Now some people would have you believe that that is a good thing. They are wrong. The biggest impediment to a sales person is seeing information that indicates there is no opportunity with a prospect. And once you have logged that type of feedback into Salesforce.com – it stays there, and fills your salespeople with head trash.

“Well – it looks like the last time someone talked to XYZ Co. they said they ‘had looked at us one year ago and decided we were not a good fit’ – so why bother calling today”.

In point of fact, that information has a shelf life and may no longer be true. We have a saying in our office that “Not Interested” is not a Stage in Salesforce.com. What you really have is a “Long Term” opportunity. If you are going to be any good at sales, you must begin each day with the thought that no one is permanently not interested. And no information in Salesforce.com is a permanent condition for a prospect – short of “Out of Business”.

Salespeople trade on optimism. It is the reason why I love the business of sales – if fits my personality. I prefer to see the glass as half full. But often times, Salesforce.com tells salespeople that the glass is not half full. And sometimes it even tells salespeople complete lies. In the activity history – in old logged calls – Salesforce.com tells salespeople things about a prospect that were once true but are now completely false.

So I encourage everyone at our company to practice what I call – Sales Amnesia. Forget what that lying CRM system is telling you and call that prospect as if it was the first time. And get your head right. Stay optimistic and know that you are offering to share a compelling solution to a problem that you know they are facing. Circumstances change, people change and decisions change.

And if I could spend some quality time with the Salesforce.com Product Team, I would request one improvement to an already great system. Create a new type of Logged Call – let’s call it the “Vanishing Activity”. It would simply erase itself from the activity history after a preselected time – six months, a year or maybe two. Then when your new hotshot rainmaker takes over that recently vacated sales territory, they do not have to slog through any negative notes, thoughts or outcomes. They simply start fresh and stay positive. And blow their numbers away with deals that everyone was told were dead.

While still only a teenager, the commercial internet has already forever altered the value and vernacular of sales lead generation.   Until a few years ago, the holy grail for a marketing department was to generate a deep and sustained supply of sales leads, a lead being defined as someone who had responded to an outbound marketing campaign (direct mail, email, etc.)   But today, through the help of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media, most marketing departments can generate more than enough inbound inquiries to look remarkably effective against their lead generation goals.  And because most organizations still compensate their marketing folks on the number of leads they generate – leads are precisely what they concentrate on generating.  The problem is no longer a question of lead quantity; it is now much more a simple matter of lead quality.  And that is where we need to distinguish between a Lead and an Opportunity.

In the new age of paid search and SEO, the term “sales lead” is losing its luster.   Marketing’s ability to produce so many leads has begun to devalue the concept of leads in the minds of sales people.  The dirty secret inside many sales organizations’ CRM systems is the number of sales leads that are never followed-up.  The effectiveness of the marketing department to generate large volumes of leads has not been counter-balanced with a lead qualification process. Today, in many organizations, sales people are  presented with such an overwhelming queue of unqualified leads that they cherry-pick a random selection of leads to call, or worse, turn their nose up at the whole lead pile altogether.

Before all of this inbound lead generation boom, sales would complain that they were not getting enough leads.  Now they are complaining that they are getting too many — though not quite as loudly, because its sounds ridiculous.   But the online world is changing so rapidly that the ironic truth of the matter is – Leads are for Losers.  If you as a salesperson are spending all of your time calling and qualifying, you will miss your number just as fast as you can say “steak knives.”

This phenomenon also picks at the never-healing wound between marketing and sales.  While it is not fair (because marketing is only doing what it was asked for), marketing needs to step up to the cure.  And that is to present sales with Opportunities.  Some call them qualified leads, but that is semantically confusing.  Let’s make a clean break.  The game has changed and the vernacular needs to change with it.  The Glegarry Glen Ross-type fight for leads is obsolete. What sales now needs isn’t lead generation, it’s opportunity generation, where systems and practices are established to put leads in their place.