Is your sales team ready for a lead blast?

To go along with death and taxes, it should be known that the unpredictability of lead generation is simply unavoidable. Sometimes things break your way, and other times they don’t. Some days you generate a lot of leads and many days you generate zilch.

I wanted to share a couple of examples of what I’m talking about. First of all, here’s an example of what a few week period of time looked like with regard to a single source’s deliveries to all FranFunnel clients per day.

As you can see, it’s lumpy. If asked to predict what the next day’s lead total would be, you’d have some trouble. But keep in mind that “lumpy” can come in all sorts of flavors.

I bet you didn’t think that the next day we saw leads from this source, this is how many there would be…

Yeah.

That’s what happens sometimes in lead generation.

But it’s not only sources that can be lumpy. What happens if you have a particularly effective PR push that really drives people to your brand?

Here’s what one of our client’s lead flows over time looks like:

In this case, you had a brand that was working with a vendor to make a huge lead push that ended up driving 5x the number of leads that that brand is used to seeing.

Ultimately this world is not about identifying frustrating situations but rather asking yourself what you’re going to do when they come your way.

In general, you need to position your sales team for “normal” lead flow. It’s not reasonable to think that you could scale up and down a team effectively when either of the two aforementioned situations occurs.

However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to keep these situations in the back of your head. And frankly, while personnel can’t scale automatically, that’s one of the gigantic benefits of technology.

In both of these situations, FranFunnel was able to handle the situation with ease and it doesn’t appear that lead quality was affected as much as it might have been had all the leads been handled manually.

So I’ll ask again: Is your franchise sales team ready for a lead blast?