads to go around, everyone starts to tap into their network and say, your startup is a hot place to work. And that plus a great VP of sales is how you really build an amazing sales team. And the great sales teams because of this have almost no churn whatsoever. But if you take it too far, reps just don't follow up with anything but the best leads. And it happens again and again. You'll go in and you'll find out if reps have too many leads, that half the leads are more they barely even touch, or they're not worth their time, or they push too hard, or they just want to put them into a cadence and not follow up. So what's the right answer? I'll come up with two suggestions. For a typical inside sales team, it's hard for a rep to follow up with too many more than 50 good, decent leads a month. You can score them how you want, but there's only so many demos a day. You can do so much follow up. And if you give reps too many more than 50, it's possible it's too many. Number two, put an SLA in place. So if reps don't follow up with leads, they're routed to another rep. And even consider having a dedicated rep, a cleanup rep, who her or his only job is to close the leads that the other reps don't follow up with. Put that SLA in place and you'll find much more momentum in your sales team.
