There are times when a well-oiled sales prospecting and lead generation machine can under-deliver – and you may not be aware. But there are easy fixes. Here we explore three cases, and discuss how to overcome these sales management challenges.

1. What to do when your sales reps think good leads are bad Good lead gone forever!

2. Inside sales teams make thousands of calls to prospects, seeking an appointment or a sale, with scrubbed lists with contact names, job title, phone numbers. Sales managers track calls, appointments and sales. The cycle continues when reps deplete their assigned leads and it starts over again.

3. There are times when this well-oiled prospecting machine can under-deliver – and you may not be aware. But there are easy fixes …

4. What can you do in three cases when good leads could be rejected …

5. Testing new markets

6. When looking at sales data, you may find strong traction among companies that don’t fit the best customer profile. (or at least what the rep thinks is the best profile)This traction is usually uncovered by in-depth profiling, micro-segmentation or modeling analysis. These customers may not be among the largest customers, but you find that they purchased numerous units of products that fit specific needs.

7. As an example, say you are selling technology products, and religious institutions are not known as leading technology buyers… … but recently we came across a church buying hundreds of iPads for one of its programs. This is opportunistic entry into a market if other religious institutions have similar programs.

8. What are three steps you can taketo lead your sales reps in this situation?

9. To aid sales calls, share historical product purchase data with reps so they lead with iPads and related iPad cross-sell products instead of laptops, printers or software. Show reps the sales potential of these calls when they may understandably question this. Pull examples to show similar sales to this market and the value of the deals. To help target this new vertical, it is important to match the highest product propensity to the leads in this vertical.

10. Missing information

11. Even when providing a scored list through predictive modeling, some information valued by sales reps for their calls may be missing. ?

12. In one case, sales reps for a technology provider perceived the presence of a website as a surrogate for computer purchases.In our B2B database of 14 million businesses, this field is only available for 22-25% of sales prospect records.In our scored file this info was available for 35% of records --certainly an improvement, but reps were concerned about the two-thirds of leads without this info. ?

13. The lead scoring rated these leads as strong prospects but reps were uncertain about calling them.What can you do if this happens?

14. Have sales reps do a quick Google search on company name and state. The company may have reviews, social media presence, etc. that would otherwise confirm they’re “tech-savvy,” and if there’s a website it will likely turn up.

15. Show cases where leads without this information have progressed through the pipeline and converted successfully.

16. Explain that the process of data collection, while well-defined, is not always perfect. Set up specific steps sales reps can follow to cross-corroborate other fields and deduce the missing information.

17. Prospects heavily skewed

18. Recommendations from predictive modeling may favor market segments that reps do not normally associate with large sales. But the model shows easy smaller sales opportunities exist.

19. One of our projects produced recommendations where the prospect company size varied from 100 employees to as low as 8. Most records were towards the lower end, reflecting the business universe and perhaps implying employee size was not an important predictor of sales. These leads were produced by the scoring algorithm and further fine-tuned as most likely to respond. However, reps were suspicious of the potential of prospects with fewer employees. ?

20. What can you do when sales reps are not completely trusting the sales potential of leads?

21. Provide your sales reps with evidence that shows why these prospects scored high. Share the desirable attributes of these prospects.

22. As another tip, you can use Industry (SIC) distribution, and create “blocks” of leads that contain a mix of company sizes. Provide guidance to your salespeople that x% are expected to convert for each of these “blocks.”

23. A benefit of predictive analytics is the ability to score based on a large number of attributes (500+ variables is not uncommon for our models), reaching beyond the boundaries of even human intuition which no doubt can bring profitable insight. We don’t discount that intuition; rather, predictive analytics should lead you to new sales from new markets. The flip side is that these new markets and new customers may not intuitively look like great sales opportunities at first glance, precisely because they’re new and different …

24. … but acting on the recommendations of the predictive models is needed to break through to faster growth and higher sales. This is where sales managers can mentor reps to see the opportunities ahead. Help sales reps trust the idea of calling upon these new opportunities, and the potential conversion rates and quota attainment, even when reps may have previously rejected some of these opportunities. To get the true gains possible with predictive analytics, you need to build the trust and confidence to push beyond a business-as-usual routine.

25. Brought to you by:Predictive analytics for salesLead gen, call timing, cross and upsell, customer nurturing and much more.www.valgen.comwww.valgen.com/blog