As a marketeer, I have never heard these words.
Just kidding, I get it at least twice a month. This is the age old struggle between sales and marketing, and with marketing being the creative side there are thousands of responses: “The sale begins at ‘No’, you order taking monkey”, “I give the good leads to closers” etc.
It’s all in good fun, kind of like complaining about cafeteria food, you do it regardless of whether the food is from the best chef or a can. If you are hitting your numbers everyone is happy, if not everyone is pissed off.
But there are things you can do to improve your leads. I’ve been working on our process to screen leads via a survey on SurveyMonkey (a web-based survey tool), and it’s working wonderfully. You get a new list, send them a few questions and you manage to filter out maybe 20%: 5% look a lot better than average and 15% is crap the sales guys don’t have to eat.
Keep in mind I can give a sales guy a hard time, but that’s because I share their goal – they should be able to blow their number out before the 3rd month of the quarter so they don’t have to come in to the office for the last month if they don’t want to (and I don’t have to listen to them). They should really never have to work Fridays, and Mondays should be exclusively for golf. This is the path to a happy workplace.
For more great info on lead gen I turn to Brian Carroll, he’s a thought leader in this space. Here’s some more info on Sales and Marketing playing well together.