Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Quite Possibly The Perfect Telesales Dashboard

By Jason Stewart  - September 5, 2007

What are the most important metrics for your telesales efforts?

Over the years I have worked with a number of third party companies that have specialized in setting appointments and generating leads for my senior sales teams, with varying degrees of success. The hardest part of the process is not really any different than when you have your team in-house -- keeping track of progress and getting visibility into the day-to-day dials so that you can spot problems before they end up blocking the flow of leads. Are my reps calling in at the right level? How’s the pipeline? Do I have enough new names for them to call? What objections are they facing?

One firm I had the pleasure of working with, AG Salesworks, had these metrics nailed down, and quite honestly showed me one of the best dashboards I have ever seen. Run out of their Salesforce.com system, and designed specifically for weekly review of the team’s progress, it flies in the face of conventional dashboard wisdom by only featuring one graph or chart -- but still provides an excellent summary of the previous week’s events. They were kind enough to share an example:

LEAD INFORMATION and LEADS PASSED Very straightforward, simple line item listings of recent leads and overall history of the calling campaign. A summary of the new leads passed to the sales reps during the past week, as well as a listing of initial meetings that were scheduled to occur and what’s on deck next week. Aside from reporting success for the week, it also prompts conversations about whether the meetings occurred, how they went, and what can be learned from them.

DATABASE DETAIL This section features the only graph on the dashboard, a bar chart showing the overall status of all prospects in the database your reps are working from. A great chart that shows you instantly what percentage of names have been dialed, who has been contacted, and how many fresh names have yet to be called. Also see who is interested, not interested, not a fit, etc. No more running out of names because you can see when the reps are running low, and can then go out and purchase a new prospecting list. Below that is a line item glimpse into the pipeline to see how many contacts are close to booking that first appointment, as well as a view into the reasons some of your prospects are not interested in taking that meeting. Extremely useful, not only for coaching your reps on how to handle common objections but also to spot trends in your target industries that might affect overall sales.

CONVERSATION DETAIL Yet more line item charts, detailing the outcome and the prospect title for every single “connect” (live conversation) over the past week. When I was working with them, I was especially fixated on the titles. We had a few “sweet spot” titles we liked for them to dial (Controller, VP of Finance, etc.), but it was always interesting to see where we got directed at these companies after someone “in the know” heard our pitch. As the groups who make purchasing decisions get bigger and bigger (fewer single decision makers!) it was always helpful to understand who was being pulled in to learn about new projects and vendors.

I was so impressed with the AG Salesworks dashboard that I replicated it for use monitoring some of our overseas telesales teams, which were not outsourced. There were some custom fields that needed to be created and reports that needed to be fine-tuned. The hardest part was the coaching on the workflow side, making sure the reps were tracking what needed to be tracked. Adoption is key. Decide what is really important to monitor, make sure your reps are comfortable entering the information you need (drop downs are great -- less typing), and then build your reports.

Before long your dashboard may be the envy of the sales and marketing departments.

So, What's the Goal of That Campaign Anyway?

By Jason Stewart  - August 6, 2007

I was reminded this weekend of how many times I have sent out a desperate email campaign without really thinking about what I wanted to accomplish with it.

Susan Tatum had a great piece posted to her blog on August 3rd, 10 Questions that Drive Increased B2B Marketing Campaign Results. It reminded me of that old carpenter’s adage, “measure twice, cut once.” Make sure you understand your goals, and what you want to accomplish, before you act. Too often I have received emails or invitations with no clear call to action or incentive for me to act. I bet they didn’t answer any of Susan’s ten questions before they hit “Send.”

Here are her ten, with some comments:

1. Who is the target audience?
Are you really going to just send that email out to everyone in your database? The same email, to everyone, regardless of department or position? Honestly, the COO of the company is not (necessarily) going to be interested in the same things as the Director of Finance or the VP of Sales. Consider sending more frequent, smaller, better targeted campaigns or at least create a few versions of the offer and dictate who in your database gets which one.

2. Where can we find them?
I look at this question in two ways…number one is, of course, where do we find people who might be interested in our goods and/or services that do not exist already in our database? What are they reading? Where do they go on the web? Which events do they go to? Basic marketing…find your audience and get in front of them. But what about the people who are already in your database? Once you figure out the target audience, are you able to easily find that audience in your database?

I would imagine that one thing keeping businesses from controlling the target audience of offers and campaigns is the fact that they have no idea how to pull that audience out of their database. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of sorting through all those names and titles and finding an easy way to pull all “marketing” or “finance” people out of your database, consider hiring a temp.

