How Do You Prioritize Your Teleprospecting Lists?
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.