B2B Lead Blog

When I first started making test calls with MECLABS (publisher of the B2B Lead Roundtable Blog), I was unsuccessful, to say the least. I was unaware of the real goal of the call, lacked an effective strategy, and was generally unprepared. After about 900 calls, my results were disappointing — I only had one lead!

Since I was unsuccessful, I lacked confidence in my ability, and that feeling came through on each call. After receiving both informal and formal training, as well as making the choice to dive into the task at hand, my results grew to six leads after only 575 calls. That was an 839% improvement.

Although I did not realize I was following a defined outline at the time, after completing MarketingSherpa’s B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Online Course, I was able to see the improvements I made broken down into three basic principles for effective teleprospecting:

• Be human
• Build a relationship
• Be knowledgeable

Of course, it’s difficult to translate these blanket statements into applicable action. I learned the translation must start with the individual who is making the call, because teleprospecting leads starts with a one-on-one phone conversation.

Be human

“We believe that people buy from people, that people don’t buy from companies, from stores or from websites; people buy from people,” said Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS.

To be human, on an individual basis, phone call by phone call, one must be completely mentally present. This means, concentrating on each call, focusing on each decision maker, and determining the qualification of each company.

The most difficult aspect in being present during calls is leaving any anxieties unrelated to work outside of the workplace. Teleprospecting can be a highly stressful, tedious and monotonous task, but mistakes can be prevented by giving the proper energy to each call and leaving unrelated issues aside. I discovered that by creating a healthy work-life balance, I could decrease the inevitable potential for anxiety that often comes along with the position.

Along with focused energy, starting fresh with every call is essential in teleprospecting. Carrying any mistakes, assumptions or a bad attitude from one call to another is a sure way to miss out on opportunities for qualified sales leads. Whatever was done or said by one decision maker should not affect the next company’s opportunity to have a pleasant, unbiased conversation.

In any case, you must continue to optimize your approach to the call, notes on the call and call style by finding the best method through tested means and with applicable feedback from mentors and managers. In teleprospecting, you must always be open to constructive criticism. With the use of analytics in the marketing world growing, there is a ton of data supporting methods and ways to optimize.

Build a relationship

The phone call must be between two humans, and not between a human and a “salesperson” focusing on the universal lead definition (ULD). The great rule in sales is to ask open-ended questions. This allows for less questioning and a better flow during the conversation.  It also gives the decision maker a chance to supply complete information about the company’s issues and solutions.

Another essential element to teleprospecting is conversing by the 80/20 rule: Listen for 80% and talk for 20% of the conversation. The universal lead definition configures the notes, but attentive listening provides the information. Avoid interrogating the lead; instead, engage in a conversation.

Be knowledgeable

First, be knowledgeable by creating good habits for a good call. This includes not only knowing how to build a relationship and starting every call fresh, but it also includes remembering the goal of the call: qualifying sales-ready leads.

Many think this will be automatic, but it’s easy to get sidetracked in other action results for a call. For example, good habits include trail closing even if you “think” there is no interest, and avoiding using actions that could be considered a crutch, like scheduling a callback time or sending an email.

Other actions besides the goal of the call are sometimes beneficial, but this is only after a conversation and/or close have been attempted. It is important to remember these are not substitutes for the true goal of the call: qualified, sales-ready leads.

Second, be knowledgeable by knowing your product or service. Be aware of the company’s value proposition by clearly defining the unique benefit to the customer over the competition. It’s a good practice to be able to summarize this in a sentence or two. Know common objectives and competition to your product or service so you can be prepared.

Overall, don’t get bombarded with facts, tactics and questions; keep it simple. As Dr. McGlaughlin has also said, “Clarity trumps persuasion.”

Related Resources:

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

Nine Reasons Why B2B Marketing Should Own the Teleprospecting Function

B2B Lead Generation: 300% ROI from email and teleprospecting combo to house list (via MarketingSherpa)

B2B Lead Generation: 4 ways to use teleprospecting in your next pilot (and 2 ways to measure it) (via MarketingSherpa Blog)

B2B Telemarketing

When you’re converting inquiries into qualified leads, it’s widely believed that time is of the essence. Even research published in the Harvard Business Review says you’re almost seven times more likely to qualify a lead if you respond by phone within five minutes than if you respond an hour later.

That’s why, when one of our Research Partners, a B2B telecommunications company, wanted to convert more inbound leads into sales-ready ones, we cut our response time. The results were surprising, as you’ll see in a moment.

