230: Leads Are The Lifeblood Of Sales

<p>Marketing plays a key role in generating leads.  They are trying to maximise the accuracy of the segmentation of the data base, to make offers that resonate specifically with different segments.  They are producing content marketing pieces that will spark leads through the SEO route.  Buying ad words to get pay per click activation from buyers, who are searching for your specific good or service is another channel.  Potential buyers raise their hand when they download a white paper or an eBook from the website or leave an inquiry.  However this is never enough from a sales point of view.</p> <p> </p> <p>Salespeople want to fill the top of their funnel of leads.  They know they have certain ratios which will unveil the KAIs or Key Activity Indicators.  If we try to email or phone a certain number of prospects, then we will get a certain amount of replies or contacts.  By tracking how many we make contact with we can get a ratio of our activity relative to our success.  The next stage is converting those contacts into face to face or online meetings.  In Japan, for the vast majority of B2B sales, face to face has been required, especially if you are a potential new supplier.  Online meetings with new clients just pushes the degree of difficulty right up. Regardless, there will be a ratio of success here counting appointments achieved against attempts to get a meeting.  Then obviously we can count how many of those meetings led to a deal being done.  That is another key ration. </p> <p> </p> <p>We can calculate the value of all the deals we did against the number of deals and work out our average sale value.  If our average deal size is 1 million yen and our annual sales target is 30 million yen then we can work backwards and nominate how many original client contacts we need to be making to generate our target number.  The problem is very few sales people have any clue what their KAI is and they just ramble around thoroughout the year.</p> <p> </p> <p>When we know our KAI we know we need to put aside what market