"These are the new leads. These are Glengarry leads. And to you they 're gold, and you don't get them. Why ? Because to give them to you would be throwing them away. They're for closers."
- Alec Baldwin (as Blake) in Glengarry Glen Ross.
For those who have watched Glengarry Glen Ross' tense drama about the bunch of real estate salesmen competing for the best leads, the salesman in us drooled over the pack of lead cards in Blake's hands. For those who have not watched this mesmerizing, one of the greatest scene of all times then do look it up at YouTube. While many of us might not agree with Blake's style in his terrorizing seven minute speech, there is usually an afterthought when we ponder on the above lines - Do we really throw the golden leads away?
While we could be divided on it, but our survey shows that if leads are in business cards collected by an organization, then there is a 90% chance that Blake was right.
Online and Offline marketing, campaigns, channel programs, trade-shows and all the whatnot lead to an important event - handshakes. Considerable amount of time, money and travel is invested towards the meetings which start with a handshake. During majority of handshakes, very precise contact information is exchanged through business cards.
During 1st half of 2016, we had discussion with 38 companies (33 are SMBs in Singapore, Japan, India and Philippines) and found that 90% of business cards collected by an organization are not used by them.
Either the organization has completely forgotten about them. Or the company is aware of cards' existence but there is no plan to work on them. Then in majority of cases, the organization feared that the cards are no longer with them and have already been taken by the employee who has left the company or are stacked within a shoe-box at employee's home. There is another small category where it is feared that cards collected by your organization are now used by others. This happens in cases where a vendor or a channel partner collected the cards in your name but you did not receive the data. Even for the 10% cases where the data was captured, it was unlikely that the data was shared within the company and the relationships were analysed.
What are the chances that the data of each business card are the related notes associated with that handshake event are accurately captured by the company's CRM, Email Marketing, Campaign Management or Marketing Automation System?
In next few posts, we will share more findings from our study and our perspectives, but let us get back to the question - Was Blake right? If you consider the link between business cards and leads, then we know that he was spot on!
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