Size Matters. . .When it Comes to Your Teleprospecting List
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?