I can say without hesitation that I enjoy what I do. Running an inside sales team my days can vary from training with my employees, collaborating with my clients, motivating the team…the list goes on. But with every job we enjoy, there are few things we are tasked with doing daily/weekly/monthly that we would prefer to pass off to someone else. In my case the task I detest the most would be without a doubt anything having to do with list generation. I would rather make cold calls every day of the week (including Saturdays and Sundays) than have to spend hours scrubbing contact information on my cold call lists or inbound leads.
For those of us who can identify with this painful exercise, you know what it’s like after spending an extended period of time checking through thousands of “leads” for duplicates, incomplete contact information or existing customers. Eventually you feel as if your eyes are going to begin bleeding profusely and then fall out of your head. Meanwhile both marketing and sales are certainly willing to provide input on the list, how it should look, the profile contacts we should be targeting etc…but when push comes to shove nobody seems to want to get their hands dirty in taking the time to sift through the list or inbound leads that are worth following up on.
Understandably it’s one of those jobs that nobody wants to assume, but if you don’t who will?
I remember the first outside sales rep I was responsible for supporting back in the day. He was a great guy, but he never seemed to have an appreciation of all the work that went into finding a contact, getting them live and then converting them into an opportunity. Surprisingly enough, up until that point he had never made a cold call in his life so he had no real perspective on what it took. He would often dump a list of just company names on me and say… “Have at it!”with a wink and a thumbs up as if he was doing me a favor. Then he would cap it off by saying “Oh and by the way, I would scrub this list because there could be a few customers in there along with the a few other folks I may have proposals out to.”
Now I’m not expecting this guy to provide me a list of contacts with direct dials that pick up the phone and say “you have wonderful timing. I want to buy your product. Put me on the phone with your rep right away!” …but throw me a frikin’ bone here.
The more work you are willing to put in on the front-end will only benefit everyone in the long run. Better quality lists mean your inside sales reps are finding a larger quantity of leads AND they’re finding them at a faster pace. This larger volume of opportunities are converted to the outside team who now have a larger universe of deals they are working which means there is a higher likelihood they will close (assuming your sales team is adequate). Once the deal comes in everyone looks like a hero and the marketing team, inside sales team and the outside reps can all sit around a circle holding hands and sing Kum-Bay-Yah!
If you are dumping a list of marketing leads on the inside sales team that is filled with incomplete contact information, or is chock full of duplicates, then you are you putting them at an automatic disadvantage before they even pick up the phone. Have you taken into consideration how much that can negatively affect the progress of your campaigns or the growth of your pipeline?
Everyone should be prepared to get their hands dirty. We can use all the marketing platforms and fancy data fusion tools available to us out there to clean and de-dupe your leads, but ultimately you must face the facts that there still needs to be a degree of manual labor that should be required in order to get a truly clean list.
Point is, marketing and sales need to accept equal responsibility for providing the cleanest list possible. Sales reps should know their territory better than anyone and should be taking the time to scrub off the prospects they are already engaged with or they perceive are not necessary to pursue. Meanwhile marketing needs to come up with some kind process for doing their own pre-scrub of their inbound leads since 50% generally are junk. Hey I'm no genius, but I'm going to assume that the marketing lead from Jesse “The Body” Ventura at 123-456-7891 is probably not going to buy from you.
The success of every campaign I’ve been involved in running has always hinged on the quality of what you are calling into. I’ve said it before...guess what I’m going to say it again.. YOUR INSIDE SALES TEAM IS ONLY AS GOOD AS THE LIST THEY HAVE TO CALL ON.
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.
There can be a variety of factors that play into the success and/or failure of your telemarketing campaigns. If the campaign fails, it seems to me that the commonly accepted reason is the down economy, otherwise known as "no available budget." Other reasons for failure can range from the wrong industry focus, or off target messaging, or calling on the wrong title; the list goes on. The unfortunate thing is we tend to overlook what generally seems to be the most obvious problem, THE COLD CALL LIST.
You're putting yourself at an obvious disadvantage when you launch campaign with a low quality list filled with limited or inaccurate contact data. The good thing is most of the time it can be solved very easily. As long as you're not going after federal contacts or an obscure vertical, the list vendors we're working with these days can help to append your information to add better quality contacts with title, email, direct line etc. Problem solved right? Wrong.
The size of your calling universe generally is the primary issue that we often overlook. When running a campaign, how many companies/ prospecting names do you feel are necessary to effectively gauge its effectiveness? Traditionally, we've found that you will need at the very least 500 companies to give an accurate sense as to whether or not there is a demand/marketplace for your products.
I've had the unfortunate task of working with an outside guy who dropped 30 companies in front of me and expected that I could land a meeting in 10 of them. As much as I wanted to please my outside guy, I'm sorry to say I failed that task pretty miserably. At AG, our lead rate is just over 4%. So for example, If we have 100 conversations during the week, we'll end up passing 4 fully qualified sales leads. So let's assume I've spoken to 3 individuals in that list of 30 companies, I would be lucky to land a meeting in 4 of them. Honestly 4% is on the higher-end compared to other organizations I've worked with, and I mainly attribute that to our unique calling approach at AG. My point here is that the more you have to call on the better.
