Ken Krogue Reveals Why Inside Sales Is All About the Leads

Ken Krogue Does your sales team have enough high-quality leads?

If so, your peers envy you. In 2012, XANT released a research study showing that 56.9% of inside sales managers ranked “finding good leads” as their No. 1 problem. We just updated this research for 2015, and you can see the latest results on Forbes.

The findings didn’t surprise Ken Krogue at all. He’s been preaching the value of leads since his days at FranklinCovey, where he built the inside sales division for what was then the nation’s second-fastest growing company.

Krogue, who now serves as president, founder and chief strategy officer at XANT, still believes inside sales is all about the leads.

He loves to share success stories about companies that have achieved a 13x lift or more by building an optimized lead gen machine.

LexisNexis success story

Several years ago, PeopleWise, a division of LexisNexis, hired Krogue to help them increase sales.

PeopleWise had four lead gen reps, four inside sales reps and 12 outside sales reps.

The executives wanted Krogue to focus on the outside reps, believing that’s where they would gain the most leverage.

But Krogue, always the contrarian, disagreed. He lobbied for lead gen.

“If you flood your salespeople with opportunities, they’ll figure out how to close them,” he said.

Start with benchmarks

Krogue started by benchmarking the PeopleWise sales process.

He discovered that each lead gen rep was making 20 calls and averaging 0.5 appointments per day.

He put their reps on the XANT PowerDialer and watched them go from 20 dials to 170 dials per day.

Just by increasing call volumes, the reps started generating 2.5 appointments per day, a 5x increase.

They achieved a significant boost simply by leveraging technology to improve effort metrics, like dials.

Then Krogue turned his attention to the proven marketing strategies that would transform PeopleWise into a true lead generation machine.

By focusing on campaigns, lists, leads, offers and skills, PeopleWise optimized its sales engine to the point that each rep produced 6.5 appointments a day — a 13x increase over the benchmark.

“It’s all about the leads,” Krogue said. “It always has been and always will be.”

Wring maximum value from your leads

Based on years of research, XANT has found that the two keys to wringing maximum value from your leads are speed and persistence.

Do your reps respond to leads fast enough?

Do your reps follow up with leads persistently enough?

You are 100 times more likely to contact a lead and 21 times more likely to see that lead enter the sales cycle if you call within 5 minutes, according to the 2014 Lead Response Report.

But the average response time is 39 hours 22 minutes.

If your reps make at least six call attempts per lead, they will contact up to 90% of your leads.

But reps only make 1.3 attempts per lead on average.

So most sales teams are wasting a lot of valuable leads – and missing out on a ton of sales opportunities.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Discover the art of cold calling and the science of contact ratios in the free ebook below.