If we all enjoyed the same things, there would not be much variety in the World. There would not be a strong need for Marketing, and one simple message would be able to reach everyone the same way. But that is not the case – thankfully, otherwise life would be pretty boring. Granted, we all strive for the same end result, but the means to getting there is always different for everyone. This same concept most certainly applies for the different roles within an organization. The communal goal within an organization is to make more money, and reach new revenue goals year after year. It’s not a simple task, and it takes the synchronization of different components to get there – marketing targets the right audience, IT increases the productivity of the staff, sales has the right messaging, and the CEO ensures the unity of the machine. With this thought in mind, you need to be aware and acknowledge that some divisions within an organization may have little concern over what another department is doing; they have their own problems and tasks to deal with. That being said, it is important as a business development representative, to ensure that the time and effort that you are investing to penetrate a company is not being deleted or thrown in the junk mail folder due to lack of relevancy.
When targeting an individual within a company, leaving voicemails and sending emails, make sure that your bullet points highlight the capabilities that are relevant to the needs of your audience. A Director of IT will have less interest in your SEO capabilities than your ability to integrate with their current investments. The VP of Sales is not going to see the value of your solution if you are highlighting your ability to be deployed within 3 months rather than your ability to increase conversion rates.
When targeting IT, focus on functionality, integration or productivity. IT folks don’t want to keep changing the solutions that they have purchased, that makes them look bad. So try to speak about how you can provide “additional value”. CEOs are often interested in everything working together and the departments having what they need to succeed. The detailed functionality of the solution is not as important as the message of increased productivity and cohesiveness between all departments.
We all play the sales game, and we all acknowledge that a lot of the success comes from reaching out to as many people as possible. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by sending a generic email with no relevance to the role of your prospect. Taking the time to customize your messaging to the specific needs of that department demonstrates the research done on your part and your sincere interest in making their job easier.
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?
The key to any success is a strong foundation. A good education will prepare you for your ideal job; a sturdy structure for a new building; and open communication for a strong relationship. The same theory applies when you begin your teleprospecting campaign. As spoken about in my webcast, before you start your calling efforts, you need to establish who your target market is, develop a strong value statement, and develop a list of contacts to call.
List generation is one of the more crucial parts to receiving immediate success from your teleprospecting campaign. There are several methods that our clients have to provide us with contacts, such as tradeshows, webinars, whitepaper downloads, or a Sales Reps' target account lists. More often than not, we are asked to generate our own list of contacts.
This can sometimes be overwhelming! Where do you start, who do you target, what title am I looking for, how do I find them?!? Throughout our years of teleprospecting, we have established quite an extensive database of contacts and organizations. But as times change, and people move on from organizations, our initial contacts may no longer be with the company, or we may be tasked to find contacts for a title that has yet to really establish itself within the workforce (oh how far Knowledge Management has come since 2008).
Before I get started, there are three areas that I use to seek out contacts; one is our own database, and the others are two list generating websites, NetProspex and Jigsaw. Both of these sites have been very helpful for my list generating needs. They allow me to search by Industry, Revenue Size, Employee Size, Location, and Title. One feature that I really like about NetProspex is that I can upload a CSV file of target companies that I want to pull contacts from, rather than pulling names for a general list of organizations. A feature that I like about Jigsaw is that it awards me points for updating and creating my own contacts. This helps tremendously to build my points and generate lists at no cost to my organization.
When I begin my list building tasks the first thing I need to establish is who the target market is. What industry has a need for the product, but more often than not, I start with what size organization should I target. This can be based either on number of employees or revenue. If the value of your solution is heavily reliant on providing synergy across different groups within an organization or increasing the efficiency of an employee's day, your focus may want to start on targeting organizations with a larger employee size. Just as equally important to keep in mind is the revenue size. Based on the cost of the solution, you need to target organizations that can justify the initial spend prior to receiving the ROI.
Once you have established your target organization, now comes the more challenging part, finding the right contacts. Both NetProspex and Jigsaw allow you to search by Job Function and Job Level. My suggestion when building lists is to pull at least three contacts for each organization. As title roles can vary within an organization, don't rely on one contact as the right person. For example, Director of Security can have one of two roles, physical security or IT security. When pulling contacts, try to get as specific as possible but also include a Director level or VP/C-Level contact to reach out to as well. Even though you may more often than not speak with their admins, they are a great source of knowledge and can point you in the right direction.
Lastly, if you are using a list provider like Jigsaw or NetProspex, keep an eye on the validation date. Given that there has been a lot of turner over and reduction in the workforce of the past two years, try to find a contact that has been validated within the last 6 months.
Even though list building can be time consuming, it is very important to provide your teleprospecting team with the foundation /contacts that they need to do well at their job. You want to avoid your team from spending too much navigating throughout an organization and to focus their time and efforts having quality conversations.
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?
There are many facets to teleprospecting -pre-call plan, qualifying questions, overcoming objections and so forth. Through my training experience at AG, there is not one common area of weakness; everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. I'd like to take this opportunity to go over some of the trends that I have come across and things to keep in mind when you reflect back on your own on your lead gen team's prospecting approach:
1. Be assertive! There are many ways to be assertive, but one thing to be aware of is not using submissive phrases such as, ‘I was hoping, ‘I was wondering'. Be present and be confident. As Jaime noted in one of her recent blogs, 90% of effective communication is non-verbal. So if we statistically are relying on 10% to be effective, don't waste it by sounding submissive and unsure. It's a simple tweak in the messaging that can have strong effects on the outcome of your conversation and your own mental state.
2. Ask questions - Whether you are leaving a voicemail, sending an email, or having a conversation, ask questions. Use the knowledge that you have gained through other conversations to ask a strong question. How are you currently addressing XYZ need? What are your plans around XYZ? Are you able to do this? Add a little assertiveness to your question and phrase it "When do you plan on..." (everyone else is doing it, when are you). The goal of asking questions should be to get the prospect thinking about what they are not doing, and uncovering the pains that others in their situation have already addressed through your solution.
3. Reference Others - This is such a useful tactic. Our ultimate goal is to either qualify or de-qualify a prospect/company. The sooner you can do this the faster you can move on to someone else. Something that I have found to be extremely helpful is to reference the others that you have reached out to within the organization. Give yourself the credibility you deserve and show the prospect how hard you've been working to speak with someone.
4. Be Honest - Prospects don't always know that you are not their sales rep. For that reason I think that it is very important to let them know of your role. Many times you will have a conversation and the prospect asks that you follow up with them in three weeks to discuss further. That's fine, and by all means do follow up, but I still find it important to let them know of your role. Understanding that you are not going to be able to provide them with the in-depth technical knowledge that they need in three weeks, they may ask to be connected with their sales rep instead. If so, set it up and back qualify.
5. Keep it simple - As much as I would prefer a prospect calling me back for a nice conversation, more often than not their busy day does not permit that. That being said, their busy day is most likely going to prohibit them from being able to read a long email. Therefore, keep it simple. As Nicole often speaks about, make sure you have a clear purpose within your email, don't product dump, and always end with the prospect thinking about how efficient/effective their current solution/process really is.
It's tough to write about a surefire way to approach teleprospecting, as there are so many different variables that can affect the success of your call. What's important, though, is to have a strong foundation, and that starts with your teleprospector! Be confident in the knowledge that they have of your product, the market and be confident in your own process, because YOU trained them.