We typically phoned people who submitted a Web form on the company’s site within about five hours. We slashed that to five minutes or less with:

• Automated alerts — Our IT team developed a program that notified our lead generation specialists to make a call the moment someone submitted a Web form.

• Adjusted hours — A lead generation specialist was always available during the hours when someone would most likely submit a Web form.

• An easier-to-use database — Lead generation specialists had to go through several steps to access the partner’s database; we revised it so they could reach the lead they needed in one click.

As a result, whenever someone submitted a form, the person received a call back within five minutes more than 85% of the time. At the end of six months, I was eagerly looking forward to the results. Here they are:

Almost nothing changed! Even though we cut response time by more than 98%, the number of qualified leads remained virtually the same and the amount of calls it took to get a qualified lead actually increased slightly.

Our effort did not have much impact. So what did this teach us? To slack off and not respond to inquiries for days? Absolutely not. Instead, we learned three valuable lessons:

Lesson #1: Know your customers and their needs

Will they lose interest or select another vendor in the next hour or two? If so, then instant follow-up may be a good idea. But in the case of our partner, the potential customers’ needs for B2B telecommunications were not going to change dramatically in a few hours, so cutting response times did not have much impact.

Lesson #2: Know what you’re selling

If it’s a transactional sale, five-minute follow-up may very well be worthwhile. Not so much, obviously, for the complex sale. However, again, that doesn’t mean if you have a complex sale you can kick back and wait to respond to inquiries. Our research in complex sales has consistently demonstrated that follow-up within 24 hours is always optimal.

Lesson#3: Test before investing

What works for someone else may not work for you – even if it was featured in the Harvard Business Review. Begin by identifying your key performance indicators: What you want to achieve. For this test we wanted to:

• Increase sales-ready leads — Our partners were satisfied with the amount inquiries their inbound marketing efforts were producing. They wanted more sales-ready leads – leads that fit their Universal Lead Definition.
• Improve lead qualification — Our goal was to reduce the number of dials required to attain sales-ready leads. We were hoping this could ultimately make our team more productive.

Once you set key performance indicators, measure them before and after the test, and compare. It’s really that simple. Start on a small scale, and then implement the program across your entire organization if the results merit it.

Related Resources:

To Call or Email? That is the Question

Webinar Replay: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

New Chart: Chief requirements for B2B lead qualification

B2B Telemarketing

As the MECLABS Research Partnership analyst team, my colleagues and I speak with professionals who attend our events (like the next month’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas), purchase our publications, and want more information about how MECLABS can help grow their business. So every day we hear about the challenges they’re facing.

One issue that surfaces all too often is optimizing databases: When you have a database of thousands upon thousands of names, how do you help your team easily and effectively prioritize who to contact? Nearly every company I talk to does some kind of lead scoring, but rarely do those lead scores align with their database in a way that allows their sales teams to determine – at a glance – which prospects are the right fit at the right time.

This hit way too close to home. Here at MECLABS, my team was struggling with the same issue. Through events, publications, and general inquiry, we add hundreds of interested potential partner inquiries to our database every few weeks, sometimes even thousands. We have an ace IT team that has set up platforms so we can quickly identify who fits our Ideal Partner Profile, and we’d contact them as soon after they express interest in our Research Partnership program. We are very well aware of the importance of timeliness for marketers who are struggling to optimize their sales and marketing funnels. And we’d follow up based on the next action that was associated with their file.

But it took Brooke Bower, our data-analysis whiz, to help our team look at our database from a new perspective, one that would help us get the highest return on our time by focusing on the most promising potential partners, as opposed to merely the most urgent.

What we realized was missing was a comprehensive at-a-glance snapshot that basically shows us the key factors that define a successful research-partnership engagement:

• If the individual making the inquiry is a decision maker or an influencer
• How many events the individual, and his team, have attended and publications they’ve purchased compiled in an easily sortable list
• Their organization’s firmographic details – such as revenue, marketing budget, sales cycle and size

We enlisted the IT department to add fields to our existing platform to bring together these details into a single “opportunity grade” that would be applied to each potential partner’s account. (The concept of an “opportunity grade” was recommended to us by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS.) The higher the grade, the better fit for a long-term, strategic research partnership.

