As I've mentioned in previous blogs, list quality plays an enormous factor in our ability to drive leads to sales and build forecast (Are You Giving Your Inside Sales Reps A Good Quality List?) Ideally the time should be taken to weed out the inaccurate contact info, current customers and the independent consultants or students who download a whitepaper for "educational" purposes. What's the point of putting our inside sales reps at an automatic disadvantage before they even pick up the phone?
We often debate if we would prefer to target the individual that raised their hand or a clean list of high level contacts at your top 200 accounts. My two cents is that we would rather start from scratch with a list of companies and target contacts that have never been touched. The primary reason behind that is that I have complete control over the title and the organizations that I want to talk to. Don't get me wrong, a mixture of scrubbed leads with the low hanging fruit combined with clean target lists is the ideal scenario, with the obvious caveat that I don't have to deal with the time sink of scrubbing off the bunk data.
So let's assume you are working with this scenario. What titles would you typically target? Most of us are trained to call high into every company on every list, right?
Well, I'm not sure if I entirely buy into that on every list you're calling on. With your cold lists it's pretty typical to only have a VP or C-Level contact to call, but if you can, try to find multiple contacts since you're unlikely to get a response the higher you call. Tracking down those director and manager level titles make sense for a couple of reasons- 1) Working multiple angles gets you to an evaluator/decision maker much quicker to gauge interest 2)Most of the time the Director/Manager titles are the people you generally end up getting forwarded to anyway.
A majority of the leads resulting in closed business for our clients began with a conversation with those director level contacts or below. It's pretty rare for us to see inbound lead from a CIO who downloaded white paper....as most of us know he/she tasks others to do the preliminary research before they get involved.
We've struggled with a few of our clients who use lead scoring through their automated marketing platform to rate their leads, with a large percentage of scoring weighted heavily on the quality of the title. Unfortunately there were very few leads that scored high enough because most of the leads were directors, managers and analysts downloading the info. We've also learned (the hard way) that just because a lead receives a high score out of your marketing platform doesn't always mean they're the right person.
Eventually what we recognized with the inbound marketing lists was that it would be best to follow up based on the company vs. the title. Rather than just calling into a VP downloading info, we took the time to also contact the business analysts as well. Generally what we discovered was the analyst actually picked up their phone and more often than not, played an integral role in the decision making process. At the very least they could provide us the intelligence we needed to have a very healthy conversation when we DID get the big boss live.
The point is - don't neglect the little guys. Just because a lead didn't receive a 100% from your fancy marketing automation tool doesn't mean it should be ignored.
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!
You pick up the phone, dial the number, get their voicemail....and hang up. Log the call and move onto the next activity right? NO!!! Rewind and think for a second. Get yourself in the right mindset. An outbound dial that doesn't result in a conversation with someone at your target company is a failure to some degree. If you think about it, our job is to speak to people live. It doesn't always have to be the most appropriate contact in the organization. Almost anyone you catch live can give you some valuable information to help you progress that target company through your qualification process.
My message to you and your reps is simple. Don't hang up until you've spoken to someone live. At the end of the target contacts voicemail message, hit 0# and get sent back to the operator. Depending on the current status of the account in question (where they are in your qualification process) will determine what you do next when the operator answers the phone. I've had some lively debate on this concept as many on my team feel that once you find the most appropriate person to speak with you should only contact that person. My response to that is simple, if they are truly the best person to speak to about your technology and it's benefits to the their company then why don't they pick up your call. Go lower or higher, it doesn't matter. Even if you end up at the admin level you can ask that person if they know of a better time to reach your contact live?
This isn't about being pushy, nor is it about carpet bombing a target company by phone. The process of generating a fully qualified lead requires a great deal of information gathering. All of that critical information doesn't just reside within the mind of one individual. For that very reason, it is logical to speak to as many people as possible within each company as you paint the picture of a fully qualified opp. 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.
A big focus for the AG team last week was simple enough: talk to more people to get more quality conversations in, and the leads will come as a result. I think this was the perfect reminder of what the team needed to hear to really increase their productivity, and the resulting conversations and opportunities prove it. Every sales person knows this theory is true, but sometimes all of us need a gentle reminder to stay persistent and not to become lazy. In a note to the team last week, Pete Gracey, the president of AG said, “You have not done your job if you hang up the phone before you get someone live when prospecting into a company.” I found it interesting how the reported conversations doubled last week after he made this comment.
