B2B Sales & Marketing Minute

There is nothing that sales people hate to do more than make cold calls. Even the very best sales people who make this activity a regular and scheduled part of their work week just tolerate it because they have learned over time it is their best way to fill the sales pipeline with new, quality prospects to work.

Over the years we have learned that the best way to get people excited about making cold calls is to ensure that the calls are productive and yield real results. Successful cold call or lead generation campaign can be traced back to 3 critical campaign pillars.

• List Quality
• Strength of Message
• Effective Delivery

Any weakness in one of the above pillars and the campaign’s success can be in jeopardy. At ProSales Connection, we spend a great deal of time before we launch a lead generation campaign making sure we are happy with each of these areas before we go live.

In this Blog, I want to focus on the first of the three pillars.

List Quality

Regardless of how strong your businesses message is or how skilled your sales people are at articulating the message, if a sales person is speaking to the wrong contact or wrong type of businesses the campaign won’t be successful. This is a fundamental component. With that being said, the prospect list is rarely 100% wrong. It is a usually a grey area.

Wrong Direction

Often the marketing department extrapolates data points from the existing customer database and make some assumptions about where the marketing focus needs to be. This is, in general, a sound approach. However, it can lead you astray if the data is not carefully analyzed and input from the sales department is not used to get a “reality check” on the assumptions and conclusion from the research.

For example, if a company looks at their revenue by vertical market and discover that 25% of revenue last year was from the Health Care market. It would be easy to conclude that this is a hot market for your business. You might be surprised when after the lead generation campaign fails that this 25% of your revenue was generated by 1-2 customers that had “one-off” projects that were unique to their businesses. It was not an industry wide need, but rather a unique business challenge at a specific client.

This sent your sales team off on a wild goose chase for business that was not repeatable and therefore an inefficient use of your sales people’s time and energy.

Poor Quality

The second biggest risk to a lead generation campaign, as it relates to the list quality, is the actual completeness or accuracy of the data given to your sales team to work from.

If the contacts given to the sales force are missing data like names, titles, phone numbers, business name or industry description it can grind productivity to a halt. A sales person making cold calls needs to find a rhythm to be productive. That means the data needs to be easily delivered in a systematic way (a CRM solution is best) and the data needs to be complete and accurate. As soon as a sales person has to break their rhythm to poke around a website for 10 minutes looking for a phone number or name the productivity drops and the return on your marketing investment is diminished.

In summary, make sure the list you give to your sales people for any cold call or lead generation campaign is targeted at the right prospects based on careful market research and ensure that you are sourcing the data from a reliable source where quality is paramount. Avoid the temptation to same money on the list and transfer the cost to the sales team with ineffective calls and lost time correcting/collecting data.

Until next time…

Mike Faherty
ProSales Connection