Your Prospecting List Probably Isn't As Good As You Think
Those of us in the sales game with a little bit of pride should consider our time valuable. I think that’s why we hate busy work. You know, the kind of work that can be a huge time-suck but needs to get done even though it takes us away from the part of the job that we are passionate about. Although it is a necessary evil, we can get caught up in those small details which can make us far more inefficient than necessary. As a result, over the course of the average work week those mundane tasks add up to a lot more wasted hours than you’d expect.
In my opinion, the goal of any good manager should be to remove that time-suck. While I know we can’t completely eliminate all busy work from our employees’ day, as a manager I feel we need to challenge ourselves daily to make our employees as efficient as possible.
As it relates to inside sales, one of the biggest time sucks of all is a crappy list. If your inside rep is spending more than a few minutes before each dial tracking down accurate phone numbers, email address’ etc.. they’re wasting time. The few minutes taken prior to a call should be focused on doing research on the company and the contact, rather than dealing with the mundane task of tracking down their contact info.
Here are a few suggestions on what do with your lists. This goes for the hottest list of leads landing on your website…to that list of no-shows from that webinar you hosted a 6 months ago.
Manual scrub the list: Partial contact info usually means it will take 3x longer to find a contact. I’ve found it’s necessary to fill in the blanks as much as you can before someone picks up the phone. Though this might not be a job anyone in their right mind will volunteer for, as I’ve mentioned, it is a necessary evil. Think about using an intern for something like this since it can give them valuable exposure on how to research a company and at the same time save you the headache of doing it yourself.
What are the "must haves" on your list?: Assuming you don’t have the time or the help, you should identify at least 3 core pieces of info that are necessary before your team makes one call into the list. First off, company name should be a required piece of info. Generally if we don’t see that field filled out, most likely they are a student or a consultant who we shouldn’t waste our time with. The other criteria we’d prefer to see is a title which should make it easier to prioritize the list from c-level titles on down. Getting email or a phone is inter changeable. One or the other is a nice to have out of the gates, but anyone with basic prospecting skills should be able to obtain that info.
Don’t buy or call a list of names that are over a year old: Every name/lead has a shelf life. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. This approach has consistently proven to be true for any name my team calls on. The typical amount of hard bounce backs on any list I’ve bought from various list building sites is 30% - and those names are generally less than 6 months old. Anything over a year averages out to a 55% bounce rate. Bottom line, it’s not worth investing your money or your reps time in calling on old data.
The big thing to keep in mind here is that most lists are never really as good as you think they are. Consider some of the tips suggested above to save your inside reps from the time-suck.
I’m open to any suggestions too.
What are you doing to make sure your leads/list are cleaner?