Three Tips to Effectively Scrub Your Teleprospecting Lists
I spend a lot of time writing blogs that include the idea of scrubbing lists before putting them in front of inside sales teams. For that reason, I’ve decided to dive a bit deeper into this idea in today’s post. The expression “scrubbing a list” is just another phrase to refer to the action of “cleansing your data” before sending it over to your inside team to call on. This is such a crucial piece of the process when it comes to launching a sales and marketing campaign or list, and it’s something that is sometimes unfortunately overlooked. In my opinion, the number one reason this exercise is so critical is because if a list isn’t cleansed properly, you run the risk of calling or sending an email to a current customer which could be extremely detrimental to the existing relationship you have with them. You may have unfortunately experienced this first hand, but hopefully you have some great tips to share as well because there is always more room to further improve the process to make it more efficient. Based on my experience, here are a few pointers I’d like to share about effectively cleansing and preparing lists:
- Remove current customers and current prospects. It can be easy to remember to take out current customers from your lists, but it’s key to make sure that current prospects in talks with the sales team already are also removed from the list. The best way to make sure you are removing current potential prospects is to send your list over to the outside sales team before sending it to your team. This way, the outside sales team can highlight which accounts they’d prefer you stay away from and prospects aren’t confused by a cold call and/or a cold email.
- Exclude competitors. This tip seems so simple and straightforward, but trust me, competitors still make their way into lists every day. Whether you are launching a new calling campaign based on a list from a tradeshow or a list you pulled from your list provider, make sure you take the time to remove any potential competitors from your lists. I have found the best way to do this efficiently is to take a glance on your own, or provide your list development team with a list of current competition and have them spend some time removing them from the list. An even better way to do this is to provide a suppression list to your list provider before making your list purchase so they can exclude these companies from the search from the get-go. The effects of sending a competitor an email and placing a call into them in error can reveal campaign or promotional information that could undermine your competitive advantage. It also paints your company in a negative light, so the best way to avoid this is to take these companies out of the mix before even sending it over to your reps.
- Omit existing contacts in your database that you have recently qualified out or recently spoken with. If your team has recently spoken with a prospect, the last thing you want to do is hit them with an introductory email. This will leave prospects feeling incredibly confused about the communication they had with your team, and it won’t leave them feeling confident with your company’s overall processes. The best way to avoid this is to omit duplicates from your list. I usually export a list of these contacts from our CRM (I can determine who these prospects are by running a report by lead status, and those that have been recently contacted are easily omitted) and then I have list development help me “dedupe” these contacts from the new list.
One of the key components to making your teleprospecting efforts a success is to put a clean list in front of your reps. So, remember to cleanse your list of current customers, current interested prospects, competitors, and existing contacts with recent activity associated with them from your list before your team dives in.