Sales Prospecting Perspectives

I can say without hesitation that I enjoy what I do. Running an inside sales team my days can vary from training with my employees, collaborating with my clients, motivating the team…the list goes on. But with every job we enjoy, there are few things we are tasked with doing daily/weekly/monthly that we would prefer to pass off to someone else. In my case the task I detest the most would be without a doubt anything having to do with list generation. I would rather make cold calls every day of the week (including Saturdays and Sundays) than have to spend hours scrubbing contact information on my cold call lists or inbound leads.

For those of us who can identify with this painful exercise, you know what it’s like after spending an extended period of time checking through thousands of “leads” for duplicates, incomplete contact information or existing customers. Eventually you feel as if your eyes are going to begin bleeding profusely and then fall out of your head. Meanwhile both marketing and sales are certainly willing to provide input on the list, how it should look, the profile contacts we should be targeting etc…but when push comes to shove nobody seems to want to get their hands dirty in taking the time to sift through the list or inbound leads that are worth following up on.

Understandably it’s one of those jobs that nobody wants to assume, but if you don’t who will?

I remember the first outside sales rep I was responsible for supporting back in the day. He was a great guy, but he never seemed to have an appreciation of all the work that went into finding a contact, getting them live and then converting them into an opportunity. Surprisingly enough, up until that point he had never made a cold call in his life so he had no real perspective on what it took. He would often dump a list of just company names on me and say… “Have at it!”with a wink and a thumbs up as if he was doing me a favor. Then he would cap it off by saying “Oh and by the way, I would scrub this list because there could be a few customers in there along with the a few other folks I may have proposals out to.”

Now I’m not expecting this guy to provide me a list of contacts with direct dials that pick up the phone and say “you have wonderful timing. I want to buy your product. Put me on the phone with your rep right away!”  …but throw me a frikin’ bone here.

The more work you are willing to put in on the front-end will only benefit everyone in the long run. Better quality lists mean your inside sales reps are finding a larger quantity of leads AND they’re finding them at a faster pace. This larger volume of opportunities are converted to the outside team who now have a larger universe of deals they are working which means there is a higher likelihood they will close (assuming your sales team is adequate). Once the deal comes in everyone looks like a hero and the marketing team, inside sales team and the outside reps can all sit around a circle holding hands and sing Kum-Bay-Yah!

If you are dumping a list of marketing leads on the inside sales team that is filled with incomplete contact information, or is chock full of duplicates, then you are you putting them at an automatic disadvantage before they even pick up the phone. Have you taken into consideration how much that can negatively affect the progress of your campaigns or the growth of your pipeline?

Everyone should be prepared to get their hands dirty. We can use all the marketing platforms and fancy data fusion tools available to us out there to clean and de-dupe your leads, but ultimately you must face the facts that there still needs to be a degree of manual labor that should be required in order to get a truly clean list.

Point is, marketing and sales need to accept equal responsibility for providing the cleanest list possible. Sales reps should know their territory better than anyone and should be taking the time to scrub off the prospects they are already engaged with or they perceive are not necessary to pursue. Meanwhile marketing needs to come up with some kind process for doing their own pre-scrub of their inbound leads since 50% generally are junk. Hey I'm no genius, but I'm going to assume that the marketing lead from Jesse “The Body” Ventura at 123-456-7891 is probably not going to buy from you.

The success of every campaign I’ve been involved in running has always hinged on the quality of what you are calling into. I’ve said it before...guess what I’m going to say it again.. YOUR INSIDE SALES TEAM IS ONLY AS GOOD AS THE LIST THEY HAVE TO CALL ON.