My friend Tom runs an inside team for a software company in Boston. He gave me a call the other day asking for my opinion on his compensation package for his inside sales reps. We both compensate our inside sales reps based on performance, but Tom sees performance very differently than I do. Tom pays his reps by the number of opportunities they pass on a monthly basis. The more appointments you set for the outside team, the more money you get. Every time a sales rep has a conversation with someone you passed, the little cash register noise goes off in your head. I hear this from a lot of people that run inside sales teams.
The main issue that I have with the compensation model is that it incents the wrong kind of behavior. Finding someone that will listen to a sales rep for 15 minutes is relatively easy. I know personally that I have been called enough times by certain inside teams that I will take an appointment with a sales rep just to keep the inside rep from calling me back, even though I have no intention of buying or even keeping the appointment.
So how do you keep your inside sales reps from setting your sales team up with fruitless appointments? The answer is simple: stop paying them to do so! I’ll admit if I were in their place I would do the same exact thing. They are being motivated to find meetings when they should be motivated to find actionable sales opportunities. In lieu of paying your inside sales rep for every appointment they set, try paying them based on the number of successful appointments that take place. You can judge this by using feedback surveys. The feedback survey is a great way to compensate your inside rep as well as keep track on the effectiveness of your outside team.
After a sales rep has a discovery call or introductory meeting that was set up by your inside sales team, send them a quick email. The email is going to gauge the quality of the opportunity sent. I list 3 questions that the sales rep has to reply to:
- Did the meeting happen?
- Was all the information given to you from the inside sales rep accurate and up the specifications agreed on?
- Is this call moving into a next step?
If the answers to the first 2 questions are “Yes”, the inside rep should get credit for passing a good opportunity. If your sales team is working well they should be able to convert 80% of those into a next step. If you find that you are getting answered “No” to a particular question consistently on the feedback surveys, then you have something to work on. Here is how I interpret the unfortunate “No” based responses.
1 – Did the meeting happen? If the calls aren’t happening, you have to look at how interested the prospects really were. No shows happen when inside reps don’t fully qualify and don’t pique the interest of the prospect. I find this happens more with inside sales reps that are compensated based on the number of leads they pass. As I said, If you tell a rep that every time they pass an opportunity, they will get (x) dollars, they will pass anyone that hits the bare minimum requirements in order to score the lead and get paid. It’s very pavlovian in nature: book a time, get some money, book a time, get some money, hit the red button, get a banana, little bell rings, time to eat…. Of course there is always going to be a drop off and some people won’t show for a meeting. If you have more than a 20% no show rate, you will want to look into the pitch and how it is being delivered to ensure the prospects are being qualified properly
2 – Was all the information given to you from the inside rep accurate and up the specifications agreed on? There should be questions that both the inside and outside sales reps agree need to be answered before they move to a sales call. I wouldn’t suggest getting too in depth with these. Contain them to questions such as, “Does the prospect have a problem we can solve, is there an active initiative for the prospect to solve this problem, does the prospect have the right characteristics to purchase from us? (number of users, revenue, locations, etc…)” IF the inside sales team is gathering this information on all opportunities, you should expect at least 70% of the opportunities to move forward into the next step of your sales process.
3 – Is this call moving into a next step? I talked about this in my last point, but if the first 2 questions are answered in the affirmative, the last one comes down to the sales team’s performance. If the prospects are showing up for meetings and they have all of the qualification they agreed they needed, then they are responsible for moving the opportunities to a next step. We currently have an average of 80% of our “leads” moving into a next step. That is across multiple product lines and industries. I would say anything under 70% should be alarming.
This is how I use feedback surveys to motivate my inside sales team to pass quality opportunities to sales and to ensure those quality opportunities are being followed up with a strong sales effort. It would be interesting to hear of any other tools that people are using to do the same.
Great blogs this week from Chris Lang, Craig Ferrara, Pete Gracey and Ilona Jazdowska! They discussed several interesting topics: Have you tried utilizing Social Media to help boost your Sales pipeline? Do you find that your top performers are leaving? How and when are you utilizing the "Call Blitz" method? And last (but not least...) how is the communication between your inside and outside sales teams?