Within just a few days, through the teamwork of IT, marketing and sales, we have sorted our database so that it reveals to us that “opportunity grade” for each partner. It wasn’t rocket science, just taking the time to ask the hard questions (thanks Brooke), and look at what we do from a fresh perspective, to give IT the parameters they needed to bring it all together. This is a project that will never be completed, of course. We’re going to continually work with Brooke to analyze what qualities make up our most qualified research partners and make sure our database can easily and accurately help us identify them.

Great results happen when people and departments with different skill sets take time to put their minds together — in this case it was Brooke’s data savvy combined with my hands-on experience talking to potential Research Partners about their challenges.

I’d really like to hear about your experiences in building a database that helps you engage more efficiently and effectively. I welcome you to share them in the comments.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Scoring, Marketing Strategy, Sales

I can’t stress this enough: when it comes to marketing, if we’re not constantly learning, we’re going to find ourselves left behind faster than ever.

Some people say I’m an expert in B2B lead generation because I wrote a book on it, but you know what? I am astonished by what I didn’t know then compared to what I know today. This past year has been especially illuminating thanks to the brilliance of smart marketers who are expanding and perfecting the lead-generation concepts I wrote about years ago.

This year’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinars are testament to that.

In February, Paul Teshima, SVP of Product Management at Eloqua, set the tone for the webinar year. He defined the tenets of the new world of marketing in Revenue Performance Management. “We’ve seen a problem now where, even though marketing is doing a great job of generating leads, sales still cannot handle the volume and they slip away,” explains Paul. “Some of the leading companies today are really focusing on this idea of managing and bringing marketing sales together, in a more effective way, now that they’ve solved some of the tactical problems.”

Paul explains how here: The Future of Marketing: The Evolution from Demand Generation to Revenue Performance Management

In March, Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Global Marketing at ECI Telecom, detailed how she executed an ultra-successful content strategy campaign and how that transformed their entire marketing strategy.

“We had to put ourselves in line with our buyers’ journey so we knew how to engage them at the right level,” she points out. “We had to provide value to our prospects, who have never heard of us before, and position ourselves as a company that understands their marketplace and their business issues – a partner as well as an expert.” Learn more here: How ECI Developed an Entire Content Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results

In April, John Johnston, eBusiness Marketing Manager for Volvo North America, outlined how he streamlined, integrated and automated lead generation for a marketing program for 20 different heavy construction segments for dealers in 125 countries.

“We took online marketing activities, leveraged their analytics and optimized – measure, take action and repeat. It’s a continuous loop that makes the database and the lead-generation process better and better.”

Watch the webinar to find out how John’s efforts are providing customers and prospects the precise information they need to make a smart purchasing decision, and dealers a much more detailed, useful picture of who they’re selling to. And much of this is happening in real time. Learn more here: How CRM Revolutionized Marketing and Lead Generation at Volvo North America

In May, Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for MECLABS Leads Group, and I expounded on the powerful combination of excellent data and the human touch to make the best use of sales time and resources.

According to MarketingSherpa, 80% of marketing leads are lost or discarded because even though someone may have provided basic contact information, they may not be ready to talk to a salesperson. Teleprospecting bridges the gap.

Make sure you’re setting a strong foundation for your campaigns with an accurate list. Brandon revealed the outcomes of a breakthrough experiment that tested how higher cost/high quality lead data affected the cost per lead. The results were astounding – the difference between the best- and worst-performing lists was $581 per lead. Learn more here: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads and How One Company Slashed Their Cost Per Lead by More than Half

In June, Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MarketingSherpa/MECLABS Primary Research Group, shared why inbound marketing – a strategy where the prospects find you as opposed to you finding them – is critical, and how integrating social media and SEO drives it.

“Companies with integrated social media and SEO achieve 60% better conversion rates…Search rankings are driven by relevance, relevance enhances an organization’s credibility, and this credibility helps to drive conversion rates,” says Sergio. “It’s an essential ingredient to a B2B marketing program.”

To prove it, Sergio shared five steps that helped an email marketer pull in 70% more leads and doubled revenue in one year. Learn more here: How to Integrate Social Media and SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

In July, Dave Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, revealed how companies are leaking significant revenue in their sales and marketing funnels – knowledge gained through analyzing two billion communications with 80 million customer profiles. He outlined astonishing facts like 43% of companies don’t even respond to inbound leads! But for those that know how to respond, the opportunities to make the sale grow exponentially – 78% of sales goes to companies that respond first, not to the company with the best or cheapest product.

