Sales Prospecting and Closing the Loop
If you have established your teleprospecting team, you may already be up and running with your inside team generating leads for your outside sales team. This is great, and exactly what the purpose and goal of your teleprospecting efforts should be. One important question you need to ask yourself, and your outside team, is how are the quality of those opportunities?
It is great to know that you are supplying your outside reps with qualified opportunities, but how beneficial have they really been? It is just as important, if not more important, that beyond the quantity of opportunities you provide that you also reach out to solicit feedback about the quality of those opportunities. Your inside team should focus beyond just appointment setting, but to pass the highest quality leads possible. Here at AG we have coin phrased this as our ‘Post Feedback Process', PFP.
Why is this important? If you are anticipating a certain ROI from your telesales efforts, you need to be ensured that the calls that your team has scheduled are occurring. Life isn't perfect and calendars are not set in stone, so there are many times when a sales rep is not able to connect with the prospect. In these situations it is important that you have your teleprospecting team reconnect to re-schedule the call. Your outside team most likely does not have the time nor bandwidth to play phone tag, so don't rely on them to re-schedule. Keep an eye on the averages, and be weary when you see a ‘no-show' rate higher than 13% of the calls scheduled. If that is the case, maybe your team is pushing the prospect too hard on the phone and you need to retrain their cold calling techniques.
Beyond ensuring that the calls have occurred, how successful were they? Did the outside rep deem the call a success; is their sales potential, can this close within your average sales cycle? This is extremely important feedback to obtain to make sure that everyone is on the same playing field. If you notice that more than 25% of the calls that occurred were not successful, you need to find out why. Is your team missing information in their opportunities, are you targeting the wrong size organization? Gaining this knowledge and feedback from your outside reps will help your team focus on finding the good opportunities and weaning out the bad.
There is a lot of insight that can be gained from soliciting feedback and you will start to see strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and those occasional threats that will help you improve upon your current sales prospecting process and give your teleprospecting team the competitive edge they need to meet their goals and yours.
What do you think?