Before we do a quick recap we want to highlight a great article we found this week from Howard Sewell, President, Spear Marketing Group where he discusses the importance and value of an inside sales team, and the questions you should ask yourself before launching a lead nurturing program. 5 Questions To Ask Before You Launch A Lead Nurturing Program.
Tuesday June 15th
Sales Success and Social Media - AG's Chris Lang as always gives his witty take on the importance of social media and how it has helped him in his sales pipeline.
"...when my Marketing VP approached me and asked me to write a blog once a week, I sarcastically told him I would try to squeeze it in after my samurai practice but before my mime lessons. He then told me that in addition to a blog he wanted me to follow AG's foray into social media and establish a presence on LinkedIn, start Tweeting, and use Facebook for work (rather my usual purpose of using it to see people I graduated with and determine who has aged better)."
Tuesday June 15th
Keys to Retaining Your Top Inside Sales Reps - AG's Director of Client of Operations Craig Ferrara shares his insight on how we've been able retain a lot of our top performers.
"While I didn't have the opportunity to do an exit interview with each and every person that left the organization, the general consensus from my colleagues was there was not enough focus on the culture and making the reps feel as if their opinion mattered.
We've been pretty fortunate that AG has seen a much higher retention rate than my previous employers. While I have my own thoughts as to why we've managed to retain our people I was curious to get my teams thoughts as well. I asked a couple of tenured top producers on my team this question..."
Tuesday June 16th
End of Q2..Time to Utter the Words Inside Sales Dread! CALL BLITZ - AG's Peter Gracey discusses the benefits of the dreaded "Call Blitz" -particularly for this time of the year:
"The best time to run blitzes is the last two weeks of June. You are nearing the halfway point of your calendar year as well as entering what we have found to be the slowest two weeks of the year (July 1st - July 15th). Running one or several call blitzes during the last half of June accomplishes some very strategic objectives for your organization."
Thursday June 17th
Tips for Inside Sales Success: Closing the Loop with Quality Feedback - AG's Quality Assurance Manager - Ilona Jazdowska explains not only is it important to close the gap between Marketing and Sales (Sales Prospecting and Closing the Loop) but it's just as important to close that gap between your inside and outside sales teams.
"It is equally critical to close the loop between your inside and outside teams! There can often be a disconnect between an inside sales team and the field reps. Once the lead has been passed over there is no further communication between the two parties as to how the call went. The value of having a feedback process in place is that you can make sure everyone is on the same page and that the inside sales team is aware of what makes for a good opportunity."
One of my responsibilities is gaining feedback on the quality of the opportunities we pass, part of our Post Feedback Process. So if you are one of our clients (especially if you are a sales rep at one of our clients) - I don't mean to bother you on a daily basis, nor be a pest when I follow up to gain your feedback; but to have the knowledge and understanding of how the call went is very important not only for AG but for you as well. The value of gaining feedback from the outside reps on the quality of the opportunities passed is to ensure that your investment in your teleprospecting team is being utilized to the fullest. You want to not only make sure that the follow up calls occur, but that the opportunities meet the criteria to move forward in the sales process and close within your average sales cycle.
I have written about the importance of closing the loop between Marketing and Sales. It is equally critical to close the loop between your inside and outside teams! There can often be a disconnect between an inside sales team and the field reps. Once the lead has been passed over there is no further communication between the two parties as to how the call went. The value of having a feedback process in place is that you can make sure everyone is on the same page and that the inside sales team is aware of what makes for a good opportunity.
It is important to have a metric in place to measure the success of the opportunities that your teleprospecting team is generating. It's great if your team is producing 20-25 opportunities a month, but if 1/4 of the follow up calls did not occur, 1/3 are not a fit your solution or if the prospect was only interested in information and not even in the market to make a purchase this year, the benefit of generating a high number of leads is quickly diminished.
