When gathering the data for sales leads, having more isn’t always the best. Think of your salespeople for a minute. Do they always sound like they can’t get enough leads? More importantly, do they even need that many leads despite how many software projects your business is already working on?
No matter what your size, there will be times when you’re at capacity. Of course, that can be seen as a good thing. Your business is finally underway when it comes to doing what it does best. It shows that your previous sales leads have been highly qualified and resulted in successful deals.
Realism still needs to kick in though. Despite that success, you don’t want too much work to handle. It stretches your resources and could compromise what otherwise could have been good results. For example, if you’re still developing a new software upgrade but your salespeople are harping about another opportunity because of it, that upgrade might not deliver as well as you’d hope because you were rushing to meet expectations.
It’s like when you’re storing data (e.g. customer data, documents, even a collection of pictures). Is having all that data stockpiled somewhere (in your private database, flash disks, hard drives etc) really necessary? Is there ever a point where it isn’t?
As a matter of fact, even online storage isn’t spared. If you’re providing such a service, do you encourage this type of data-hoarding behavior among your own cloud computing subscribers? Daniel W. Rasmus just posted a very informative article on Fast Company detailing the symptoms:
“What are we hoarding now? Online storage. Have you collected Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box, and Amazon cloud storage like flash drives to some virtual key ring? Do you have images scattered across Apple’s Photostream, Google + and Picassa, Flickr, and Facebook?
If your answer is yes, then you have Distributed Data Disorder (DDD). This is no imaginary aliment. I spent nearly five hours over the weekend rationalizing the gigabytes of data that I had stored in SkyDrive and Dropbox. Duplicates, in some cases–folders with the same intent but with different names, each containing bits of my writing, my business, my personal life.”
If this sounds like your clients, or worse, sounds like you, then it’s time you realize that having all that information on your cloud computing sales leads won’t always spell success. The article may describe the disease in cloud storage but hoarding data can clearly be a bad marketing and sales habit too. Here’s what you should do:
- Start setting a limit – When you’re working at capacity, start telling your salespeople to slow down but also go beyond that and make sure the marketers providing them leads also get the message. If you’re outsourcing, you should at least be just as familiar with your provider and collaborate closely on how to get them out of overdrive.
- Share your advice with customers – If you have customers that are suffering this same habit in terms of data storage, share your message with them. A good suggestion would be to use your outsourced marketer to send out an advisory or survey via telemarketing. Show them what you’ve learned from the lesson of organizing data and evaluating its importance.
- Market supportive applications – In the article, Rasmus recommends a few tools. If you’re offering similar tools, then have your marketers and salespeople focus on those instead of giving your business too much work.
Again, there are times when less is in fact more. Minimizing the demand for software leads isn’t always a bad idea when you’re already at capacity.
