So, you have set your next years goals. You know what revenue numbers you need to hit and you have established the campaigns and marketing events that are going to get you there. Now you need to execute and follow up on your leads. Whether you are planning on outsourcing your teleprospecting team or not, put yourself in the shoes of the sales team and make sure that you are providing the components needed for your efforts, and theirs, to be successful. I have had the opportunity to work for a variety of clients. Some coming right out of the gates with little to no name recognition (some with products still in Beta!), companies with cutting edge technology, others part of the Fortune 500. From my experience, I know what I need to be successful. I am going to share with you some of the preliminary homework that you need to do in order to make your time and investment as successful as possible.
- Product Knowledge: I know this seems obvious, and it is. Of course we need to know what you have in order to sell it. Yet keep in mind that [our] goal is not to “sell the product” but to uncover the pains and establish the needs in support of your solution. Therefore, what helps the calling efforts is a clear understanding of which capabilities resonate with whom within the company.
- Competitors/Differentiators – The number one reason that a company is not interested in your solution is because they are using something or someone else. It is extremely important to have as much information on your competitors as there is on your solution and what differentiates you in the market. This knowledge provides us with the ability to speak specific to inefficiencies of your competitors and extract pain points that the prospect may not have been aware of in the past.
- List – Whether you outsource, or have an Inside Sales Team, there is nothing better than being provided a targeted list of contacts that are involved, someway or another with what your product addresses. It becomes extremely time consuming when Inside Sales folks are provided lists with no contact names, email addresses and/or phone numbers. That’s not to say they can’t find that information but it significantly impacts the number of dials that they are able to make.
- Marketing – Sadly, the phrase “can’t judge a book by its cover” does not always apply. It is important to make sure that your first impression counts. Is your website up to date? Do you have case studies? What is your marketing material? Very often an Inside Sales Rep is asked to send additional information and there are times that I am reluctant to send something, because I feel that it demeans the quality of my clients’ product. Prospects want to see comparisons, specifics, and testimonials (i.e. case studies). Have PDFs that speak specific to the top 3 or 5 highlights of your solution, and make sure these are marketed towards the CEO, CIO and Director level contact.
These are a few of the key areas that I find to be most useful when building a successful teleprospecting campaign. When all of these areas are addressed, I can go into my calling efforts with the confidence of knowing what the value proposition is and the value that we can provide. That leaves only the hardest part left, catching the prospect live….but we have tricks for that too :D
How did everyone’s week go? We had some great blogs this week by Laney Pilpel, Craig Ferrara, Peter Gracey and Chris Lang.
As always I would like to point out a particular article I found this week that’s worth noting. Paul Castain wrote a blog titled: The 7.5 Deadly Sins Of Prospecting!. It listed 7 (and a half) things that you should not be doing while prospecting. It’s a great way to see if you are indeed guilty of these “deadly sins” and how to keep from committing them!
Monday August 23rd
Polite Persistence Pays Off For Inside Sales – Laney Pilpel offers some great pointers as to how and why being polite but yet persistent can pay off.
“The theme here boils down to this: Persistence, or what we like to call at AG, “Polite Persistence.” I think that sales people tend to get a bad reputation for being too forward, which is why we train our reps to be persistent in the nicest way possible. We accomplish this in many ways, from our tone and messaging to the amount of times we contact prospects throughout our call plan. There are two examples that really stand out in my mind and exemplify how we really go above and beyond to get the most meaningful conversations and quality opportunities possible without giving up.”
Tuesday August 24th
A Call Plan Can Help To Fix The Gap Between Sales and Marketing – Craig Ferrara touches on an article that he read this past week that discussed how to best deliver “sales ready leads”. He went on to explain how building an effective lead nurturing process was important.
“The last thing we want is that gap between your sales and marketing team to become a place where sales leads go to die. To prevent this from happening I suggest start by putting a call plan in front of your inside sales team. Step one should involve following up on any inquiry (assuming it's been scrubbed in some way) within 48 hours. As we all know, the longer a lead ages it becomes less and less likely the lead will convert to an opportunity for your sales team.”
Wednesday August 25h
0#, The Oldest And Still Most Effective Move An Inside Sales Rep Can Use – Peter Gracey discusses the oldest trick in the book, hitting 0# and how important it can be when getting key pieces of information in your calls.
”By requiring that you speak to someone live on every call you end up casting a wider net within your target organization and most importantly you get yourself a sales ready lead faster than your competition.”
Thursday August 26th
3 Ways To Shorten Sales Cycle – Chris Lang offers some great points on how to shorten the sales cycle.
“I certainly encourage all sales and marketing executives to find new ways to increase their forecast. However, you should not turn your back on the proven methods that work just because they are “old school” and in many cases tougher to do. Roll up your sleeves, do the dirty work and close some deals.”