There are some key steps that you want to have in place to ensure the success of your feedback process.
1. Cut out the middle man: It works best if opportunities are sent directly to the Outside Rep. Some clients like to distribute the leads themselves, but I have come across situations where a client has forgotten to assign one of our opportunities and the follow up call was missed with the prospect. Because our BDRs rely on the success of the calls for their own compensation, they are diligent to confirm that the call between the prospect and sales rep is set on the calendar.
2. Open communication: Share the contact information between your inside and outside team; phone numbers, emails and even calendars. What may seem like a calm Wednesday on Monday can quickly turn for the worse. By having open communication between your sales teams, the call can easily be rescheduled and the rapport with the prospect stays intact.
3. Share the Information: If you notice that the quality from a particular inside sales rep always seems to be on the lower end of your scale, share it! It only fosters bad habits if you do not address the reasons for the low score. Maybe the opportunities are not mature enough to pass, or the inside sales rep is targeting the wrong person with the organization.
4. Establish a follow up process: There are many ways to solicit the feedback. You can send daily emails after the scheduled call was scheduled to occur, build weekly reports to be filled out by your sales team, or you can even discuss the appointments from the previous week during your weekly sales meetings - choose what works best for and what solicits the highest response.
Now that you have the process in place, here is an example of what AG likes to gather from our feedback process:
1. Did the call occur? I look to ensure that the scheduled appointments that my BDRs have set up have occurred between the prospect and sales rep. If not, why? If there is a high no-show rate (15%) this may be an indication that the inside rep was too persistent on the phone and the prospect only accepted the follow up call in an effort to get off the phone.
2. Was the call successful? Based on the calls that occurred you want to see at least 80% of the conversations deemed successful. This means it was with the right person within the organization, and there is a compelling need for your service or solution.
3. Does it have sales potential? Either based on closing within your sales cycle or the level of commitment to evaluation, you want to see at least 60% of your successful calls yielding the potential to close.
4. Has this opportunity landed on your forecast? This is a very important piece of information to gather. Depending on your average sales cycle and the timeline of your teleprospecting campaign, it may take 6-12 months to see any direct ROI from your inside sales team. By gathering the information of potential pipeline, you are able to justify your investment during different stages of your campaign.
What are your thoughts? How do you measure the level of quality of your teleprospecting opportunities and the success of your campaigns?
Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you another guest entry from one of our BDRs, Jill Ryan.
We have discussed how sales success is augmented by closed loop approach to marketing and sales. We all know that an effective Inside Sales team follows a call plan specific to the prospect, qualifies the account, and passes them along for an introductory call. From there, the sales reps take over; given the contacts provided to move this prospect to pipeline.
Occasionally, when we follow up on our passed leads, the feedback is that they never occurred. Whether the Sales rep missed the call, the prospect never answered, or there was some crazy miscommunication, everyone loses. Now, instead of making fresh dials into new accounts, the business development reps (BDR's) are forced to play phone tag and re-engage these people to reschedule. How can we avoid this huge waste of time? For me, it has been by having great relationships with the Sales reps.
Working directly with the Sales reps has been the most helpful tool in enhancing my performance levels, and thus the amount of leads I commit to client pipeline. Several of the "young guns" I work with have also had success with this approach. They understand how difficult it can be to navigate around gate keepers, busy schedules and rejection. By encouraging an open relationship with the Sales reps, less intro calls are missed, and more calls move along to the next step.
So Sales reps, here are a few tips to drive your better results for you Inside Sales team:
- Give us your contact information. Whether it is your desk phone, cell or email, we are not going to stalk you. In more cases then not, I come across an interesting prospect that is on the fence on taking a call. If I can reach out to the Sales rep for a specific case study, or just a sentence of tailored information - the prospect is more prone to take that call next time around.
- Make sure to listening in on BDR's calls. There may be something we miss on a qualification call that you can identify, extracting more compelling information for the following steps. We can learn so much from you that will help us as we refine our qualification questions.