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.
- When it comes to calling into a company, we are hunters! A lot of companies out there will only talk to C-level contacts, and ignore the rest of the organization. We make it a point to not only reach out to the C level contacts and their assistants to get passed down, but then we contact managers and directors below them until we get the answer we are looking for. We may not always have the information available to us, so we utilize contact databases to find more people to call and never forget to use 0# to talk to as many people as possible. An interesting point here is how to incent inside sales people to have these quality conversations, and to stay persistent on those lazy days - what better way than to incorporate number of conversations into their compensation plans.
- We don’t stop at phone communication - we compliment it with immediate email follow ups. We realize that most of the executives we reach out to barely have enough time in their day to finish their work, let alone take a call from someone they don’t know. Because of this, we send brief, to the point emails to make the best use of their time. If they respond to us that they aren’t interested, we don’t stop prospecting them until we know why. The best example of this was seen through an email exchange between a insides sales rep and a prospect a few days ago. The inside sales rep emailed a prospect and the prospect said “I’m not interested. We already have a specific package for our industry that meets our needs.” Typically, I think someone might give up on this prospect or maybe even the company all together for the time being. Instead, this inside sales rep followed the email up by mentioning that many other companies like his were looking into this type of software and that if it was interesting to him now or in the future, he’d like to have a brief conversation now. The prospect replied by sharing more information about his environment, and referred him to their CFO, and the inside sales rep passed over an opportunity with the CFO the next day.
Sometimes we tend to become lazy about being persistent, especially when we get shut down by prospects when cold calling every day. Always remember that persistence pays off and not to qualify out a company until you know exactly why they aren’t interested.
The best managers I’ve ever worked with generally spoke from their personal experience and not necessarily from the sales 101 instruction manual. It was always encouraging knowing that my boss at one point walked in my shoes and understood what it took to do the job. While this can be applied to nearly any job, I’ve found that it is particularly important when you are making cold calls. From what I've seen, if you’ve never made a cold call in your life your opinion more often than not doesn't carry much weight with your inside sales reps.
I equate cold calling to going through basic training. It can be difficult but it helps to develop your character, and provides the core fundamentals to succeed in sales. I can't imagine a private having much respect for a superior if they haven't spent time in the trenches (pun intended).
A common problem I've grown accustomed to, especially at a few of my old sales gigs, was the love affair that existed between the sales team and marketing. Neither group was afraid of offering their 2 cents on how to best execute our calling efforts. Very rarely did they actually agree on much, so the daily balancing act attempting to keep both units happy could best be described as exhausting for the inside sales team. When all was said and done, with all of the back and forth, we found the results to be comparable to previous campaigns and at times slightly lower.
One of the bigger points of contention that existed between each team was the amount of daily activity they felt was required in order to attain the campaign lead goals. The numbers seemed to vary wildly.
Marketing thought banging 50 calls an hour was an achievable number. Their thoughts were that it was just a numbers game. Make the call and just move onto the next name on the list. What they weren't taking into account was the time it takes to do a little research on the company, if we've spoken to them in the past... not to mention logging post call notes. What if we get the prospect live for a 20 minute discussion?
When it came to the outside sales team we found they had more realistic expectations in terms of a call goal. Some of them actually made some cold dials back in their early sales career, so they understood the value of being able to do some research before picking up the phone. The problem we ran into with them was that they felt we needed to do more research than necessary. They wanted us to read through the prospect web-site in detail, read-up on all press releases, check out the company bio on our target prospect and look up their profile on Linkedin. While I'm a firm believer in pre-call planning, there has to come a point when you need to just pick up the phone. It was almost as if they wanted us prepped like they typically would be before a big presentation. The problem was it was impossible for us to hit a reasonable call number or get remotely close to our monthly lead goal if we were expected to do a half hour of research before we called into each prospect.
Ultimately what we settled on was a call goal that made sense from the "numbers game" perspective, but also allowed us a bit of time to build in some necessary research. This is essentially the philosophy that helped us develop our call plan around here at AG.
