3 Corners You Should Never Cut With Your Telemarketing Team
Have you ever failed miserably at completing a task because you tried to do it in a manner you wished it to be done, rather than doing what has been proven to actually work? I’ve put “dry clean only” in the wash; I’ve “jerry rigged” the Christmas tree to the car rather than fully wrapping and tying it down. I’ve used duck tape to fix my grill. The results: new tiny sweaters for my nephew, a 2 mile “There’s a damn Christmas tree in the middle road” back-up on interstate 93 and the infamous atomic grill incident of 2002.
This happens a lot in the business development process as well. Management creates a process that is easy rather than what is correct to avoid what is seen as unnecessary hassles. Here are the corners people cut and what they risk when they do it.
Asking sales reps to book the discovery call.
This happens all the time especially with large companies. The inside team qualifies a lead and then passes it to the outside team without a set time to meet. The thought is that it’s a pain to coordinate schedules with sales and book a time that the sales rep is available. The reality is that the minute the inside rep hangs up that phone, the chances of that meeting getting booked drops. Rather than book the meeting when you had the prospect on the hook, you have to count on the sales rep to call the person in a timely fashion and book the meeting. You also have to rely on the prospect to answer their phone or respond to the sales rep’s email. You’re putting yourself in a bad spot when you rely on sales to be timely in doing anything but close business and a prospect to answer their phone when they are supposed to.
Judging the inside team by the number of leads passed.
As a child did you ever have an older kid try to fool you into giving up your 1 dollar bill for the 10 nickels they had? Every now and again you’d see the “not too bright” kid in the neighborhood go for it and then you’d laugh at him and call him names. (What a bad day, getting duped and then picked on) Don’t be that kid. Judge leads based on value and not by number. I can get one of my reps here to pass 10 quick leads (nickels) if I open up the spigot. Then again those 10 nickels have a low likelihood of leading to anything aside from a ton of work trying to sell to bad leads. I’ll take one really qualified lead (dollar) that I actually have a chance of closing. Judge leads based on how much forecast comes from them, not the amount they throw over the fence.
Depending on an old list to deliver great leads right away.
There is a common expression that says, “crap in, crap out”. If you give your team an awful list to work on because you don’t want to build or purchase a good one, you should expect awful results. I see a lot of companies simply take the fortune 1000 and hand it to their inside team and expect them to create gold. In the words of my father, “it’s not that simple…..dumb dumb”. Take time to scrub your list, add contacts and compare the metrics as to how the prospects on that list stack up to your current clients. Scrub that list from 1000 to a targeted 250. What took you a week to scrub will lead to quality leads in ¼ the time.
As in everything in life, when you put the time in to do something the right way, you will get good results. When you do the bare minimum, you can expect the bare minimum.