- Calendar invitations can be gold. Allow us to send the prospect a calendar invitation introducing you with the time, date and your contact information. This way, everyone is on the same page and a reschedule is easier to facilitate if required.
- Keep us informed. If there was a lead that was great, or if there was a lead that was just awful, let us know either way, if it is the latter we can readdress the list of the questions we are using to qualify. We do care about the job we do, and frankly are compensated on the quality we deliver based on your feedback.
By being an email or a phone call away we can minimize missed appointments and help reduce long drawn out sales cycles. If every Sales rep was more open to direct contact, I am convinced you would see the value. Also by having a good relationship with the Sales reps, I care even more about passing great opportunities along. So Sales reps, the Inside Sales team is there to help you - give us a call. By working more closely together, I am confident more calls will happen which will have a positive impact on your pipeline.
Today's Sales Prospecting Perspectives post is from Chris Lang, AG's Sales Director.
I am obsessive compulsive about organization. My OCD for organization manifests itself in my kitchen these days. About 3 weeks ago I decided to pull everything out of my cabinets and drawers, and rearrange them so that the things used most were on the forefront of the shelves and the rest would fall back in order of how often they are needed. I pulled various utensils, gadgets, measuring devises, scales, pots and pans out of the pantry and placed them on the kitchen table. I looked at the massive pile of kitchen accessories in front of me and realized something. "Man I don't use any of this stuff.....I don't even know what some of it is." Take for example the enormous fork and spoon that come as part of your utensil sets. What the heck is that fork for? Do you give it to a gigantic neighbor after you serve them a brontosaurus steak? Moving on I saw that I had 4 different whisks, a blender, a hand mixer, one of those mixers attached to a huge stainless steel bowl and one other tool that looked like you could mix, chop, process and teach a dog calculus depending on the attachment you used. You know what I use to mix things...a tiny fork. It does takes me 6 hours to make pancakes. Maybe that's what the giant fork is for! This was a common theme. I have the tools to measure ingredients in any increment you need and yet I measure with my hands or terms given to me by my mother such as "A dab of" or "A slew". I have 5 cutting boards and knives that ninjas would think are unnecessarily sharp, yet I cut food on a plate with an old steak knife.
Because I am a work nerd, this naturally led me to think of all of the things that sales and marketing teams have at their disposal that they under use. I do it myself. For Example, I have an add-on to my CRM system that allows me to see all the information I would ever need on a prospect and their company. Company revenue, past positions, competitors, contact information, co-workers, shoes size, etc... yet when I am looking for information on a prospect, you will usually find me toiling in search engines and opening up links that will inevitably give the company a virus. It takes me 20 minutes to find the information that I could have found in 2 had I clicked the "contact info" tab in my CRM.
Potentially the most valuable asset that goes unused are leads. The numbers vary somewhat, but from the studies I have seen anywhere from 70% - 90% of the leads produced through marketing are not followed up. I've never taken a poll, but the conversations I have had would verify those numbers. The business development teams here are often tasked with prospecting into the "C" leads that don't get any follow-up by the sales team. There is a ton of value in those leads and there should always be a nurturing process to reach out to them. If you're only prospecting into 20% of your marketing leads, you are wasting a substantial amount money, and you are likely missing out on deals. You close 0% of the prospects you don't reach out to.
Another seriously underutilized asset: the phone. With all of the data augmentation solutions, company websites, list building sites etc... we sometimes forget that a great way to find out who is in charge of "XYZ" is to simply call and ask. I have sat by my computer and done 20 minutes of research before each of my calls. By the end of the day I will have made about 20 calls. There is something to be said for the person that does less research and makes 80 calls. Yes you have to go in a bit blind which can be scary, but you will get a lot more market intelligence by talking to a live a person and you can ask "who is responsible for XYZ?" When you look through websites and data solutions you can find titles. Over the past 2 years responsibilities have changed quite a bit. Looking for a decision maker by title is a lot tougher to do now as CFO's, COO's and VP's are crossed trained to make decisions in departments they wouldn't have dealt with previously.
