Who do Your Teleprospectors Call?
One of the most important items that needs to be addressed when building an inside sales team, or outsourcing this function, is who your reps are going to call. We have talked before about how crucial it is to have a quality list of prospects for your telesales team to go after. There is another piece of this that is just as important - how long should your telesales team focus on a single campaign before moving on? If you have a marketing department that runs numerous campaigns throughout the year it is important to make sure these leads are getting followed-up on in a timely fashion. However, you want to make sure you have the right team structure in place to support all of these call-downs.
If your telesales team is overloaded with new lists coming in every day the following issues will arise:
1. They won't have the bandwidth to apply their call process methodology and the number of qualified opportunities getting flipped to sales will diminish.
2. Due to time constraints, they might start cherry picking prospects who they feel are the best fit and disregard others who might have actually been ready to buy.
3. If they have tons of campaigns to choose from they will resort to calling off of "warm" lists and not focus as much energy into cold-calling into their target accounts. One of my previous blogs talks about why this isn't always the best strategy.
4. You won't be able to as effectively measure the success of each marketing campaign since your telesales reps might not have the time to call into each prospect on each list.
5. They might not be able to follow-up with certain prospects as requested since they are too busy making sure they "touch" as many people on all their lists.
My recommendation is to first determine how many marketing campaigns you are going to run each quarter and estimate how many leads each will produce. I like to limit my BDRs to 1,200 new leads per quarter, per rep, as this allows them to disposition each with the same call process. It's also important to evaluate what type of calling you want done for each campaign. Maybe you only want the leads from XYZ tradeshow called into with one voicemail and one email because you know it wasn't the best audience. In this case, my suggestion would be to have one designated BDR following-up on all marketing events and another BDR focused on strategic outbound cold calling into a target account list.
You have invested time and money into your marketing campaigns - make sure you have the right team in place to follow-up on those leads and convert as many over to the sales team as possible.
What do you think?