It can be difficult to determine a realistic call goal since each department generally seems to have their own expectations. Take the time to understand what your inside sales folks are facing before you commit to a number that makes sense to YOU. After all, they're the ones making the calls each day and should have the best sense of what is realistic. The point is, we all need to come to a collective understanding on a number that won't burn your inside sales team out, and at the same time provides us with the quality and quantity of leads that make everyone happy.
I’m sure you are all familiar with Salesforce. If you are not, reps using this tool have this great homepage everyday that has all the tasks for the day pulled up. After completing them, you can go ahead and create a new task for the following days. This is a refreshing way for inside sales reps to keep their day organized. That being said, with the number of outbound activity and quality conversations we have, it is important for our BDRs to further organize their day and keep it as efficient as possible.
When setting up a new task that will appear on your homepage, we have found that there are 3 important labels to help streamline your teleprospecting campaign. It is important to label the prospect status, next task, and time zone. Meaning, before opening a new task you should be able to identify it with these labels. The prospect status will identify the urgency of the task and help the rep to prioritize. A prospect can still be in prospect (P), contact identified (CI), or even interested (I) mode. The next task will prepare you for your next activity with the prospect and this might be a voicemail 2 (VM 2) or no contact (NC). Labeling the time zone (ET, CT, MT PT) will help to map your day out and will ensure you won’t waste unnecessary time opening west coast contacts at 9:30am in Boston!
Labeling tasks also helps from a management perspective. I would much prefer to have “contact identified” on my home page rather than a majority of tasks still in “prospecting” mode. By glancing at your homepage, it is easy to identify if more work needs to be done to uncover the best person to speak with in your rep’s accounts. The same holds true for labeling the next task. If I see a magnitude of tasks in voicemail 4, 5, or 6 it is clear that there needs to be attention focused around the messaging for that particular campaign. If majority of prospects are not responding at the beginning of the call plan, some additional work around scripting and emailing is most likely necessary.
This is just a small sample of how we help keep our days organized and efficient with such high outbound activity. Do you have any ways to keep your day busy days more structured?
I’ve just come back from a few days off with my Kids. We spent a nice long weekend at our favorite beaches on Cape Cod. On Monday of this week I learned a very valuable lesson regarding how often you need to reapply sunscreen to your children when at the beach. If you’ve seen my picture on our website, you’ll note that I am about as tanned as a glass of milk. My children have been blessed\cursed with the same pigment. Because of that, we are always very careful to lather them up with enough sunscreen to actually repel UV rays all the way back to the sun. However, I was a bit negligent in my fatherly duties on Monday only reapplying once over the course of the day. This resulted in two very crispy, red, and agitated kids at bedtime Monday night. Had I reapplied even one more time during the day, my kids would have slept like angels; instead we had several nice long chats over the course of a very sleepless night….and now for the gigantically desperate attempt to tie the reapplication of sunscreen to the training of teleprospectors!!
You see, training is like sunscreen for your inside sales reps. If you reapply training regularly to your inside sales reps, they stay sharp on the phone. They are reminded of best practices and how to use them. The reapplication of training strengthens core skills and maintains top performance. It gives you and your managers the forum to address any issues and concerns you have indirectly and to gain valuable insight into who your “A” players really are.
Overall, like reapplying sunscreen, reapplying your training continuously builds better and more productive inside sales reps. And, most importantly, it keeps them from getting burned on the phones. Stay tuned next week for more inventive attempts to tie real life situations back into teleprospecting.
Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you another guest entry from one of our BDRs, Jill Ryan.
Recently I was getting extremely frustrated with the concept of “maintenance mode.” How long can some one “maintain” contact with a person that has never answered before? I can’t stand calling someone for 6-12 months and leaving them voicemail after email, getting nothing in return. Part of this job is to gather market research on why someone isn’t answering so we can make the best use of our time. Personally, I pick up and hang up every time I see a surveyor on my caller ID. That person could be giving away the hope diamond and I would have no clue because I don’t feel like listening. Even after being in this business for a while and having countless conversations about the difficulties of cold calling, I still never throw the receiving end a bone.