That covers it! We hope you all have a great weekend! See you Monday!
I just finished reading a great article from Josh Stailey with The Pursuit Group regarding how to best deliver “sales- ready- leads”.
http://www.imakenews.com/thepursuitgroup/e_article001828768.cfm?x=bhcrTyc,b26bn4tC
He touches on the misaligned expectations that exist between marketing and sales (my favorite topic) and how it results in limited attention being paid to those early-stage opps. As a result, most of them run the risk of falling through the cracks. Josh makes some excellent suggestions to prevent this from happening such as leveraging technology, launching an effective inbound marketing program, along with the use of metrics to link marketing leads/programs to revenue growth. But the most important suggestion he made (in my mind anyway) was building an effective lead nurturing process and I wanted to expand a bit on this..
Josh points out that nurture process can last for months, so both marketing and sales need to have an action plan in place to stay on that prospect's radar. At AG it's simply "the call plan". While I’m a firm believer in leveraging every tool at your disposal, we’ve learned the hard way that no matter how creative you get in reaching out to your prospects, nothing beats a good ol' fashioned phone call.
The last thing we want is that gap between your sales and marketing team to become a place where sales leads go to die. To prevent this from happening I suggest start by putting a call plan in front of your inside sales team. Step one should involve following up on any inquiry (assuming it's been scrubbed in some way) within 48 hours. As we all know, the longer a lead ages it becomes less and less likely the lead will convert to an opportunity for your sales team.
Most inside sales teams recognize the importance of continual follow-up with our prospects, but what we learned over the years is that you cannot rely solely on email or solely on the phone. It requires an effective combination of the two to quickly determine if an interest exists now or down the road. The problem with using email alone is that it tends to be less personal and the prospect may feel less inclined or compelled to contact you when they are starting to evaluate. When you rely only on the phone, you'll recognize, as many do in teleprospectng, that people rarely call you back. As a result you might find yourself out of the loop on the details when let's say they are actually getting close to potentially putting out an RFI/RFP.
The theory behind our call plan is that you can't assume that your prospect will ever respond to you. A consistent and deliberate approach combining both phone and email will greatly increase the chances that you will hear back. Hey- it may not be the response you are looking for, and you may get some folks that aren't all that fond of your persistence...but at the very least it will allow you to determine if the prospect is worth pursuing further and how much nurturing may be required.
I was looking at my blogs over the last few months hoping for some inspiration for this week’s post and realized that I’ve been at this for just about a year. At least once a week I’ve “attempted” to come up with some original and compelling content to discuss, and I’m not gonna lie there certainly have been some weeks that I’ve struggled.
My first thought when I was tasked with writing my blog last year was- Isn’t this something that the Marketing team should be handling? I mean what value can a sales guy or sales ops guy add to the process? My second thought was, is it possible for me to come up with a unique topic to discuss after a few months of doing this? But as my VP of Marketing pointed out at the time - “You’d be surprised at the variety of topics you can come up with the experience you have gained helping to run this business for the past 5 years”
Well, I can honestly say that as much of a challenge as this has been on occasion, I cannot deny how valuable the process has been for me. What I’ve discovered is that blogging should not just be reserved for your marketing team. Our president, directors, sales team, sales ops, training team on down to our business development reps have all been included in the process.
What I’ve recognized, along with my fellow bloggers here at AG, is there is so much we can discuss when it comes to teleprospecting and cold calling. Hell, we talk about it in theory all day long with our management team and employees so why not use this as a collaboration tool for our organization along with all of the other sales teams out there trying to accomplish the same thing. Not only that but if you truly take the time to sit down to think of a topic, you can come up with unique content or at the very least take another spin on a topic you’ve already covered. By having to put these ideas on paper, this process has forced me to methodically think about what I do on a daily basis.
As I was looking back at all of the AG blogs over the past year, there were a few concepts discussed that are not always being put into action as regularly as I would like. This process, I’ve discovered, has also been a great way to self police myself and others I work with. Again, it’s great to talk about all of this in theory but if you are not putting it to practice then what’s the point? Practice what you preach baby!
Another fortunate benefit of this entire process is all of the great content I've been exposed to from other folks who understand what it takes to effectively cold call and to motivate inside sales teams. It has also provided me food for thought on the variety of ways I can manage my group. Here are a few blogs I would highly recommend reading - Paul Castain's Sales Playbook and Smashmouth B2B Blog: Sales & Marketing Demand Gen
If you, or your team are not active contributors to the blogosphere, consider giving it a try. At the very least it can get you thinking about best practices as it relates to your business and can expose you to other great content out there that could inspire you to become a better manager/employee/colleague/ Dance instructor…you name it.
Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest entry from one of our BDRs, Stephen Wolff.
It is always difficult to answer the most common question asked of me when I meet new people. “What do you do for work?” I always tell people I work as a “Sales and Marketing Consultant.” The reason I say this is because I do more than just find “leads” for AG Salesworks clients. Part of our responsibility as a Business Development Representative (BDR) is to not only find “quality sales opportunities” but to get marketing information on what is going on in the businesses that we call into. The information we uncover is key to building our clients’ forecasts. The sales reps can tailor their pitch, due to the level detail outlined in our opportunities, making the most effective use of time spent with prospects.
When I begin calling on a prospect I have three goals in mind. First is to get the lead. Second, if the prospect is not interested, get some information on why they are not interested, and third, set up a time to reconnect in the future when they would be more interested in evaluating a new product, anticipating that in the long run this is a chance to turn this prospect into an opportunity.
I think of my job as a detective. When I call I try to use every minute that I am on the phone with someone to get as much out of the call as possible. This can be tough with time constraints, meetings and people who just really do not want to talk to people taking up their time with sales calls.
I like to use Colombo’s lines “Oh, one more thing.” I find that people are willing to share one more thing with me in order to get me off the phone. This one thing may turn into a longer conversation that could bring out more pains and needs from the prospect and in time, turning this ‘not interested’ person into an opportunity for our clients. Every little bit of information helps. It may not get me an opportunity today, but the information I gather can only help me to find that opportunity down the road. Usually, it’s this marketing information that sets AG Salesworks apart from everyone else in our field. When a prospect tells me that they are not interested, this is where we need to find out why. Is it because they are using a competitor and if so who? The information that we find in this part of our calls is extremely important as it creates the marketing intelligence that is often just as important as a lead is to our clients.
For sales, I find information such as when they plan their budgets, how they find funding, when their funding is released, and when their fiscal year begins. For marketing, it could be finding proper verticals, best collateral, and the organization size that best fits their product. Also, for both sales and marketing, other useful information can be how old their technology is, how often do they evaluate their solution, and when do they think they will be looking at vendors or upgrading/expanding on what they are using.
So all of this information can be very beneficial several ways, most notably: by a BDR to follow up at a later date knowing what to expect and set up a call accordingly, as well as by the marketing team to determine where they need focus their energy and marketing resources to build their future pipeline.
We, BDR’s, are like Detectives trying to find all the facts and get the whole story from each phone call so that we can provide the most information not only on the opportunities that we find but also on the prospects that are not opportunities…Yet.
I'll be honest, writing a blog wasn't my idea. I have pretty simple philosophy that governs my day once I step into the office. "Do the things that lead to closed business, anything else is a waste of time." So 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).
Fewer than one-half (45%) of B2B companies have only the basics of a social media presence-such as a Twitter and Facebook account, or a company blog-and only 32% are engaged in social media on a day-to-day basis, according to a survey from White Horse.
- MarketingProfs
"B2B Less Engaged in Social Media Than B2C"
Published June 2, 2010
I can honestly say I thought the idea was a waste of time, sharing the same opinion as many of my sales peers in thinking that all I need to do to close a deal is to get in front of a good prospect. From there my product knowledge, cheery demeanor and quick wit would win me the deal. Regardless of what I thought at the time, I followed the plan my VP had put in front of me to become involved in the marketing and sales community, answering questions, commenting on blogs, and Tweeting. I did my best to take the sales edge off of my comments and stopped trying to sell someone on every post. My goal was to share my knowledge and experience.
About 4 months into it, I noticed a couple of changes. I would go to my normal networking events and people would know who I am and actually approach me with questions. This deviated from my normal technique of stalking someone like a cheetah and pouncing when I thought they were at their most vulnerable. My emails were opened and replied to more often. People began calling me back after I left them a voicemail. All of this was nice, but like any sales person, if it doesn't result in closed business, it is not a good use of my time. My performance is evaluated by how much business I close. My CEO doesn't high-five me for the awesome response I put on a message board and he certainly doesn't pay me based on the insight of my blog posts (I'd be broke). So I took a look at my win/loss ratio on proposals sent out. It was going up. It went up more and more every month. I didn't change anything else throughout that time. The number of discovery calls I had was about the same, the number of proposals I sent out was the same, the message was the same, but I closed more business.
To find out why my close ratio went up, I looked at all my notes from my deals that closed. I found that about half of them had heard of me or AG Salesworks first hand or from a friend, colleague, etc... If you look at the 2008 notes, less than 30% of the people that received proposals from me had heard of AG Salesworks before someone from my team had reached out to them directly. Again, I didn't go to more events and my company didn't make any major changes in its marketing strategy that would rapidly increase our market awareness, well except for one - we initiated a strong social media campaign about a year ago.
