Brian has an interesting little fable that he wrote about thirsty sales people and dirty water. Funny.

I disagree, a bit. Thirsty salespeople (at least those that you SHOULD have hired) are like particular cats. Even if they're extremly thirsty, they're not going to drink crap. They want fine filtered water, just your sales people should demand fine filtered and qualified, univerally defined leads. If they're not demanding pure leads, and you're not giving pure leads to them, you have problems at both ends of the drinking fountain. Upon finding this out, you should:

1. Fire those sales people that settle for mediocrity. If they're drinking crappy water and liking it, imagine what they're feeding to your customers
2. Raise the standards of your lead gen staff. You customers can sense what's going on inside too.

Dana,

Great points and I agree with you completely. This should be the case for all companies.

My experience has been different though. It seems companies wrongly focus their energy on generating leads for their weakest sales people rather than those who are strong.

I wrote a post about this a little while back.

Research shows, that top sales performers have the best opportunity screening skills. They focus their energies where they not only have a good odds to win but more importantly, will become ideal customers - bigger sales, longer-term value and more profitable.

Poor sales performers, focus on opportunities that have a high likelihood to close but may not necessarily be ideal customer - small sales, short-term value and less profitable.

What does this mean? If your lead generation is off target you could do more damage to sales performance than good. So sales leaders and marketers take this as a cautionary tale - when sales people say I want "HOT Leads", you can help them better target their opportunities by jointly developing an ideal customer profile and universal lead definition before lead generation begins.

BTW - I really like the look of your blog. I read mostly RSS now so I didn't see it until now.

Cheers,
Brian