We’ve all heard the pronouncement that “cold calling is dead.” But don’t make the mistake of taking that to mean that there’s no place for telephone prospecting as part of your demand generation strategy.
I define teleprospecting as phone-based outreach to prospects dually aimed at educating and identifying qualified leads for sales.
Teleprospecting is a valued complement to content marketing and inbound marketing and should be a component of any MQI-to-MQL Nurturing program. In fact, Aberdeen research shows that 60% of leads, on average, still come in through outbound marketing efforts – vs 40% from inbound. Moreover, an effective teleprospecting program leverages many of the same principles as content marketing – note my call-out of education as part of the definition. The only difference is that it’s delivered one-to-one through a specific individual and not one-to-many via web-based channels.
That said, finding success with teleprospecting isn’t easy. Many of the barriers that have rendered cold calling so ineffective — such as increasing difficulty in getting business people to answer their phone — still apply.
To get results from teleprospecting, start with these five elements of a winning teleprospecting program:
1. Create Positioning Around How You Help Your Buyers
The underlying premise of the teleprospecting team should be that the team is there to serve prospective buyers and best support them through their buying process. This should be coupled with the notion that there is an industry advancement (aligned to the problems your products or services solve) that is also part of your mission.
The positioning should follow a construct like the one below:
- There are a set of challenges your prospects are dealing with today – the problems addressed by your solution. These problems should be a foundational element of the content marketing strategy.
- Your prospects can take measures to improve on this situation, but there is a lot of work to do, a lot to figure out, a lot of information out there.
- Your teleprospecting team is here to help your prospects work through these problems, and provide them with whatever content they need along the way, and when they are ready, schedule time for them to talk to one of your specialists (aka Sales).
This theme is so vital to success that it needs to be embedded in every communications and conversation that the teleprospecting reps have with prospects.
2. Integrate Your Communications
The goal of the outreach is to leverage the positioning above and get the prospect to open up – reply to an email, answer the phone, return a phone call, and initiate a discussion around their situation. This will allow the teleprospecting rep to either move them toward the conversation with a specialist (as a marketing qualified lead) or identify an appropriate set of content with which to nurture them.
All touch points need to be leveraged – as every one of them matters – and they all need to project the same message around subject matter expertise and “we are here to help.” The touch points include:
- Voicemail – short, professional, respectful, and reference the email – when the prospects hears the voicemail, we want them to think, “this is someone who respects me and someone with whom I’d be open to doing business.”
- Email – short, professional, respectful and reference the voicemail – and the email will contain multiple links for validation including:
- Personal Page – I recommend building personal landing pages for each Teleprospecting rep to position them as an expert and share and catalog relevant content for the buyer.
- LinkedIn – Both the email and personal page should link to LinkedIn, where the Teleprospecting rep should also come across as an expert – with similar descriptive language of what they do and how they help, useful content and relevant LinkedIn group participation.
Cold calling may be dying, but integrated communications is alive and well.
3. Keep it Human
Although there is an element of machine to a program like this (it’s a high volume, numbers-driven approach leveraging automated systems after all), the program can be differentiated by “keeping it human.” All touch points, all emails and voicemails should exhibit respect for buyers and their time, a sincere interest in helping them and a thoughtful approach to meeting their needs.
4. Feed In the Right Leads
Similar to the MQL Trigger model for passing leads to Sales, there should be clear definition around which leads are fed to Teleprospecting. And these rules should be evaluated and adjusted based on the effectiveness of the programs as well as the capacity of teleprospecting team.
5. Manage it by the Numbers
The function is very much metrics driven. You need to know the capacity of the team– see this post here for a full description and calculator for how to look at capacity – and then manage performance around the target volume and conversion rates for MQIs to MQLs which is the key metric for the function.
These five elements will give you a foundation to not only establish but scale a teleprospecting program driving predictable pipeline and revenue growth.
For additional Aberdeen Research on this topic, you can also refer to “Marketing-Led Teleprospecting Activities Drive Inside Sales Effectiveness.”
Zak Pines is a Moneyball Marketer, which he defines as one who takes a leadership role in partnering with sales as a unified revenue growth team, driven by closed loop marketing and analytics and supported by marketing best practices such as integrated marketing and content marketing. Zak is Director, Marketing for Ipswitch, Inc. where he oversees demand generation for both the WhatsUpGold and Ipswitch File Transfer product lines. You can follow Zak’s marketing musings at www.MoneyballMarketer.com and @MoneyballMktr.