Sales feedback and opportunity tracking on marketing campaigns is something else that is underutilized by many companies. The complaint that I often hear is that a marketing campaign is run, nothing is seen for 6 months and then BANG...a prospect closes that may have come from the marketing campaign. No one knows how the prospect became a customer, what the process was to close them and why other prospects from the same campaign didn't close. If you aren't tracking your opportunities you are missing out on quite a bit! For example we deliver feedback surveys to our clients' outside sales reps. The survey has 3 questions. 1) Did the call/meeting happen? 2) Was all of the information provided accurate? 3) Is this moving forward into the next steps of your sales process? The answers ensure that sales is following up on the opportunities you are passing them and gives you an idea of the quality of the prospects so you can evaluate the success of the campaign. This same approach should be adapted to top of funnel marketing campaigns as well. For example, if you run 4 events and each produces 100 leads. If you then close the loop and collect feedback from all the leads, you are now in a position to go back and say "Campaign X brought 100 leads and 60% were deemed viable, Campaign Y 70%, Campaign Z 65%, but Campaign A only had a 30% success rating". Now you know that you need to either revamp Campaign A or can it altogether as it isn't matching the success rates of your other campaigns.
There is a long list of other things that I or most anyone could point out. The point is that there is likely a tremendous amount of untapped potential within your current sales and marketing investments. Look into all the available features within your CRM. Nurture the 70% of the leads you produce that would normally go to waste. Act on the market intelligence reports you get from the inside sales teams. Use that big fork!
Virtually every client that we work with measures our overall success by how much net new revenue they close from the fully qualified opportunities that we pass them. I agree that this is the most important overall evaluation point, but it takes some time for sales cycles to happen. Teleprospecting campaigns add value in three main stages. It is imperative that you not only recognize those stages, but that you are consistently evaluating each outbound campaign according to them. We use the stages and criteria below to evaluate the success of our client campaigns at strategic intervals.
Stage 1: Initial Quality Assessment. (This occurs immediately following the first call.)
Our reps fully qualify sales opportunities and send them to our clients salespeople for follow up. As part of the qualification, we book an introductory conference call for the assigned salesperson. The day after the conference call was due to occur, we send a very brief quality survey to the salesperson to give us an indication as to how the call went. The survey consists of three main questions.
- Did the scheduled call occur?
- Was the call a Success?
- Will there be a next step with this prospect (if yes, what)?
At this stage of the game, the best you can hope for is that your qualified opportunities have moved into your sales process (not forecast) and that your rep has gotten him\herself in a position to sell your services\products. This isn't the point in time where something would be forecasted, even the most eager salesperson would agree. You've got to have at least one more discovery call to truly determine whether or not this prospect is forecast worthy. For this reason, it is far too early to judge the success of the lead by whether it's forecasted or closed. Therefore, you must look at the quality of the interaction and the validity of the information passed. These three questions allow us to determine that.
Evaluation Metric: A minimum of 75% of the opportunities that you qualify and pass should receive a "yes" to all three questions.
Value Add: Reps are busier talking to more qualified prospects, thus you maximize the money you are spending on them.
Stage 2: Forecasted within 90 days
As a rule of thumb, an actual opportunity should have reached forecast for our clients (20% or greater chance of closing) within at least 90 days from the date of first conversation with a sales rep. In the best scenarios, we are able to simply ask our clients to run a forecast report of our opportunities for us out of their CRM that we can compare to our list of opportunities delivered. Any opportunity that reached forecast within the first 90 days makes the cut as a successful effort by AG (regardless of outcome). If our client isn't able to pull that data for us, we will re-survey the sales reps that have received opportunities to learn whether or not they have forecasted them, and for what amount.
Evaluation Metric: Of the opportunities that you pass that get a 100% Initial quality assessment, a minimum of 40% should find themselves on your sales forecast.
