Is It Time To Say Goodbye To Your Teleprospecting Partner?
While it may seem counter intuitive, I'm going to talk today about some warning signs that indicate you may want to break it off with your current teleprospecting vendor. I'm extremely proud of our customer satisfaction rates, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that sometimes, it just doesn't work out. Yes, AG has been dumped and done some dumping. Part of life I guess. We take it hard when we lose a client (either by their choice or ours) and do our best to run a post mortem to ensure that it doesn't happen again. I thought it would be beneficial to talk about the warning signs I would look for if I were contracted with, or was thinking about contracting with, an outsourced teleprospecting firm.
1. Connect Rate hovering at or well below 10%: For the purpose of definition, your connect rate is defined as the number of quality conversations divided by the total number of activities engaged in (outbound and inbound). As a rule of thumb, a successful BDR will have at least 15 quality conversations out of every 100 activities they engage in for a "connect rate" of 15%. This is a critical metric to trend on a weekly basis for your project. For the first couple weeks of your relationship, allow for it to be higher than 15% without getting too excited. This false high is caused by the fact that your BDR is usually following up on some inbound responses to your first intro mass email. After the first two weeks it should settle in at or around 15%. If not, raise the red flag. A connect rate of 10% or less can indicate any number of rectifiable problems such as poor list quality, rough messaging, etc. These are not your problems to solve. After your first month on the phones, ask your provider for stats on your connect rate. If it is at 10% or below ask them why and give them 2 weeks to rectify the problem. Connect rate is the greatest stat of them all. It tells you not only how effective your team is, but is a direct indication as to future lead volume. If you can't get it to 15% by 6 weeks in, chances are that you don't have the right partner and you should consider parting ways.
2. Access to "The Team" with your teleprospecting partner: You pay good money to have qualified opportunities generated for you; you deserve access to the people working on your behalf. They should be an active participant in your implementation process. They should be prepared and excited to interface directly with your sales people. Most importantly, they should be the main focus of your weekly check in calls. If your partner is hiding their people it can be a sign that they are either not comfortable with how they come across, their overall skill set, or they have farmed your project off to a "team" of people with no one person dedicated as the BDR. Either way, you may want to consider severing ties if you don't have access to your team.
3. You aren't paying them so you can spend your day training them: As mentioned above, you pay us good money. In fact, some companies in our space will even charge you an "implementation fee" in the first month above their normal fee. If you are going to work with a firm that does this, read the rest of this paragraph with extra special care as those folks need to make you feel incredibly special in order to justify that expense. Any teleprospecting vendor worth their salt knows that the time a client should spend helping to get them ramped up should be no more that 4-5 hours in the first week. After that, your time spent "managing the relationship" should consist of answering email questions and having a one hour con-call weekly to discuss performance metrics, issues, and overall project needs. Teleprospecting is not an art, it is a science. A top notch firm knows this and approaches the training aspect as such. They should show you through action and process that they understand that in order to be successful they have to extract valuable knowledge from you while maintaining the integrity of their own conversation\scripting methodology. If they do understand this, it will result in you having a very relaxed and non-invasive implementation and overall management of your program. If it is painful at all, start assessing whether or not it's worth it.
Partnering with a teleprospecting firm can be a confusing thing. Especially at the outset when you don't have enough fully qualified opportunities to truly determine success. Use these three evaluation points in that first month and I'd be willing to bet they'll tell you all that you need to know about your selected partner.