Are Sales Leads Lost To Customers’ New Interest?

Are Sales Leads Lost To Customers’ New Interest?:

from Business 2 Community by Matt Ford


You cannot have sales leads without any form of interest. Why else would a prospect tell you about their needs and what budget they have allotted for them unless they thought you offered a good deal? Their equation would not fit unless you happened to fit in. On the other hand, sales leads have to be qualified fast because prospects can take new interests. Are new interests always bad for business though?
Identifying New Interests By Recycling Old Sales Leads
Naturally, if interest is not on you, you have shorter chance of getting any business sales leads. It is a tricky thing to measure though. Just because a prospect has grown less interested in your business does not always mean you have a competitor in your hands or you are about to lose that customer for good. Try seeing these customers as B2B leads you need to qualify again and see what is really going on.

• Are they interested in the same industry? – If your customer has been eyeing someone else who is in the exact same industry as you then, sure, be a little worried. The keyword there though is ‘exactly.’ Your sales leads are not really lost when the alleged ‘competitor’ offers something that specializes in an area completely different from yours.

• Were you supposed to pique their new interest? – Upon learning what your new prospect is interested in, was it something that another one of your own products could have earned that interest as well? If your answer was yes, then that only meant that you should have recycled your sales leads sooner. If no, then why be jealous of another business that does something your business takes no part in?

• What does this new interest mean to them? – It could be that your sales leads only indicated this interest indirectly because prospects were preoccupied with a problem only you could solve. Does that mean the act of finding qualified sales leads actually gives your competitors an edge? No. As said before, if it has nothing to do with your industry or market, then it is not really worth losing sleep over.

It is like your sale leads represent athletes with interests in different sports. Sometimes they play basketball but a little while later, they will be at the local bowling alley. The only mistake is a B2B lead generation strategy that selfishly makes prospects concern themselves with only the happenings in your industry. You get your sales leads by respecting a customer’s freedom and realizing the whole world does not always revolve around what you sell.