It’s no wonder that Dave points out that venture capital firms want companies in their portfolios to have inside sales departments. “They’ll recruit, train and transplant inside sales teams into their portfolio companies,” he says. For more data that will show you how to speed leads into your sales pipeline, go here: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Find out how:

• Clarifying value proposition helped one company decrease cost-per-acquisition by 66% and multiplied monthly profit four times over
• Re-engaging clients helped one company attain grow its business by 64%
• To quickly and easily choose the best lists
• To time lead-generation activities to attain the highest possible return on investment of resources
• Closed-loop feedback makes sales professionals worship their marketing department

Find out much more here: Finish 2011 Strong: Six Funnel Focal Points to Maximize Time, Resources and Revenues Part 1 and Part 2

It all came full circle in October, when Jen Doyle, MarketingSherpa Senior Research Manager and Lead Author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, discussed what more than 1,745 marketing organizations had to say about their lead generation efforts in 2011.

“It’s increasingly challenging for marketers to achieve success, and challenges are growing in pertinence year after year,” she explains. “Perceived effectiveness of tactics is declining severely. It’s getting more difficult to achieve the same results from the same marketing activities.”

She points out, however, that may be due to the fact that marketers still aren’t optimizing their funnels:

• 68% haven’t identified their sales or marketing funnels.
• 61% send leads directly to sales.
• 79% haven’t established lead scoring.
• 65% haven’t nurtured leads.

Learn how to make 2012 a better year here: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report: How Marketers are Transforming Mounting Pressures, Challenges into Revenues.

We are in the process of planning our 2012 webinar year. What would you like to know more about? What information would help you generate more leads? How can we help you stay on top of lead-generation innovations? Leave a comment below.

B2B Telemarketing, Content Marketing, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership

Longer selling cycles and stalled deals are impeding sales funnels everywhere. Use these three practices to convert more leads into revenue:

Use Funnel-Specific Market Research
If you really want to understand what’s happening with customers at a particular point in your funnel, then you have to ask them while the last interaction with you is relatively fresh in their minds. As such, an interview or survey should happen close enough to the event that the prospect will recall the context of the decision. Be sure to include questions on customer decision dynamics. In many industries, for example, executives are scrutinizing much smaller transactions, so lead generation, lead nurturing and sales enablement tactics must address this shift in buying behavior. Typically, such research reveals a few issues that can be addressed relatively quickly.

Integrate this research into your demand-generation and lead-nurturing framework by making such surveys or interviews automated trigger events. For example, let’s say you’d like to gain a customer perspective of your teleprospecting operation. Here’s how you can go about it:

1. Create an automated rule - on the first teleprospecting conversation send an email to the prospect moments after the call.
2. Reference the conversation and the name of the representative, then ask for confidential feedback.
3. Provide a link within the email to a simple survey that asks about the knowledge and professionalism of the representative. The web form might also allow for free-text feedback.

Use this type of feedback to improve training for the individual or team. Similar context-sensitive surveys could occur when customers download a white paper or a case study, attend a webinar or visit a tradeshow booth. Use this kind of information to improve white papers, case studies, webinars, or other specific marketing outputs.

Use Teleprospecting to Re-Engage Your Stalled Prospects
Professional teleprospecting representatives should consistently approach “dead” leads as an informal market-research project. The message can be straight and true. The representative is trying to find out what went wrong to better serve customers in the future. The rep should ask the customer to be as candid as possible, then listen and thank the customer for his candor. Open-ended questions should be used at the outset, with probing and clarifying questions thereafter. In many states, B2B calls can be digitally recorded so key stakeholders can actually hear what customers are saying.

Obviously, for this approach to work, the teleprospecting team must be listened to as a voice of the customer. The company can then use this intelligence to develop incentives that address the problems of delay. For example, if prospects lack capital budgets, perhaps a “buy-now-pay-later” program will get the sale back on track. Commonly, nothing has happened because the project was never a priority. In such cases, lead nurturing and campaigns targeting more senior executives can be of value.

Make this type of effort a two-part campaign. In the first phase, the team does the research. In the second, after huddling with product marketing and sharing the answers, the team reaches back out selectively to offer solutions that respond to the prospect’s reason for stalling. Of course, the solutions can then be applied moving forward to all stalled prospects.

Update Your Ideal Customer Profile
Sometimes, less is more. If your research reveals that your product or services is not a particularly good fit, you might want to revisit the ideal customer profile for each product or service, and adjust your targeting and qualification tactics accordingly. Better targeting won’t salvage stalled leads, but it will allow you to allocate more sales and marketing resources where you can win more frequently. That strategy, in turn, may buy your company more time to change the product or service to make it more competitive.

