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A steady flow of leads is essential for any sales team, but often businesses take a simplistic approach to generating qualified leads.

The wrong approach often starts with the mantra that every sales rep needs to make cold calls. The problem is that it is a big waste for the best closers to be cold-calling, even if their cold calling efforts produce leads.

Let others handle the cold-calling, and leave the best closers to do what they do best: make the sale.

This can be done by specializing the customer-facing teams so that the qualifiers – a.k.a. sales development team -- are prospecting for new leads. Once the qualifiers have done their job, then this is when the closer comes on board to make the sale.

This approach, simple on the surface, takes far better advantage of agent strengths and can lead to more overall sales.

Also helping with sales is having the right auto dialer in place. Many smaller sales teams still ignore this crucial tool in the sales channel toolbox, instead letting their agents manually dial phone numbers. This is a big waste of time, even if customer-facing sales teams have been broken into specialized units.

A good auto dialer wades through the wrong numbers, the answering machines, and the connection times, ensuring that qualifiers suffer through no down-time and are able to focus on the actual customer interaction.

Dialers such as those offered by Spitfire come with several auto-dialer modes, including predictive dialing that utilizes algorithmic logic to speed up and slow down the call rate based on the number of available agents, number of available lines, the campaign's average call time and other statistical information.

Other modes include preview dialing, where the dialer preps the call but gives the sales agent the final say before reaching out, and fixed dialing where the sales manager can set the pace.

Auto dialers also are good for observing telemarketing regulations, in that they can make calls based on time zone and other variables, such as whether or not the call is to a cellular phone. These are details that can keep sales teams out of legal trouble.

Generating leads has and will continue to be an important part of the sales process. But it should be done smart.