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One of my favorite movies about the high-stakes world of sales is the award-winning drama Glengarry Glen Ross. The story revolved around a seedy Chicago real estate office where salespeople would stop at nothing to generate sales. They often complained to their boss about the lack of good quality leads. If they had better leads, they could close more deals.

Early in the movie, the character of Blake, played by Alec Baldwin, pulls a stack of index cards from his briefcase and tells a room full of salesmen, “These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. And to you, they’re gold. And you don’t get them. Because to give them to you is just throwing them away.”

New leads. Hot prospects. A chance to generate revenue from new customers with deep pockets. It’s the stuff every salesperson dreams about.

This issue of Progressive Distributor includes two articles that will interest you if you’re hungry for new revenue sources. The first article, “Panning for gold” (page 14), offers advice on how salespeople can find and qualify new sales prospects. It includes tips from sales trainers and distributors about the best ways to uncover potential new customers. Written by associate editor Paul Markgraff, the story says distributors that get the best results have prospecting processes in place. They don’t expect salespeople to wander aimlessly in search of new opportunities.

The second article, “Service strategies reinvent distributor roles” (page 20), is written by Mark Dancer of Pembroke Consulting. He suggests that fee-based services can provide a new source of profitable growth and strengthen a distributor’s competitive position. But he adds that new fees for old services won’t work and fee-based services must deliver new value if you expect customers to pay for them.

The articles share a common theme. Creating new leads and new revenue sources takes hard work, strategic planning and disciplined follow-up. In real life, you can’t expect someone to show up at your door with a stack of new leads wrapped in a bow. You must create your own opportunities.

This editorial appeared in the March/April 2006 issue of Progressive Distributor magazine. Copyright 2006.

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