While no one can change the economy, you can increase the yield from demand-generation investments by using these three practices. They’ll help you attain a better understanding of the buying behavior and obstacles that prevent customers from moving forward. This approach will help you identify the best tools to move them down the sales funnel or reallocate resources that will yield a better return on investment.

B2B Telemarketing, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Sales, Sales Leads

Too many marketers think that their inside sales teams are alchemists. They dump data that’s absolute garbage into the top of the sales funnel and expect sales lead gold to come out the other side.

This came to mind when my teleprospecting team was struggling with one of our lead-generation clients.

They had promised us a “high-quality list” from their database: tens of thousands of names of c-suite executives who were in their target-market sweet spot.

The reality: nearly half the contacts had disconnected phone numbers and another 30 percent definitely wasn’t in the target market for this particular product. Think fast food joints and mom-and-pop businesses. The remaining contacts had missing or inaccurate information. My team spent at least 80 percent of their time doing research and investigation to make the list usable so they could do what they were actually hired to do – generate leads.

Unless you want your inside sales professionals to be mere data entry clerks, test your lists! It takes about 30 hours of calling to attain a fairly accurate understanding of list quality by answering these questions:

• Is there duplicate data?
• Is the information current and complete?
• Are the contacts truly in your product’s target market?

If more than 1 out of 20 contacts fail this test, I advise cleaning this list before you pass it along to a lead-generation team. Unless, of course, you don’t mind your team spending their time tracking down and entering data instead of generating leads.

Here’s the crux: you may think you have this awesome, robust database, but only a small segment of it may actually be the customer you want to reach. Unless you’re constantly updating your lists, too much of the data is likely old and unusable.

Your team may, indeed, be alchemists, and generate impressive numbers of leads regardless of the garbage you’re giving them. My team did. They ended up giving the client with the horrifically bad list an 800 percent return on investment, but not without a lot of extra work and stress. I can’t help but think how much higher their ROI would have been if we were given a better list. Think about what your teams could achieve, too.

B2B Telemarketing, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Qualification

Since 2007, InsideSales.com has been partnering with leading academic institutions to analyze data gathered from two billion communications with 80 million customer profiles. During Tuesday’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinar, Dave Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, shared the juiciest statistics and trends from these analyses to help B2B marketers optimize inbound lead contact, qualification and close rates. Here’s a taste of what he presented:

• 78 percent of sales goes to the company that responds first
• An average of 43 percent of companies never respond to inbound leads
• Most sales professionals give up trying to reach a lead after an average of 1.29 attempts, but 61 percent of leads go into the pipeline after the second call.
• If you set an appointment, expect a 20 to 45 percent no-show rate. Decrease no-shows by 20 percent by using Google or Outlook calendar invitations.

Not a minute passes in this webinar without Dave presenting some type of data you can use to speed leads into your sales pipeline. If you’re serious about driving the highest ROI from your inbound marketing investment, be sure to watch the video replay below.

View and download slides via SlideShare.

Want to jump ahead to key points fast? Review these timestamps.

2:20 – Dave outlines the history of InsideSales and why organizations like MIT, Harvard and Stanford are eager to partner with them.

7:00 – There is a revolution in sales, says Dave. In 2009, there were 800,000 inside sales departments. In 2013, there will be 2.3 million. Meanwhile, outside sales will have flat growth. Venture capital firms want companies in their portfolios to have inside sales departments, so much so that they’ll recruit, train and transplant inside sales teams into their portfolio companies.

9:33 – When does a web lead cold go? Immediately! Contact rates decrease 100 times if you wait 30 minutes, as opposed to five minutes, to call back. If you think your company is good at responding, think again, says Dave. InsideSales.com has conducted more than 5,000 audits for leading companies, and the average response time is 44 hours! An average of 43 percent didn’t respond at all.

13:15 – 78 percent of sales goes to the company that responds first – not to the company with the best or cheapest product.

14:00 – Sales professionals will attempt an average of 1.29 calls to reach a lead and give up after that. However, in the B2B environment, 30 percent of leads go into the pipeline after the first dial attempt, 61 percent go into it at the second. It’s worth calling back until the eighth attempt. Some companies see leads move into the pipeline even after the 12^th call.

