The 3 Evaluation Stages for your Teleprospecting Campaigns
Virtually every client that we work with measures our overall success by how much net new revenue they close from the fully qualified opportunities that we pass them. I agree that this is the most important overall evaluation point, but it takes some time for sales cycles to happen. Teleprospecting campaigns add value in three main stages. It is imperative that you not only recognize those stages, but that you are consistently evaluating each outbound campaign according to them. We use the stages and criteria below to evaluate the success of our client campaigns at strategic intervals.
Stage 1: Initial Quality Assessment. (This occurs immediately following the first call.)
Our reps fully qualify sales opportunities and send them to our clients salespeople for follow up. As part of the qualification, we book an introductory conference call for the assigned salesperson. The day after the conference call was due to occur, we send a very brief quality survey to the salesperson to give us an indication as to how the call went. The survey consists of three main questions.
- Did the scheduled call occur?
- Was the call a Success?
- Will there be a next step with this prospect (if yes, what)?
At this stage of the game, the best you can hope for is that your qualified opportunities have moved into your sales process (not forecast) and that your rep has gotten him\herself in a position to sell your services\products. This isn't the point in time where something would be forecasted, even the most eager salesperson would agree. You've got to have at least one more discovery call to truly determine whether or not this prospect is forecast worthy. For this reason, it is far too early to judge the success of the lead by whether it's forecasted or closed. Therefore, you must look at the quality of the interaction and the validity of the information passed. These three questions allow us to determine that.
Evaluation Metric: A minimum of 75% of the opportunities that you qualify and pass should receive a "yes" to all three questions.
Value Add: Reps are busier talking to more qualified prospects, thus you maximize the money you are spending on them.
Stage 2: Forecasted within 90 days
As a rule of thumb, an actual opportunity should have reached forecast for our clients (20% or greater chance of closing) within at least 90 days from the date of first conversation with a sales rep. In the best scenarios, we are able to simply ask our clients to run a forecast report of our opportunities for us out of their CRM that we can compare to our list of opportunities delivered. Any opportunity that reached forecast within the first 90 days makes the cut as a successful effort by AG (regardless of outcome). If our client isn't able to pull that data for us, we will re-survey the sales reps that have received opportunities to learn whether or not they have forecasted them, and for what amount.
Evaluation Metric: Of the opportunities that you pass that get a 100% Initial quality assessment, a minimum of 40% should find themselves on your sales forecast.
Value Add: You are able to get a preliminary forecasted MROI on your teleprospecting campaigns. Make appropriate changes, stop all together, or get a nice early pat on the back :-)
Stage 3: Closed Business
As our opportunities age on our clients' forecasts we look to the ‘6 month mark' as the time when we will start to expect a percentage of the opportunities to begin closing (this does vary based on sales cycle by client, but 6 months is a safe time to begin checking). This is the final and most important evaluation point for the measure of the success of your teleprospecting campaigns. Again, in most cases our clients can simply report this information back to us, but if need be we will do the digging for them. From a self preservation standpoint, it is work worth doing :-).
Evaluation Metric: This varies by organization...you know your own close rate.
Value Add: I don't need to explain this one!!
This is how we evaluate the success of our programs. We believe it's got to be done in stages, not just looked at from the closed business angle. How do you evaluate the success of your teleprospecting campaigns?