Setting the Standards

'An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.' - Benjamin Franklin

Do you pay a premium for the results your company generates before they get them?

Many companies have lax approaches to the data that they receive, and even fewer have no airtight procedure to ensure that they are stopping all queries surrounding generating bad leads before they happen.

This is no way to live: Messing around with spread sheets of data you have received and having your eyes glued to your screen every minute of the day waiting to pounce on anything that looks suspicious. Or the reverse– Not looking at those CSV’s and spreadsheets for any bad leads.

We usually find that 20-30% of all lead generation is fraudulent, inaccurate, or invalid. Looking through data after you’ve received it can lead to huge over reactions back to suppliers based on finding small, or ‘typical’ amounts of invalid leads and can cause bad relationships to form and complacency to set in. It’s not surprising really, if you’re spending time looking through data then you’re probably already annoyed about having to do it. The issue is one of automation - The data processing needs to be automated so you are taking out the bad leads and letting through the ones that you know your company will benefit from in real time, without having to go through it manually.

And right now, because of the tools that are readily available, implementing a system that will enable real time validation and verification of data should be ignored at your own peril. Chances are if you are not already using something like it to acquire, validate and process leads then your competitors are.

The single biggest consumption of time in most lead generation efforts is separating the wheat from the chaff, and getting your best customers that are in-spec and valid.

Setting the standards early on with your suppliers and automatically having something to refer back to on as to why you didn’t buy individual leads, will allow you to scale fast, keep strong relationships, and give you the time to concentrate on turbo-charging performance.