16:18 – Higher-ticket items require more research before calling the customer. The more you research, the less you will have to dial.

19:00 – Efficient sales reps tend to leave more voicemails because they’re making more calls. That means they can spend more than two and a half hours a day leaving voicemail. However, about four percent of those voicemails result in a call back which goes directly into the pipeline. Script voicemails to ensure more call backs, and even automate them.

22:11 – Make the most of every call by capturing permission to communicate with them in the future. A single rep can capture 7,500 permissions in the course of a year, “That’s enough contacts to fill a webinar without making another phone call,” Dave points out.

26:23 – No-show rates to appointments can be as high as 50 percent. Prevent that with a “hot transfer” – ask if they would have 10 to 15 minutes to talk immediately.

27:42 – Build a direct dial database. Contact rates increase by 300 percent when using direct dial.

29:21 – If you can’t do a hot transfer, do appointment reminders via Google or Microsoft Outlook, there will be a 20 percent greater chance that they won’t cancel.

30:32 – If you call between 8 and 9 a.m. and 4 and 5 p.m., you’re 150 percent more likely to connect. If you call on Wednesday and Thursday, you’re 80 percent more likely. Always call before emailing. And don’t limit communication to email – leverage Twitter, LinkedIn and fax. Dave reports fax pulls seven times better than email.

33:53 – Show a local presence. When callers used a local number, there was at least a 60 percent increase in contact rates. Emails sent with a local number received a 40 percent higher response and 33 percent lower negative response rate.

39:08 – Review of key takeaways

41:08 – Q&A begins

B2B Telemarketing, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Qualification, Webinar Replay

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, almost 70 percent of B2B organizations increased their inbound marketing budgets this year. This includes website design, management, and optimization, as well as inbound-marketing tactics including social media, virtual events and webinars, SEO and pay-per-click.

If you’re making the same investment, you will definitely want to attend our next B2B Lead Roundtable Webinar on July 19, Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions. David Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, will share how his company has joined forces with these academic leaders to study how companies are managing the leads they’re generating through inbound marketing efforts.

The results are going to surprise and may even alarm you.

Consider this: merely responding to the leads you receive will put you ahead of 40 percent of B2B organizations! Companies are spending more money than ever to drive leads through their websites and the Internet, and yet, nearly half don’t follow up! That means there’s outstanding opportunity for those who do. David will give you practical, easy-to-implement ideas, underscored by case studies, to make sure you hold onto leads once you get them. The discussion will include:

• The speed at which leads go cold – it’s a lot faster than you think – and what to do about it
• The average time it takes companies to respond to leads
• The average attempts sales people make before they give up
• Why caller ID matters – even for B2B sales calls
• The best time of the day and day of the week to follow up with prospects

Watch the webinar replay:

B2B Telemarketing, Lead Management, Webcasts/Webinars

When Brian Carroll and I present webinars on adding the human touch to lead nurturing, like the ones last month for the B2B Lead Roundtable and Marketo, we inevitably get these questions:

“How often should we call? How often should we email? What should we do first?”

The last question always guides me to the best responses for the first two. That’s why I always call the prospect before sending an email.

First, a phone conversation is a prime opportunity to gain opt-in. You can hear Brian and I role play how it’s done at timestamp 47:34 in the webinar replay from the B2B Lead Roundtable event. Listen in and you’ll be surprised at how natural it is to gain permission to send more information, which, of course, requires an email address.

Second, emails cannot do discovery. An email can’t tell you:

• Whether recipients are influencers or decision makers
• Their roles in the company
• What they’re most interested in knowing
• Their buying process

In contrast, a thoughtfully planned conversation is the ultimate discovery tool. It can reveal the answers to all of these points so you can identify the best:

• Follow-up cadence and frequency: You’ll know their buying cycle and how to ideally align contact – phone calls and emails – to it.
• Content: You’ll know what they care about and why, that’s the knowledge you need to create emails that are meaningful to them.

Third, real-life conversation is the best way to build connection. Thanks to your conversation, prospects will be looking for your email and will be more likely to open it because they know it will have content they can use. Your relationship will be off to a flying start. And, remember, whoever has the strongest relationship ultimately wins the sale.

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing

Last month’s webinars on leveraging the human touch to drive leads, presented for the B2B Lead Roundtable and Marketo, prompted a great question: “What should I look for in a teleprospector?”