Create a new field for department in the contact record, and have a temp pull everyone with the word “sales” in their title and add that word to the new field. Repeat with “marketing,” “finance,” “operations,” etc.  It may take a while, but the payoff is huge. Plus, there are likely some pretty great tools out there to help with the job, like the Excel Connector for Salesforce.com which allows you to pull records out in Excel, make changes and then import those changes right back in.

3. What do we want them to do?
4. What can we offer that will be of great enough value to them to do what we want them to do?
Have you ever written copy for an email campaign and then noticed there was no incentive in it for the prospect to do anything? No complimentary white paper, no registration for a webinar, no chance to be included on the distribution list for the results of that fascinating survey. Occasionally it is good to just get something out there, keep the company name in the front of mind.

Some food for thought though…the email lists I unsubscribe from are the ones that offer me no incentive to stay.

5. How many different ways will we make the offer?
6. How many chances will we give the prospects to respond?
I recently worked on a webinar with a third party vendor. They had a policy to send out at least three email invitations to every webinar, and they found that they got the majority of their sign-ups on that last round of email. When done in combination with a targeted telesales campaign to your most prized prospects, you can drive some decent traffic to a webinar – as long as it has a compelling message and is not just a glorified demo of your product.

Also, how many different ways within the email, invitation, etc. can the prospect arrive at the desired result? How many different places can they click to get to that registration page, or to download that white paper? Keep in mind – that button they are supposed to click on is not always as obvious as you think it is. Also provide a nice, obvious text link. Or two. Make sure there is no way they can miss the call to action.

I’m not saying you should send every campaign three times with the offer presented six different ways in every draft, but you may want to consider that sometimes you’re call to action is not as obvious as you think, or that you are getting to the right prospect but at the wrong time. That’s why that publication gets webinar registrations on every pass, and also why that telesales rep gets you to take his call after they have left their third message.

7. What will we do after prospects accept the offer?
They clicked on the link, or attended the webinar – now what?

Think auto-responders that will send an email to everyone who downloads that white paper with a contact name and phone number. Think quick evaluation of leads before they are either distributed to the appropriate salesperson or thrown back in to the “nurture” pile. Think phone calls from the sales reps within 48 hours (maximum) to see where they are in their process. Without good lead management your efforts are wasted.

8. How many different offers will we need to make in order to get an acceptable number of prospects to become qualified leads?
Just how many campaigns do you need to run? Well, if you have a few years worth of data that question gets easier to at least estimate. If we got 10 sales last year out of 300 leads, and we want to get twenty sales this year we should shoot for 600 leads.

Which campaigns drove the most leads last year? Was it telemarketing? Should we hire another inside rep to generate leads? Do we have enough names in our database to support another rep? And so on…

Look at the history, repeat what works and don’t spend money on the campaigns that tank. We all know the sales guys love trade shows…but how many good leads do you really get, and at what cost per lead?

9. When will we know a prospect is ready to be passed to the sales team?
See our lead scoring entry for some tips on this…

10. How many sales-ready prospects do we need to generate to a) justify the campaign, and b) consider it a success.
Before you act, have you even decided what your goals are? How do you know if that event or webinar was successful if you didn’t have any expectations or goals set in advance?

Salespeople have quotas for a reason. You should have clear goals as well.

Too Much Information

By Jason Stewart  - July 30th, 2007

This blog has had a few entries about the hazards of asking for too much information from your prospects, but what about sharing too much information about yourself?

Have you ever looked at a website and thought to yourself “Wow. I have no idea what they do.”

How about the opposite? Have you ever looked at a vendor’s site, understood exactly what they do, and then disqualified them from consideration because of information you found there?

It’s a very fine line, and a few of the sales aspects of it are covered nicely in a piece called “The TMI Trap” at B2Blog. There are “Too Much Information” (TMI) hazards to watch out for in your B2B marketing efforts as well, however.

Telesales – I’ve worked with a number of telesales outsourcing firms over the years, charging them with appointment setting for our outside sales reps and account managers. I found myself, more often than not, having to stop myself from “overtraining.” In my quest to prepare them to answer any question or objection, I would lose sight of the fact that it’s not their job to do that. If they answer every question put before them, why would a prospect need to meet with your salesperson? They already got everything they needed from the telesales rep. The best telesales reps understand this, and can work the fact that they don’t know everything as the opening to introduce the senior salesperson and to set up that follow-up meeting.

Website – Talk to your spouse, significant other, brother or sister. Even better, show your parents. Show your website to someone who has absolutely nothing to do with your company, and then ask them to describe what it is you do. Prepare to be shocked. Then fix it. Once you have that squared away, have a discussion with your sales team to find out what the most common objections are this month. Ask them, point blank, if they would like to have those points addressed on the site, or if they would rather have control over objection handling case by case, and just concentrate on getting people in the door first. They’ll probably want to find out more about what is driving a concern or objection before answering it, but on occasion they may ask you for the next item on the list -- a new piece of collateral.

