I am not advocating micromanaging or control-freak tendencies. But I do think company leaders need to be willing to get their hands dirty sometimes for the good of the organization. Getting up close and personal with an aspect of a company, particularly one that is seemingly mundane, can lead to big ‘ah-ha’ moments of clarity.
Here is one example of what I mean. I have many more examples, but the article would get too long, so I will save those for another day.
Way back when my first company was small, and we didn’t have many tools to support our processes, a lot of what we did was manual. And one of those manual things was assigning leads to the sales team. Marketing would run a campaign, generate leads, and pass a file to sales. Sales would assign the leads, and reps would call and email to book qualified appointments.
What I cared about was how many leads were generated, how many turned into opportunities, and how many of those turned into customers. I was solely focused on the numbers and never gave much thought to the process because “it was working” (the numbers were good!).
So, this process where marketing generated leads and then passed them to sales in a file was just how we did it. We were growing, and no one was complaining. There was nothing to inspect, no problem to solve, and no one was paying attention to this well-oiled part of the machine.
Until one day, through a simple set of events, I uttered the words, “Send the lead file to me.”
I had just stepped in to run the sales team myself after parting ways with a sales manager who wasn’t a good fit. The typical process until then had been that when a big campaign concluded, marketing sent the file to the sales manager, who then spent a few minutes slicing the file up based on territory and then sent each rep their assigned leads to follow up with. The territory was based on the alphabet, so the surgery on the file literally only took a couple of minutes—popping leads from companies that started with A-C into one tab, leads from companies that started D-G onto another, etc. You get the drift. The lead file would eventually make its way into the CRM too, but this was before marketing automation was great at syncing this stuff in real-time, so even that step was manual.
Anyway, back to the story. With me as the new head of sales, when marketing wrapped up a webinar campaign and had 700+ leads to send to sales, they came to me to ask who they should send the file to.
If I wanted to avoid the mundane work of the sales team, I would have had them send the file to all the sales reps so they could each grab their own leads. I could have also had the file sent to the office manager, who was available to help with extra admin tasks. I could have even asked the marketing manager to do it. And it was the perfect job for an intern, of which we had plenty.
But instead for some reason, I said: “Send me the lead file, I will take care of it.”
Every best practice in the world is that a leader’s time is “too important” to do something in the weeds like this. Many, many (every?) leadership gurus would say that having the file sent to me was a mistake—that I should be focused on the big-picture strategic stuff and not worried about the basic task of slicing and dicing files.
They would be right. And they would also be wrong.
I told marketing to send me the files for two reasons. First, at that time, I was a control freak micromanager, and my first inclination was to just do something myself rather than take a moment to explain to someone else how to do it. Second, I was just innately curious and excited about the leads. It was the first time my sales team would receive fresh leads under my leadership, and I just wanted to lay eyes on those leads. I was excited for the team to start prospecting them.
On the sales team, campaign lead follow-up was based on speed. Normally, once we received a file from marketing, we wanted to get leads into the hands of the sales reps within hours. the sales team was always ready to jump as soon as new leads from a big campaign flowed to them. We created schedules and managed our time for these campaigns so everyone could get to their leads as quickly as possible.
That afternoon, the sales team blocked a few hours to start calling and emailing as soon as they received their leads.
So, I dropped everything and opened up the file. I sorted based on company name, and I got to work dumping each alphabetical territory into its own tab.
As I was doing this quick admin task, I wasn’t paying attention to the leads, but I also wasn’t NOT paying attention to the leads. My eyes were naturally scanning the list. I noticed a few company names like “ABCD” and prospect names like “Mickey Mouse”. No biggie, people give junk data all the time when filling out forms.
I also noticed a few company names that seemed like they were attached to a small business, like a local dry cleaner or chiropractor. These were not our target audience. Without thinking about the boat I could be rocking, I just started deleting “leads” that were junk data and a few of the obviously small local businesses that weren’t our target. I figured it was faster for me to delete these quickly than for the sales reps to have to do it.