Unfortunately, that can’t be answered with a fast, convenient sound bite. That’s why I’m going to do my best to respond here in my inaugural blog post.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve been involved in hiring hundreds of teleprospectors. Along with Brian Carroll, I was one of the co-founders of InTouch, now MECLABS Leads Group. Fortune 100 companies from a broad base of industries hire us to do teleprospecting for them; they know the value of the human touch to optimize their lead generation efforts. It seems like we’re always on the lookout for powerful teleprospectors to support these accounts, and over the years, we’ve pinpointed some of the critical traits that are inherent in every top performer:

An abiding desire to serve. Teleprospectors must sincerely want to help others, because that’s what they’re going to be doing all day, every day. When they conclude a conversation with a prospect, we want that prospect to feel like the call added value to his day – regardless of his timing to buy. To make that happen, teleprospectors must have an attitude of service, a sincere eagerness to help others. Furthermore, not only must teleprospectors serve the people they call, they must gain real satisfaction from serving their colleagues as well. There’s no room to be territorial, because they’re going to be passing leads to someone else who will take them to the next level
in the sales process.

The focus to follow process. A full-time teleprospector can expect to make 80 to 100 calls a day. This entails far more than simply smiling, dialing and spouting a script. After all, we use call guides, not scripts; read this or watch our most recent webinar to find out why. Our team must be fully engaged in each and every call to successfully execute proven, tested tactics that drive opportunity. It doesn’t matter how clever or charming a candidate is; if he’s unwilling to follow process, you don’t want him calling.

Tenacity and patience. We’re not bell-ringers here; people aren’t getting leads every three minutes. It can typically take 8 to 19 calls to reach a prospect. Teleprospecting is not for someone who thrives on instant gratification.

Empathy and strong listening skills. They must be able to put themselves in their prospects’ shoes and anticipate their needs. That means listening intently to pick up on the subtle signals that indicate where a prospect is on the buying process. You would be impressed at the engagement we get from prospects who can sense that our teleprospectors are paying close attention. People know when they’re genuinely being listened to.

Curiosity coupled with a love of learning. People with this combination like to be informed; they’re well-read and take pride in keeping up with what’s happening in the business world. This is a key trait for our teleprospectors because they can ultimately work with a variety of clients. While we train and coach them extensively, they must be ready to intelligently discuss any number of topics ranging from manufacturing devices to educational programs.

A clear, measured, confident speaking voice. This is lower on the list because, more than any of the other qualities, it can be taught.

Obviously, you’re not going to be able to scan a resume and identify these skills, and you can’t take someone from outside sales, plop them down with a headset and a script, and expect success. Road warriors are accustomed to closing; hunting for opportunity requires a completely different skillset and very few people have both.

To find great teleprospectors, we have candidates undergo multiple interviews and tests, including role-playing and psychological analyses, to identify strengths and opportunities for growth. You just never know where you’re going to find out a stand-out employee. Case in point is Mark Wicka, our Senior Business Development Representative. He came to our company as a temp and had never worked in any kind of lead-generation role. Eleven years later, he’s still here. (And talk about work ethic – he’s never called in sick during those entire 11 years!)

He began his career here generating leads for our clients. But these days, we’re using his skills to generate leads for MECLABS while mentoring and supervising a team that is doing the same. He thrives on learning; when he worked for our clients, he dove into educating himself about their industries and products. Now that he drives business for MECLABS, he has become expert in all aspects of lead generation. Yet, he’s the most humble guy you’d ever meet; he never comes across as a know-it-all, just very informed and authentic. His spirit of service shines through in everything he does. Consider what he has to say about what motivated him to come to MECLABS:

“I feel like fate brought me here. I worked in print advertising, but it didn’t resonate. I didn’t think it was very effective and I wanted to work for a company where I knew their solution worked,” he recalls. “I was doing more than look for a job, I wanted to work for an organization that I believed in. I’ve found that at MECLABS.

“My goal is to be an intelligent follower. There’s no disgrace in following, the person who follows leaders most effectively is the one who develops leadership most rapidly. I’ve had great mentors here – when I started it was my program managers. Today, it’s Brian Carroll and Flint McGlaughlin (CEO and Managing Director of MECLABS). Their success is my success.”

I would love to hear your thoughts about the qualities you think are essential to be an effective teleprospector. Are you surprised by my conclusions? Are there other skills you think are just as important as the ones I’ve listed? Do you want me to expand on any of these thoughts? Feel free to comment below.

B2B Telemarketing, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Leadership