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?
Today's Sales Prospecting Perspectives post is from Chris Lang, AG's Sales Director.
Have you ever seen some of the formulas used to determine the level of quality on a marketing qualified lead (MQL)? Some are amazingly complex. Other than the numbers that were crunched to create the Large Hadron Collider (particle accelerator used to smash sub atomic particles together and find different particles we never knew about as well as the true meaning of the song "Bird is the Word"), there is nothing more complicated than MQL scoring. It has something to do with the number of times someone hits the website, crossed with the day of the week, add 5 if they opted in for the white paper and then give them a certain number of points depending on the flavor of popsicle they like. Marketing tracks behavioral patterns, opt ins, web hits, shoe size, everything! They are kind of like the CIA when you think about it.
Inside Rep: Hi is this John Doe?
John Doe: Yes this is. What is the purpose of your call?
Inside Rep: This is Chris Lang from AG Salesworks, we do (insert elevator pitch). I see that you have opened my white paper 8 times, you are a VP marketing, you have clicked through 32 pages on our site, there is a new position open for qualification reps, you like rainy days and according to the bumper sticker on your car you would "rather be fishing". I thought it might be a good time to call you.
John Doe: wow you certainly did you homework, I guess I can give you a couple minutes, how did you find out all of this?
Inside Rep: I'm in marketing sir; I know things about a lot of people. By the way, stop using so much garlic in your pesto sauce. It's giving your wife an upset stomach.
Marketing goes all out to track their campaigns and prove effectiveness. Some sales teams however....not so much. Sure we track what we close, because those are the only numbers that we find important. But, we should be able to track and put a value on all sales leads from the initial discussion all the way to close. It is the best way to find out where things are dropping off in your funnel, where you have the most wins, how you fare in competitive situations and how effective marketing is in delivering quality leads.
Sales executives aren't always the best at putting a probability to close on their leads. Often times when a sales rep is asked to report on the quality of lead he/she will use a simple "Stunk" or "Pretty Good" as a response. Sometimes this is to protect themselves and pad their numbers and other times the sales person simply doesn't know how good the lead is yet. No one wants to say they got a lot of great leads, but didn't close much business, so they wait to forecast them until they absolutely know what is going to happen. This leads to a large gap of unpredictable sales pipeline as leads essentially go stealth for months until they suddenly pop up on forecast in "Proposal Stage". This is counter to what my sales and marketing VP's want to know as they look for the closing probability of every opportunity that comes in our door.
My marketing VP doesn't like it when he asks for my report on lead effectiveness and I hand him a napkin with "A couple stunk, most were pretty good, a few are nurture accounts and one was a real jerk". He found it tough to quantify this in his marketing ROI spreadsheets. Similarly, my sales VP used to get a bit testy when I told him that we could close anywhere from 1 million in net new business to about 300 billion by quarter end. Tough for operations to predict the future work loads with a forecast like that.
With these issues in mind, we came up with a system here to value sales leads after the initial call. It's not nearly as complex as the MQL system because NASA hasn't returned my calls for help, but it allows me to see the likelihood of a deal closing after one call and gives the marketing team a great view of what campaigns are going to yield the most revenue. It runs off of a 100 point scale with a certain number of points given to an opportunity based on factors such as: pains and needs, prospect's ability to make a decision and sign the check, whether it is an active initiative or not, what factors could blow the deal up, what the timeframe for purchase is and what other options the prospect could use rather than us. After each call, as rep has to re-grade the prospect based on any new information they find out. If all of a sudden they find out the prospect is not the decision maker, the lead score drops. If they hear that the timeline to purchase has moved up, the lead score would increase.
In the end, I can tell what the probability is on a deal closing from start to finish. When you combine this with the efforts of marketing to track leads in the initial stages, we are able to look at each lead, find out where it came from, how long it was in marketing, why and when sales actively pursued it, what the chances of it closing are and if it doesn't close why. We are also able to accurately predict our new revenue from quarter to quarter, see where deals drop off of forecast and we know what behaviors lead to wins on the sales side.
There is always going to be an unpredictable side to sales as long as we sell to people. Prospects change their minds for so many reasons we can't keep track of them. That being said, there is also a very predictable side to sales that says prospects following certain patterns have a higher likelihood of closing. Sales should take a page from some of the better marketing teams out there, learn how to track these behaviors and link them to close rates. It is much more effective than using napkins.