Value Add: You are able to get a preliminary forecasted MROI on your teleprospecting campaigns. Make appropriate changes, stop all together, or get a nice early pat on the back :-)
Stage 3: Closed Business
As our opportunities age on our clients' forecasts we look to the ‘6 month mark' as the time when we will start to expect a percentage of the opportunities to begin closing (this does vary based on sales cycle by client, but 6 months is a safe time to begin checking). This is the final and most important evaluation point for the measure of the success of your teleprospecting campaigns. Again, in most cases our clients can simply report this information back to us, but if need be we will do the digging for them. From a self preservation standpoint, it is work worth doing :-).
Evaluation Metric: This varies by organization...you know your own close rate.
Value Add: I don't need to explain this one!!
This is how we evaluate the success of our programs. We believe it's got to be done in stages, not just looked at from the closed business angle. How do you evaluate the success of your teleprospecting campaigns?
If you have established your teleprospecting team, you may already be up and running with your inside team generating leads for your outside sales team. This is great, and exactly what the purpose and goal of your teleprospecting efforts should be. One important question you need to ask yourself, and your outside team, is how are the quality of those opportunities?
It is great to know that you are supplying your outside reps with qualified opportunities, but how beneficial have they really been? It is just as important, if not more important, that beyond the quantity of opportunities you provide that you also reach out to solicit feedback about the quality of those opportunities. Your inside team should focus beyond just appointment setting, but to pass the highest quality leads possible. Here at AG we have coin phrased this as our ‘Post Feedback Process', PFP.
Why is this important? If you are anticipating a certain ROI from your telesales efforts, you need to be ensured that the calls that your team has scheduled are occurring. Life isn't perfect and calendars are not set in stone, so there are many times when a sales rep is not able to connect with the prospect. In these situations it is important that you have your teleprospecting team reconnect to re-schedule the call. Your outside team most likely does not have the time nor bandwidth to play phone tag, so don't rely on them to re-schedule. Keep an eye on the averages, and be weary when you see a ‘no-show' rate higher than 13% of the calls scheduled. If that is the case, maybe your team is pushing the prospect too hard on the phone and you need to retrain their cold calling techniques.
Beyond ensuring that the calls have occurred, how successful were they? Did the outside rep deem the call a success; is their sales potential, can this close within your average sales cycle? This is extremely important feedback to obtain to make sure that everyone is on the same playing field. If you notice that more than 25% of the calls that occurred were not successful, you need to find out why. Is your team missing information in their opportunities, are you targeting the wrong size organization? Gaining this knowledge and feedback from your outside reps will help your team focus on finding the good opportunities and weaning out the bad.
There is a lot of insight that can be gained from soliciting feedback and you will start to see strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and those occasional threats that will help you improve upon your current sales prospecting process and give your teleprospecting team the competitive edge they need to meet their goals and yours.
What do you think?
In my recent webcast, Perspectives in Teleprospecting - A Closed Loop Strategy, I talked about the importance of having a closed loop feedback process in place to track all of the qualified leads that your telesales team is uncovering. When you are investing time and money in a lead generation program you want to be able to prove the effectiveness of your campaign and make sure that all of the qualified opportunities that your team is passing over to sales are being nurtured appropriately.
When we instituted a closed loop process a few years ago we noticed a higher level of accountability from the sales reps that we were passing leads to and our client’s project engagements became longer.
We implemented a process where we would send a very brief email survey out to the sales rep that received our lead after they had the introductory call with the prospect. This gave the sales rep an opportunity to let us know if they were able to connect with the prospect and if the information we gathered during our qualification call was validated. It also gave them the ability to give feedback on any other questions we could have asked to make the lead more qualified. This process held the sales rep accountable for following up on the opportunity that we generated and also gave them piece of mind that, if it was off target, we would refine our messaging/qualification questions to reflect the feedback that they gave us. All of the feedback that we received was tracked and reported on at the end of each month so that our client could see what percentage of feedback was positive, how many of our leads were moving forward in the sales process, and which reps were best at giving us feedback. One of my clients, at the end of a quarter, noticed that one of their sales reps had only given us feedback on 45% of the opportunities we passed over, whereas another rep had given us feedback on 90% of all the leads we uncovered (industry averages suggest that you should be receiving a minimum of 75-80% of feedback on all of your passed leads). My client decided that they wanted us to scale back our prospecting in the one sales rep’s territory and focus more attention on the other sales rep who was more engaged in the process. This was a strategic decision that they were able to make based on data that we didn’t have before implementing a closed loop strategy.
