“Glengarry Glen Ross” was a great film back in 1992, and the same questions asked in the film are still asked today. What leads are the best leads? And as Shelley “The Machine” Levene learned — there are no such things as “weak leads!”
What is a lead?
A lead is the name and contact information of a non-member. It’s really that simple. Far too often I notice sales people trying to only get names and numbers of non-members that want to join their club. I’d agree that those are hot leads, however as we all know, sales is a number game.
Where do the best leads come from?
Member referrals are the best leads you can get. If you have a great product and create the right community within your club, your members will do most of the work for you. Your job is to get them in to experience it.
What’s the best way to contact your leads?
Like I discussed on a previous blog, Fortune is in the Follow-Up, “The best and only way to successfully contact your leads is to communicate with them on their terms, the way they want to be communicated with.”
Since a name and contact information does not give you that information, you need to create a system that allows your sales team to reach these members at different times and days, using different mediums. This will also allow management to check on this work to ensure execution. New leads need to be contacted immediately, and far too often new leads sit in data bases or lead sheets for too long before the initial contact, and even longer in between contact attempts.
Do leads have expiration dates?
Leads are perishable items. If your leads were put through your follow-up system and management has verified that the proper contact attempts were facilitated, then I’d expire and remove all leads after 30 day. Yes, I said 30 days. I know that everyone reading this can remember a time that a lead joined past 30 days, however these leads are the exception and not the rule. Old leads clog up your data base and give a false sense of security to your sales team, as well as contribute to wasted time by making contact attempts when in return, our sales team should be getting more fresh leads.
Should all of our leads come from member referrals?
Although member referrals are the best leads, your sales team must get out into your community. Chances are, these leads usually do not have friends that are members, or they would have visited by now, and when you get them in for a visit you have not only added a new member, but a whole new referral pool that would not have existed if your team did not venture out beyond your four walls.
If you and your team are using L.A.S.E.R and you are going through your identification process, don’t just look at your entire lead data base. Look at how many new leads you are collecting and start from there. A common mistake is to increase contact activities (calls, text, e-mail, etc.) when the answer may be to purge all old leads, which will create the right amount of urgency to get new leads. This just may cause the discomfort your team needs to drive the right urgency!
Lead acquisition is not glamorous work and in many cases is the Achilles heel of most sales teams. Create the right behaviors and routines around lead gathering and you will create a winning team!
Ryan Junk is the director of sales for UFC Gym. He can be reached at ryan@ufcgym.com.
