Natural Entrepreneur: Produce New Leads with the Right Team

this is a layer

Home

About us

sponsored by:

Important:
Our Privacy Policy

Sales

Produce New Leads with the Right Team

Outbound calling should be well planned, not brute forced efforts

-- by Bob Good, Good Leads Inc, Salem NH

To win new customers and close more sales, it is necessary to feed your sales pipeline with a steady flow of fresh qualified leads. But lead generation campaigns no longer have to be “brute force” efforts with cold calls.

Limited funds for marketing efforts in young companies or during tough economic periods demand smart choices. Your marketing choices should include a multi-channel strategy that coordinates campaigns across channels, to reinforce messages and soften up the battleground for outbound calling.

To obtain qualified leads, live person-to-person dialogue often is a must. But you can precede and intertwine it with other communication channels such as web based advertising, email awareness/solicitation messages, press releases and sponsorships. This market exposure increases your brand awareness, name recognition, and helps establish credibility of your product or service and company. It’s a lot easier to introduce yourself on the phone when the person you’re talking with already recognizes your name.

As your marketing campaigns are initiated, and the marketplace warms up, your telesales team needs to be ready to go. Otherwise you risk squandering the benefits of your marketing efforts, or let incoming leads go idle. Whether your telesales team is an inside sales team or outsourced to another party, there are key factors to be considered to ensure the success of your campaign.

People – As with any aspect your business, the people you hire are critical to your success (or failure). The folks on your outbound call team represent your firm and make invaluable first impressions. Hire people with experience in outbound sales and who are at least somewhat familiar with your line of business. If you have the right people, it is also important to reward them for a job well done. Creating an incentive compensation program where individuals can directly see the benefits of their labor will help keep productivity up and turnover down.

Message - Establishing a consistent message, including call scripts and default responses to handle common objections or questions from prospective customers will help your sales team present a positive company image and recruit serious prospective customers. How well your team communicates the message and handles objections directly impacts their ability get results. Role-playing exercises during the initial training period, and refresher sessions, help to enforce the message and the team’s performance.

Process – Formulating and enforcing a call methodology, or Standard Operating Procedure, will go a long way toward qualifying a lead. In addition to the introductory message, it establishes the questions to be asked, the information needed to further qualify the lead, the criteria required to assess whether a contact represents a real opportunity, and finally, if all is well, determine the next steps. Monitoring these calls for quality will help to ensure procedures are followed, making changes, as needed, will improve the team’s effectiveness and results.

Technology – Contact tracking databases, such as Act!, GoldMine, or Salesforce.com are critically necessary tools for tracking the status of leads, recording contact history (including calls, e-mails, meetings, and other correspondence), tagging products and/or services the prospect may be interested in, and linking to other contacts at the same company. All of this data gathered via effective telesales calls will help lead your sales personnel through the stages of the sales funnel, and prove an extremely valuable asset to your company. Beware of homegrown, ad hoc systems that use Excel spreadsheets or other generic database systems. These systems appear to be low-cost solutions that can work in very small operations but quickly prove inadequate and become a management headache as the team grows.

Outsourcing

As an alternative to building an inside sales team, outbound lead generation can be outsourced to a firm that specializes in this activity. This can be especially cost effective on short-term sales initiatives or when you need to ramp up quickly. Outsourcing is popular in firms that prefer to keep their internal operations focused on other core facets of the business. When considering a vendor for this job, all of the criteria listed above still apply.

In addition, there are other requirements which if met will greatly increase the chances of a successful working relationship between you and your outsourced business development vendor. These include:

Geographic Location – In the global market with US jobs being shipped overseas, it seems easy to imagine outsourcing your calls to other countries where labor cost are competitive. Beware taking the wrong step. By choosing a local vendor, it is much easier to meet, train, update and monitor the job with greater frequency and ease.

Experience and Focus – Outbound, business-to-business high-technology calls are conducted differently from consumer product calls. If a telemarketing firm markets itself as “all things to all people” this may signal limited experience in the type of calls your product demands. Listen closely to the vendor’s call experience and do not hesitate to ask if you can speak with prior customers of the vendor.

Getting a Dedicated Resource – If the job of outbound lead generation is assigned to a fixed group of callers, you can better control the consistency of the message. Conversely, having the task assigned to many callers can dilute and confuse the message.

Knowing Your Outsourced Staff – This criterion goes hand-in-hand with the item above. Outsourcing is about trust and it is important that you feel comfortable with the vendor’s ability to understand and convey your value proposition and to professionally represent your firm.

The Vendor’s Standard Operating Procedure – Confirm whether the vendor has an established calling methodology. It would be appropriate for you to review and approve the methodology and to observe and listen to outbound calls to confirm callers are following the established procedure.

Database Tools – The final area of review involves evaluating the database and tracking tools utilized by a vendor and how convenient it is for you to interface and access this data.

If you find a vendor that satisfactorily addresses the criteria above, you are now ready to define your relationship in terms of a contract. It is important to be able to specify and agree to a set of measurable deliverables. These can include a guaranteed fixed number of qualified opportunities (based upon a lead success criteria that you establish), a written warranty on the quality of those leads, and a fully populated database for future marketing. Finally, the contract may include wording to address increments of service tailored to the size of the sales funnel you need as well as easy in and out language to account for unknown business contingencies.

If it is Marketing’s job is to generate new leads, and Sale’s job is to follow up on these leads to create customers and generate revenue, outbound calling is at the intersection of these functions. By utilizing multiple marketing communication channels to warm up the market, and a quality call team prepared to germinate qualified leads, you will be on the road to growing the successful enterprise you promised your spouse and funding source!

Good Leads is a Salem, NH based business-to-business focused lead generation firm serving technology centric firms. The firm is led by CEO, Bob Good, who is also VP of Programs for the New Hampshire High Technology Council. Bob can be reached at Bob@Good-Lead.com 866 894-LEAD (5323) Ext 12.

Upcoming Events

Feb 21 (8-9:30a): NH Forum on the Future, NHHTC, CR Sparks, Bedford, NH

March 1 (6:30-8:30p): Women's Business Center and MicroCredit-NH Networking Event, Bank of America, Portsmouth, NH

March 6 (10a-noon): Growth Capital Resources in New Hampshire, City of Nashua, Office of Economic Development, Daniel Webster College, Nashua, NH

March 8: (12pm -1pm) Break the Rules and Close More Sales, Amoskeag Business Incubator, Manchester, NH

March 16: Peak Pitch (pitch your plan to invstors on the chairlift), Mt. Sunapee, NH ($)

March 22: Breaking Trends in Web Develoment, UVCIA, Hanover, NH ($)

View Ads