I have also seen an increase in the length of time our clients engage in a teleprospecting campaign with us since implementing a closed loop process. Before we started following-up and tracking all of the feedback on our leads, our clients sometimes had a hard time justifying their budget if their sales team hadn’t closed any business during our pilot program. Now we were able to accurately report on the percentage of positive feedback that we were getting from the sales team and exactly how many of our opportunities were moving forward in the sales process (how much on pipeline/forecast). This provided our client with some compelling ROI numbers that helped justify additional budget to continue the campaign. Often times this was data that hadn’t even been entered into our client’s CRM system.
If you have an inside sales team in place, or outsource this function, it is important to track what is happening to all of the opportunities that are being passed to sales so that you have an accurate picture of the effectiveness of your lead generation campaigns.
What do you do to measure the quality of the leads you receive or send over?
Have you ever dined at a restaurant where the
gratuity is automatically added at the end of every bill? If you
haven’t, I can tell you that it certainly does not compare to the
dining experience where the server is accountable to fulfilling the
satisfaction of their clientele in order to earn “positive feedback” –
the tip. After my server forgot about my meal, then brought fish when
I wanted a burger, it all made sense as to his service, when I received my bill with 20%
gratuity automatically added. I can assure you I never revisited that
restaurant.
As part of our training process, we emphasize the
importance of a "highly qualified" opportunity. Why is this important?
Well, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. You can tell your
inside rep over and over you need leads with shorter timeframe, a more defined
budget, or a more fleshed out “scope of opportunity”, but if they are hitting
their activity numbers, these requests could fall on deaf ears. Nothing
will have a greater impact on developing prospecting strategies quicker
and more efficiently than holding your BDR accountable with a closed loop feedback process.
Closed loop feedback opens doors of communication
that may have never existed before. If the manager at the restaurant never received a complaint about her waiter's poor service, how would they know that their meager tip was left for any other reason? If your
inside rep is compensated on positive feedback, you bet they will reach
out to the outside sales rep as to why the previous opportunity was not
deemed successful and how they can better qualify the next one.
Bridging this communication will accomplish optimal end results for all
parties involved.
For more information on the closed loop process, check out part three of Pete's eBook, Driving Marketing ROI.
The other day I had a new client ask me "what do you think the number one thing is that makes a new project successful?" I quickly replied, "When our client looks at us as an extension of their marketing and sales team and not as a vendor". I went on to explain that when a client is engaged in our process and communicates their expectations then the outcome is a positive one for both parties.
Clients that are engaged in our process from the start of a project typically have the highest success rates. We can create scripts and messaging, put together weekly reports, and provide visibility into our day to day operations, but if a client doesn't provide their own feedback on the leads we are generating and on the work that we are doing, then there is no way for us to refine and improve on what we are delivering. I always encourage my clients to listen in on calls with their BDR or to role play with them so that they are comfortable and confident with the message that we are taking out to the marketplace.
Making sure that clear expectations are set is another way to ensure success. Whenever I start a new project I ask my client, "how do you define what a lead is," and "what are your expectations from this campaign and how will you judge whether it is successful or not?" You might think that the answer is always "we want you to generate as many qualified sales leads as possible" but this isn't always the case. In some instances a client might have a list of 2,000 contact names sitting in their CRM system that they need cleaned and dispositioned. In other cases our client is most interested in gathering critical market intelligence within their target market. It is my job to make sure that our goals are aligned and that we are providing strategic insight into how to make our client's campaign as successful as possible.
If you have ever used an outsourced lead generation vendor, how have you felt about your relationship with them?