What do they say about recycling? It’s good for the bottle it’s good for the can. Well, that may be true; but when it comes to lead recycling, don’t assume all recycling efforts are created equal. Obviously I’m talking about sales leads not lead you find in a pencil. Incidentally if you’re interested in the origin of lead pencils and that pencils in fact never contained lead, I encourage you to read about it on Wikipedia here.

For those that are not clear on what sales lead recycling is, let me define it. Sales lead recycling is typically referred to the process after a newly generated lead has been assigned to a salesperson and then automatically and re-assigned to another salesperson. Recycling can occur based on different business rules, but it is often driven by the amount of time to first call attempt or follow-up call attempts.

Ok, so what is the optimal recycling time? Most everyone already knows the importance of calling new leads quickly; it’s been hammed home on this blog more than a few times. So the logical answer is to set recycle times as short as possible and force sales people to call quickly right? This is a mistake that many companies make when they try to improve their sales process.

Optimizing recycle times should be organization-specific and developed in combination with your sales and marketing strategy. Several variables are in play, so you’ll need to account for these things:

• Are you using a lead qualifying team internally or by a third party like DoublePositive or LeadQual?
• Do you have a dialer that is capable of calling new leads instantly?
• How many sales people do you have?
• How many leads are you getting per day?
• Are all your leads coming from real-time sources?
• Are all your leads created equal or do different leads require different best practices?
• What capabilities does your lead management system offer?

Depending on the answers to these questions, your company could have a very different recycling program than the next. You can easily see why the logical route (i.e. recycle leads immediately) doesn’t always work.

Once you’ve got your recycling times optimized, the actual recycle rate (percentage of leads that are recycled) can be a very powerful metric to manage against. Internally at Leads360, we use the recycle rate metric to drive lead distribution volumes for individual sales reps. Each week we look at the recycle rate for our sales reps; those who fall below the target rate are shut off from new lead distribution for a period. You can imagine the impact this has on our sales reps and you can see how recycling can be a powerful metric to manage from.

Recently we started looking into this metric on behalf of our clients and found some very inconsistent data, thus the impetus for this article. We’ve begun to synthesize how our clients use recycling and are trying to determine some best practice baselines. I hope to share them first on Lead Critic when we come up with something. In the meantime, I’m interested in how is your organization leveraging lead recycling; what’s worked and what hasn’t?

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