So that leads me to this thought- why do I have no interest? I think the reason why people have no interest is because we are constantly on the defensive. “What are you trying to sell me? I have no money!” We are all guilty of assuming that the person on the line is on a mission to cram product down our throats. In my case, I’m not, hell I couldn’t sell you a CRM if I tried. All I want to do is see if you have a problem and if I can help solve it. So why not just say that directly? An email or a voicemail is not a close, an info commercial, or an opportunity to recite the year your company was most profitable. It is an opportunity to invite a person to have a quick conversation, point you in the best direction or tell you when to follow up. In the business of “Business Development”, we need to open the gates to new business in order to do our jobs.
Here are some ways I conquer my “maintenance mode” and get more people qualified in or out:
- Write new “maintenance mode” emails: Send your prospects a quick note with an updated case study, or some interesting new literature on your company.
- Call them during a holiday season or the summer and see how everything is going. The more memorable you make yourself, the better chance you have of building a relationship with that person.
I have had an outstanding response rate to this new email and I think it’s worth a shot to send it out to those people that declined your invitation 3-6 months back. Let’s face it, these people are not thinking about our products as much as we are. It’s our job to drop in and say hello and not lose to opportunity to share our story. Working on new personable attempts to make contact with your prospects will keep them out of the dreaded “maintenance mode” and place them into your pipeline.
Try this email:
Following up on information from XYZ Company—Jill Ryan
Mr Prospect,
I wanted to follow up on some information I have sent you over the past couple of months. I understood at the time, it did not make sense to connect. I wanted to touch base and see if you had any active goals regarding ____________ and ___________ at this time.
My role is at the very front end of the sales process; I just want to engage you early on with information regarding how we enhance ______________________.
Please let me know the best time to follow up, as I certainly do not want to bother you unnecessarily.
Hope all is well,
Jill Ryan
XYZ
000-0000-0000
Fill in the blanks with the problems you are looking to solve and see if you can conquer “maintenance mode”.
After writing my last blog entry on the introduction debates of cold calling, it got me thinking about other debates in the world of teleprospecting. Something that inside sales teams struggle with is deciding whether or not their call plan should include leaving voicemails for prospects. Some companies believe that they should call through lists and “no contact” prospects until they reach someone live. My question is, what if the people you are “no contacting” are in fact interested, but maybe they left their desks for a moment to get a cup of coffee? If this is the case for some prospects out there, isn’t leaving a voicemail necessary? I think it’s pretty clear what my argument is and I am interested in hearing what others have to say.
The key to leaving an effective voicemail comes down to the content of the voicemail. If you call someone and product dump, that will never catch their attention – at least that is what I have found in my experience. So what does work? Here are some of my tips for leaving an effective voicemail that will get you a call back:
Make it personal. Think about how many calls your prospect receives a day. Do you really think they want to hear you sound scripted when they listen to you? Sounding like a robot will result in your prospect immediately deleting your voicemail before they hear it in its entirety. Be your personable self while clearly stating the purpose of your call at the same time.
Avoid product dumping. This goes back to my robot theory – make your voicemail about your product without telling them every detail. Try another method like mentioning a pain or challenge that many other companies are experiencing within their industry that your product alleviates. Let them know that you don’t want to waste their time, but you would like to help them if this is a challenge they are experiencing as well.
Clearly state your contact information. Have you ever received a voicemail where someone left their phone number once, and you had to keep repeating the message until you were able to jot down the entire number? I know I have, and not only is it frustrating, but it takes time. With this idea in mind, a C-level contact certainly does not have the time or patience for this, and will be that much more inclined to delete the message instead of listening to it. As a result, I always make sure to leave my name and number once at the beginning of my message and then again at the end even if it sounds repetitive.
Call to action. This is the key to make sure you hear back from a prospect. Let the prospect know what you are going to do on your end if they don’t get back to you. For instance, a lot of us here at AG end our messages with, “I will follow up this voicemail with an email. If I should not hear back, I will follow up in two days.” This way the prospect knows that if they don’t want to hear from you again, they really need to reach out and give you a valid reason as to why.
So what is more effective: only reaching prospects live by “no contacting” or leaving voicemails in hopes of sparking some interest if they’ve stepped away from their desks?