Canadian Marketing Blog

Inside Sales: Ideas and Tips Part II

This is the second in a series of two posts (Part 1 here).
Today, we share two new ideas to deal with issues on appointment setting and campaign qualification.

Idea: Appointment Setting
Problem(s) Addressed: Lack of face-to-face activity for field reps.
Detail: Teleprospectors within this inside sales sub-segment have but one goal; to set appointments for field sales reps within the accounts that are assigned to each rep. Optimally, this will employ a “limited qualification” model; in just a few minutes conversation, the appointment setter is trying to create enough interest to get the prospect to agree to a more “significant” interaction (face-to-face, telephone- or Web-based). Again, these reps must be specially trained to deliver a very tight value proposition and generate enough buzz in just a few minutes, a skill that only a portion of the inside sales population will have. Because the inside salesperson does not spend a significant amount of time on the phone with a prospect, the degree to which the lead is qualified is usually quite low; this fact must be socialized with and agreed to by the pool of field reps that will be on the receiving end of these appointments.

Idea: Campaign Qualification
Problem(s) Addressed: Lack of a closed-loop lead process; lead definition inconsistency; lack of sales and marketing integration.
Detail: This group of teleprospectors is trained to follow up with respondents to marketing campaigns and other inbound activity; they are not cold callers. The key enabler for this activity is the outbound marketing strategy that the organization has agreed upon along with a consensus between sales and marketing regarding lead definitions. No organization should be seeking a single way to define a lead; rather, multiple “lead levels” should be created, with agreement reached on what “level” a lead must meet before it is formally passed on to field sales. In this case, when inside sales receives a response from marketing, it should be based on a set of organizationwide standards, such as same, address, email address, telephone number, activity level and activity history. When inside sales is through working these leads and “graduating” them to a level deemed field-sales worthy, the lead/each lead must have achieved additional levels of characteristics/qualification.

.

You're spot on. I believe one of the most important questions to ask yourself, and the one I'd like to pose is: What do you do with leads once you generate them?

This question is overlooked by almost everyone. It is often the cause of failure in what would otherwise be effective web marketing campaigns. The common-sense answer is easier said than done: Have your best employees respond to them quickly and consistently to qualify them into prospects.

Many companies spend thousands of dollars every month with Google, Yahoo, and MSN to generate clicks to their website. These same companies invest tens of thousands in building a web site to attract visitors. They even use analytical tools like Omniture, WebSideStory, or WebTrends to track these visitors and turn them into leads, only to let those leads sit in some sales manager’s inbox for 48 hours before they are contacted.

One elegant solution is to embed a web-form onto a website that captures the lead and pushes it real time into a database. It then quickly routes the lead to the best suited sales rep, a telephony tool immediately gets the rep on the phone and automatically calls and connects the lead to the rep.

Our research shows that the average salesperson only makes four to five attempts to contact them the first week. This means only 55% of a company’s web leads will actually get contacted.

It goes back to Lead Response Management: Acquire a system that immediately and systematically pushes the leads to the best qualified salespeople. A system that also allows the salespeople to immediately and frequently respond to leads and turn them into prospects. Again, this simple but overlooked approach can boost net results by 20 to 200%.

Darin Dixon
Insidesales.con

Darin Dixon
insidesales."con" -- an apropos Freudian slip!