Teleprospecting: It's Not Just About the Number of Leads
For many years we evaluated the success of our teleprospecting campaigns solely on the number of fully qualified opportunities that we generated. Over time it became clear that we were doing our clients a disservice by not proactively sharing all of the detail surrounding every prospect we targeted during their teleprospecting campaign.
The fully qualified opportunities are just the cherry on top of your overall campaign. You've got to savor the rest of the Sundae too. There are three main success criterions for any teleprospecting campaign and they are as follows....
1. Qualified Opportunities:
As I mentioned above, this isn't the only measure of success for your program, but it is the most popular one. At the end of the day you need the fully qualified opportunities to drive immediate forecast generated by your campaign. The qualified opportunities allow you to go to senior management and say "you see, we spent x and it delivered y in new forecast for an initial MROI of Z". They also are what gets the sales reps most excited about you and the work your marketing team is doing which is always good. They are your client after all.
2. Not Interested Accounts:
As strange as it sounds, it's almost as important to find out who isn't interested and why as it is to find out who wants to buy now and why. Your "not interested" accounts can tell you many things about your company as well as your competitive landscape. Why don't they think they are interested? Is it your overall message? Cost? Lack of functionality or too much functionality? What competitor is entrenched there and for how long? What do they like/hate about them? All of this information is invaluable as you not only gain greater insight into your target market but you'll be armed with detailed critical intelligence on your targets so that you can fine tune your future campaigns to further maximize MROI.
3. An Actual Magic List of Contacts
While I've had great success pulling lists from our partners such as NetProspex there is no list that compares to the one that is delivered at the end of a comprehensive teleprospecting campaign. Not only do you gather critical intelligence from target companies as part of any campaign, but you also find and\or validate hundreds if not thousands of appropriate contacts in your target. These validated records are almost 100% accurate and will also contain information regarding their specific likes\dislikes pertaining to your technology space. Great for future marketing endeavors.
This is how we justify our existence on a daily basis...how do you evaluate the success of your teleprospecting campaigns?
Photo Credit: *Sundae with a Cherry on Top* on Flickr