What Helps a Teleprospecting Project Launch Successfully?
When ramping up a teleprospecting campaign for a new client one of the questions I'm often asked is, "what can potentially hinder the success of this project?" While there are certainly several things that can get in the way of a successful lead generation campaign, the one that I feel is most important to talk about is data management - more specifically - the quality of the lists that a BDR is going to be calling on, how these lists are scrubbed, and how the information that is gathered during our calling is tracked and reported on.
The first step is to evaluate the quality of the list that your BDR is going to be calling on. Where did this list come from? How old is the data? Does the list have complete contact information that has been validated? Often times I will have a client who has thousands of records sitting in their CRM system that they want to export and give to us for calling. My rule of thumb is if the data is more then a year old then we won't get optimal results. It is important to also evaluate whether these raw leads have been contacted in the past and how often they have been sent marketing collateral. My suggestion to a new client is to pare down their list to about 300 target accounts that fit their ideal customer profile and then use a list generation tool or vendor to find accurate contact information. This has been proven more effective in generating qualified sales leads versus calling through a list of 1,000 contacts that have been sitting in your CRM for 4 years. Craig talked about his five "musts" for cold calling lists, and you should read more about those here.
This brings me to another point - the importance of having a well maintained CRM system. Internally, we use SalesForce.com, which I find to be a fantastic tool. Many of our clients will have us work out of our own instance of sf.com but we are also happy to work out of theirs. When the latter is the case I always stress the importance of allowing us to create custom reports and dashboards so that the client is receiving the most up to date metrics. The benefit of working out of our client's instance of sf.com is that the BDR can see any activity that has been made into an account, or if an opportunity has been created. Yet this is only effective if our client's sales reps are updating sf.com. There have been many cases where a BDR begins calling into an account only to find that one of our client's sales reps is already working with them and the sales process is well underway - yet there were no notes put into sf.com that would alert the BDR to this. If we are working out of our own instance of sf.com I will ask for a "Do Not Call" list to ensure we don't call any current clients or prospects that are currently in the sales process. Making sure the sales reps are updating sf.com is also important when we want to track how many of our qualified sales leads are on forecast and how much business has closed. This is important information to have when proving ROI from your teleprospecting campaign.
Having a scrubbed target list and a well-maintained CRM system will help to ensure the success of your teleprospecting and lead generation campaigns.
What else have you seen that can get in the way of an effective teleprospecting initiative?