My rule of thumb - when doing your pre-campaign analysis start by evaluating the list size first. Anything less than 500 companies in my opinion are just not going to give you an accurate snap-shot of what the market truly has to bear. As much as we would like to theorize that there are more unique factors behind our lack of success, the answer can be much simpler than would like to admit to ourselves (or our boss).
What do you think?
When ramping up a teleprospecting campaign for a new client one of the questions I'm often asked is, "what can potentially hinder the success of this project?" While there are certainly several things that can get in the way of a successful lead generation campaign, the one that I feel is most important to talk about is data management - more specifically - the quality of the lists that a BDR is going to be calling on, how these lists are scrubbed, and how the information that is gathered during our calling is tracked and reported on.
The first step is to evaluate the quality of the list that your BDR is going to be calling on. Where did this list come from? How old is the data? Does the list have complete contact information that has been validated? Often times I will have a client who has thousands of records sitting in their CRM system that they want to export and give to us for calling. My rule of thumb is if the data is more then a year old then we won't get optimal results. It is important to also evaluate whether these raw leads have been contacted in the past and how often they have been sent marketing collateral. My suggestion to a new client is to pare down their list to about 300 target accounts that fit their ideal customer profile and then use a list generation tool or vendor to find accurate contact information. This has been proven more effective in generating qualified sales leads versus calling through a list of 1,000 contacts that have been sitting in your CRM for 4 years. Craig talked about his five "musts" for cold calling lists, and you should read more about those here.
This brings me to another point - the importance of having a well maintained CRM system. Internally, we use SalesForce.com, which I find to be a fantastic tool. Many of our clients will have us work out of our own instance of sf.com but we are also happy to work out of theirs. When the latter is the case I always stress the importance of allowing us to create custom reports and dashboards so that the client is receiving the most up to date metrics. The benefit of working out of our client's instance of sf.com is that the BDR can see any activity that has been made into an account, or if an opportunity has been created. Yet this is only effective if our client's sales reps are updating sf.com. There have been many cases where a BDR begins calling into an account only to find that one of our client's sales reps is already working with them and the sales process is well underway - yet there were no notes put into sf.com that would alert the BDR to this. If we are working out of our own instance of sf.com I will ask for a "Do Not Call" list to ensure we don't call any current clients or prospects that are currently in the sales process. Making sure the sales reps are updating sf.com is also important when we want to track how many of our qualified sales leads are on forecast and how much business has closed. This is important information to have when proving ROI from your teleprospecting campaign.
Having a scrubbed target list and a well-maintained CRM system will help to ensure the success of your teleprospecting and lead generation campaigns.
What else have you seen that can get in the way of an effective teleprospecting initiative?
For my final blog of the
year, I'll keep it simple with five suggestions on what you should be
looking for from your cold call list in 2010:
1) Never buy a name over a year old:
Generally once you get past 12 months on prospect data- some portion of
their contact information is inaccurate. A different extension, to a
change in title, to a departure from the company etc.; generally the
information isn't worth the amount you paid once it has aged over a
year. Another thing to keep in mind is if the list provider is not able
to provide a date of validation or when the name was acquired at all,
there really is not point in purchasing a name to begin with.
2) Always buy a name- do not rent!:
I can honestly say that I have never had a positive experience with a
list rental. Though the rental may be cheaper, generally the response
rate is much lower. From my experience we have seen it around 2% vs. 5%
on a purchased list. Plus, you have no vision as to who has been
touched on the list unless a prospect expresses some interest in
return. Bottom-line - if you don't OWN the name there really is no
reason to invest your dollars.
3) Get a sample list of names before you purchase a full list:
You should be allowed the test the vendor out a bit in order
to get a feel for the quality. Those of you who have bought a list in
the past understand that a decent list is not going to be cheap. The
better companies typically offer a sample of 25 names to test out based
on your specific list criteria.
4) Make sure the vendor allows for the option of re-imbursement:
The better vendors out there will pay you back for a bounced email or
disconnected line. In fact, they appreciate you letting them know
because the bad data will be scrubbed out and their database is filled
with only the most accurate up to date contact info.
5) No list is perfect:
As much as we would all like to think that there is a list out there
ready to be purchased that will net you an un-ending amount of leads
and a ton of closed biz, guess what...it doesn't exist. In order to get
a dream account list together of great titles with accurate contact
info there needs to be some manual input. Generally a good purchased
list can get you 60-70% of the way there, but you (or your intern) will
absolutely need to pick up the phone to track down additional prospects
along with some pre-scrub of the contact info in order to put your
teleprospectors in the best position to find fully qualified leads.
I hope everyone enjoys their New Year.
I'll be back next week to discuss some of the important traits required
in order to be a successful teleprospector.