Maximizing Sales Leads

Okay, you’ve exhibited at your industry trade show. You’ve collected scores of leads. Now what happens? If your company is like many, those leads get distributed out from the sales manager to one or more salespeople — and then they end up under a pile of catalogs, sales plans and other crap, never again to see the light of day. Want a better solution? Hire an outside call center or marketing firm to make the follow-up calls for your company. Afraid the outside resource won’t understand your business well enough to make an intelligent sales call? Well, you could always train them to do the job. Or you could limit their role to asking 3 or 4 key questions of each prospect to further qualify each lead.

Ed Overy, Business Development Director for MediaCross, an integrated marketing firm in St. Louis (www.mediacross.com) says this method “eliminates all the dead ends in sales prospecting that bog down sales departments. You want to put your sales guys out in front of bonafide prospects, doing what they do best….and that’s selling,” says Overy. “You don’t want them wasting their time on prospects who have no interest in buying your product or service.” Overy’s firm, MediaCross, provides sales lead follow-up calling programs. “We’ve had great success for clients — giving them a daily feed of prospects who absolutely want to do business,” he says. “A company spends a lot of money participating in trade shows and events,” says Overy. “This is just the smart way to maximize its investment.”

Ed Overy’s email address is: edo@mediacross.com