Collateral – How long is your collateral wish list? How often has your sales team requested a high-priority piece of collateral that gets used once (maybe twice) before it is completely outdated? Consider how long it takes to write that first draft, share it, revise it, share it again, update it, design the layout, share it again, etc. In spite of the temptation to have a prepared piece of collateral handy for any question or objection that might cross your path, you need to carefully select where to direct your (limited) resources. The trick is to create collateral that is informative and interesting, selling the value and benefits of your goods or services without making the prospect feel as if they are sitting in a classroom lecture. Too much information might bore them to tears, or might lead them to disqualify you from consideration before a live person can learn more about the issues driving their concerns. Specifications in an RFI (Request for Information) or RFP (Request for Proposal) have been known to change after projects have been scoped out, but typically that does not happen based solely upon an outstanding piece of collateral. You need to get a salesperson in there to ferret out the real drivers and needs behind the project.

Your objective is create the marketing pieces that drive leads to your sales team, not eliminate the need for a salesperson.

Should you Rent or Buy Marketing Lists?

By Chris Golec  - March 26, 2007

Quality and Credibility are Key

More and more companies are popping up that offer the opportunity to buy a marketing list versus the traditional rental model.    While there are many benefits to this option, the devil may be in the details.   We recommend customers carefully consider both options and then make the decision based on list quality, the provider's ability to segment and target their data, and the overall credibility of the provider. 

Problems with Rental

• Low quality or relevancy to target campaign – The rental model offers no way to know if your message is reaching the target audience since you never see the list.   If 50% the responses you receive from a campaign are solid prospects, you can safely assume that more than 50% the initial list was sent to the wrong audience. 
• No visibility into email results – Most providers do not validate (via a third party) how many emails were sent or delivered.   
• High rental minimums – Sending your message to 5,000 or 10,000 people (most provider's minimums) absolutely makes no sense if your target audience is much smaller.   Not only is a waste of money, but it forces you to spam professionals with a message that is meaningless. 
• Low response rates – A 1-2% response rate, or 98-99%+ lack of response rate, should be unacceptable.   A more targeted list with quality data should double or triple results and save your company countless hours of frustration on the back-end.
  
• No multi-channel campaigns – Renting is a one-time event.   If you are considering buying a list,  it is important to keep in mind that you may touch a prospect 6-10 times a year.   Taking a total cost approach is critical.   

Email Buyers Beware

• Privacy issues – Many providers such as Jigsaw, Spoke, Netrospex harvest email addresses from their customer’s Microsoft Outlook contact folder, receive confidential customer data as a payment or credit, spider web sites, illegally redistribute data, or all of the above.   We highly recommend marketers avoid using a source that has questionable practices and hope that a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy will suffice.   The future liability is just not worth it.  See the following:
  
  • TechCrunch - "Jigsaw is the most evil company funded by well known and respected venture investors"
  • San Francisco Chronicle - "...a breeding ground for identity thieves and spammers".
• Higher cost – The cost for buying high quality, legitimate opt-in lists may be 5-10X higher than rental lists.   You should, however, consider the ability to re-market and do multi-channel campaigns.   Since the providers knows you'll see every record, they are also like to do a much better job filtering and refining the data. 
  
• Low relevancy – Even higher quality providers do a poor job organizing their data to enable the filtering and segmentation required to hit 5%+ response rates.  We ran a campaign for a customer using data from a provider (public company) that claims to have the highest quality IT data available.    After demanding that we see the list, we found that only 25% of the titles matched the campaign's target audience (IT Directors and higher).   
• Quality – Few list providers verify their information and virtually none offer a money-back guarantee.   If your provider cannot make these claims (in writing), expect poor results and have a process in place to remove the bad data from your CRM system.    Melissa Data estimates the cost of a bad record to be $100.   
• Getting ”Black-Listed” - Many email sellers fail to eliminate the info@, sales@, and ISP email addresses from their lists.  If you acquire a list with these addresses present, be sure to strip them out and remove the vendor from your preferred list.   Networks look for these obvious triggers to block senders (you) from all future electronic communications.    

The Answer? 

If you can identify a list provider that is willing and able to sell you only highly relevant, verified Opt-in email addresses and company information.  Without these minimum qualifications, however, you could be acquiring privacy issues and be subject to less than satisfactory response rates.

Please send us any B2B marketing list providers you recommend.