How cool it is to get together with the colleagues on the call very fast, discuss not only the weather, but real lead generation and real financial help for our army.
In a short article I will sum up the main conclusions I drew about our meeting.
The first thing everyone wanted to discuss was Lead generation, of course. There is nothing else in sales nature:) All other questions fade into the background, especially about team management. Well, it's understandable: no fruit from Lead generation – no one to manage and nothing to eat. Here we are again:) Our conversation brought up one obdurate problem. These days such a trend has formed in many of our IT companies – to mindlessly send linkedin-one-template-invitations instead of complex Lead generation and then wait for good news from the one who would eventually respond. That's all. This is where the journey and the management ends. It is clear that everyone starts here, but it is worse when they finish with the same.
Finally, everyone realized that it was expensive and difficult to maintain a contemporary and effective sales department with tuned Lead generation expertise. And, once again, the case does not end simply with the purchase of the tool a la Expandi or LinkedIn Helper 2. There also should be a complex process of qualification, data management, reporting, integrations and search for new conversions. As it turned out, for some companies it was important to develop this internally, for the rest it was easier to outsource this process to lead generation and not to rack their brains searching specialists and continuous tuning for the department.
Most of them have calculated their conversions and concluded that 1 SQL (the lead that has passed the BANT) costed the company $5000-7000. And the Leads in the MQL status were about $1500. The main problem for all is qualification. They hardly sweat over the spam approach trying to gain a lead response. So, you and your team have spent this money to make at least some templates, set up tools, launch, pay salaries to all lead generators and sales reps and get "Yesss! The first answer!". Further, the main expenses were at the most difficult stage–the qualification of answers and the organization of master responses to Leads. But for half of people, the constructed qualification process is a hardly familiar format of interaction.
It is more convenient for the most part that the qualification is being held by the lead generator or the sales rep personally. The founders understand that it's not perfect, but universal, so why spend more, right? No! Because when you look at the result, there is "zero"– and the general conclusion: lead generation does not work. Well, lead generation is the first half trouble, the second half is the analysis of the results. Most make an analysis based on general feelings: a lot of answers / few answers. And only a few make division into the "hotness" of leads, overviews of conversions step by step, profiles, campaigns, etc. And this is a real problem: lack of control, lack of understanding which campaign worked better or worse, which profiles or email accounts worked better than others. Emptiness and vacuum. But there is a quick response–spam approach and vacuum estimation of results–our metropolitan lead gen, controlled by many IT companies.
Salaries for sales and lead generators have already ceased to surprise with their growth. They are growing constantly. Average lead generator rate is $1000 and the sales rep rate is $2000 now. Most IT companies are willing to pay $3000-7000 to Heads of Department, depending on the size and the complexity of the department. On average, starting from 2021, salaries have increased by 20%, based on our Sales Label human resources department requests.
Not everyone, but the majority has plans to bring knowledge from their heads, notebooks or messy Google documents to effective digital systems that help in work, starting from peek at, ending with planning. Joint collaboration on processes and tasks proves effectiveness. It's not a secret that most companies do not know how to set goals, monitor them and analyze the results. Of course, there are significant achievements in every department but no entire view of who and where works best or worst.
And still companies face problems in attracting experienced colleagues. Some people think that the issue is in the company's brand, others do not want to overpay for steepness, and the third category is willing to overpay for everything but can not complete the maze about who is the star of their sales department. In general, they are rowing in an empty boat hoping to find the right guys.
Surprisingly, most of them still explain their sales growth with SEO traffic. I laugh, twist a finger at a temple and always clarify how much money they had wasted for SEO specialists who have made keywords promotion through the best python development company in Ukraine. It is clear that this is one of the ways that works with a competent approach when it comes to quality, not quantity. But what a nightmare it is to bet on it and spend huge amounts of money)
In general, summing up–there's nothing new. Probably, it is more surprising that nothing changes from year to year. Company owners still gain their experience through losing the customers, making recruitment mistakes and inflated expectations from planned tasks and strategies. Yet it was good to discover that many people already know what "CRM" and "SQL" is.
Gain the experience! We will win!