It is tough to make a direct correlation from the AG social media push to closed business, but it appears the writing is on the wall. While, I have yet to receive a call from someone saying that they read my LinkedIn comment and would like to sign up for our services. The people I talk to, now know about AG. They are also becoming familiar with me and it is resulting in much better discovery calls with my prospects. Good discovery calls lead to next step meetings and next step meetings lead to proposals and proposals, well you get the point.
I think one of the reasons there is push back on social media campaigns comes down to effectively tracking and gauging their results. Many companies still have trouble determining the ROI from traditional marketing campaigns that have been used for decades, so the receptiveness to run a program that is potentially vaguer in its deliverable is low. That being said, just because you do not have the tools to quantify it, does it mean it cannot be quantified, nor does it mean it's not effective. Companies can't continue to do the same thing and expect different results. More and more of your prospects are leveraging social media. Take the time to work with your marketing team to figure out how you can effectively leverage social media. I am confident that once you experience the benefits I have, you too will be Tweeting, LinkingIn, Facebooking and even blogging!
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!
Budgeting can be a stressful endeavor no matter what your role is. Marketing budgets seem to be a particularly good example of this.
In my experience there are a number of factors that go into setting and allocating money for marketing programs over the course of a quarter/year. (I am by no means an expert on this subject).
With that on the table one thing that I hear a number of my clients say as they prepare and submit budgeting requests is "I am in the process of putting together my budget for the year and I am taking a look at what programs had a strong ROI and what programs led directly to revenue for the organization".
When an integrated marketing plan is in place there are obliviously a number of channels that are explored for promoting brand awareness, enhancing customer experience, generating and qualifying leads for sales to follow-up on etc. This is everything from targeted whitepapers, webinars, tradeshows, teleprospecting programs, etc.
From my perspective, teleprospecting, when run correctly, can provide extremely valuable insight for both your organization and your budgeting allocation process.
Teleprospecting is generally viewed as a great vehicle to move marketing qualified leads (MQL's) that have been generated to Sales Qualified Leads (SQL's) for sales to engage with. I completely agree with this viewpoint. But I do want to draw attention to another very important element that sometimes can be lost when evaluating teleprospecting ROI - Market Intelligence.
When you are running a teleprospecting program not only should you be getting fully qualified sales opportunities to deliver to sales, but you should be receiving a series of reports that will provide insight into your target market, the competitive landscape that exists, the objections that are being raised in reaction to your value proposition, and the list could go on. Your primary objective with this investment is to convert MQL's to SQL's, but with all the outbound activity and touch points that teleprospecting has with your market, the return can grow exponentially as you digest and analyze the data that is being captured and reported on.
This data should be fed back to you on a weekly basis to help hone/enhance your conversions of MQL to SQL. It is also crucial that it is leveraged to help in the development of your integrated marketing plans and help you allocate budget where you will receive the biggest bang for your buck.
I just bought I car this weekend. I have been considering a purchase for a while and looked at many brands. I wanted a new car, but did not really need one, at least not right away.
After visiting 6 or 8 dealerships I had decided to keep my car for a while longer. After all, I love my car and really didn't need a new one. Then as I drove by a large dealership near where I live, I thought, what the heck I will just see what they have. An hour later I drove out of the dealership with a new car. I love it! What happened? My sales rep, Ed made it really easy to buy. I told him I wanted a lower payment, more options, maintenance and tire and wheel insurance rolled in and did not want to put any money down. Then I braced myself for the negotiating. I would have been happy to land somewhere close.
Ed returned from his finance manager's office with approval for everything I had asked for. I was a bit surprised. All I could say was "OK, let's do it".
All too often I think we make it difficult for our clients to buy from us. We try to fit prospects into our selling process, pricing is not flexible, contracts are onerous, terms difficult to meet. It seems like common sense, but when I sat with my business partner and looked at our process and pricing structure we realized we were not making it easy enough for our prospects to become customers.
While we have been very successful over the past eight years, times have changed. Buyers want increased flexibility and reduced risk. Buying my car was a no brainer; we needed to become a lead generation no brainer for our prospects. I want my prospects to look at our offerings, price, and deal structure and say "why wouldn't we do this". We know our value is tremendous; we just have to give our prospects the chance to find out what a value we are.
Recently we have re-tooled our pricing model to be more accommodating. The reception has been tremendous. We have made it easy to buy and have seen our conversation and conversion rates dramatically improve.
Sometimes you just have to get out of your own way, you won't have to worry about selling so much if you help your prospects buy.
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.