Sales Advocate Newsletter
Taking Telebusiness Efficiency to the Next Level
October 2001
By Dennis Totah, President and co-founder of Catapult Target Profiling
Technology companies have truly accepted the efficiency increases brought to their field sales efforts as a result of sales development (telebusiness) teams. Telebusiness teams have two simple goals: increase the amount of time the field sales reps spend with prospects, and decrease the amount of time spent prospecting and cold calling. But who is responsible for helping the telebusiness team to achieve its common goal of consistently making as many high quality calls as possible each day?
In this month's edition of The Sales Advocate, we discuss various approaches to increasing telebusiness efficiency by providing your team with the right back-office processes and support. We will investigate the following topics:
- Lead lists and prospecting
- Maintaining your database
- Qualified lead "recycling"
Building An Effective Lead List
One of the most commonly overlooked necessities for a telebusiness team is access to a "living" lead list. In a perfect world, your telebusiness reps would not have to worry about prospecting via web or phone for contact information. In the real world, however, the average telebusiness rep spends 15-25% of his/her time building call lists for the following day.
A simple solution to this issue is to have a low cost team of entry-level employees building an ever-growing leads database and assigning calls directly to your telebusiness reps. In addition, there are companies that outsource the development of these custom databases. By providing your telebusiness reps with 10-15 new suspect leads per day, you could get up to 40% more calls made per rep. This translates into 30-40% more qualified leads per rep per month.
Having a focused lead identification team can actually help your telebusiness team to increase lead quality, as this team's sole purpose is to find the best information available for your telebusiness team to contact.
The end result is increased field sales team satisfaction based on better lead quality, and increased revenue for your company.
Database Maintenance
Did you know that each year, the average sales lead database becomes 30% outdated? This means that between 10-14 calling weeks per rep are wasted each year on these dead leads!
The value of a "living", managed leads database becomes clearly visible to both sales and marketing management when statistics like this are pointed out to them. Armed with this data, push your marketing team (or lead database building team) to scour the database. It will not only help you to maintain the efficiency of your telebusiness team, it will end up giving your marketing team more resources to focus on the sales leads that really matter during their next campaign.
Recycle Qualified Leads
It is more than likely that your telebusiness team has passed a lead onto the field sales team, only to find out that 6 months later that lead has purchased a competitor's product or service. This may occur for a variety of reasons, including: a) your company lost the deal flat out, or b) the company fell out of the sales process and the field sales rep never followed up. While occasionally losing deals flat out is just a part of selling, losing deals because of lack of follow-up process is completely unacceptable. An effective way to keep leads from getting "lost" is to set up a recycling program. This program would help telebusiness, field sales and sales management to account for each and every lead in the sales process. Some companies have reported as much as 25% of their total business coming from leads that had entered the sales process more than once (and sometimes up to four times) before closing. As a result of a structured lead recycling program, your company can capitalize upon this business.
Case Study
Portera, for example, outsources a team of lead identification/database maintenance specialists. This team originally was focused on building the telebusiness team's call lists and direct marketing databases. Now that Portera has solidified its list efforts, the team is focused on keeping the database clean. This involves going through each lead on each rep's call list and verifying that the lead is still active. In addition, the quality of the lead is identified to ensure that it continues to meet Portera's target lead profile on an ongoing basis. Through these database efforts, Portera maintains a 19 qualified leads per telebusiness rep per month average. Of these leads, 25% are typically a result of leads getting "recycled." The telebusiness team spends less than 2% of their total time prospecting for information, and maintains a 55-70 call per day average. The leads identified by the list identification specialists account for a large portion of Portera's total business.
About the Author
Dennis Totah is the President and co-founder of Catapult Target Profiling. Catapult develops custom-built sales lead lists for its clients, and then builds processes to maintain and utilize these lead lists for maximum sales and marketing results. Clients such as Portera, Docent and Enosys Markets are currently utilizing Catapult's services to augment their selling efforts.
Through our partnership with Phone Works, these services are now available to all Phone Works clients, partners and prospects. Contact Sally Duby at 510-749-9073.
This newsletter is provided as a complimentary service from Phone Works, Inc., the San Francisco Bay Area's leading sales consulting firm. Phone Works helps technology firms increase revenue, shorten sales cycles and implement successful, repeatable sales models. The industry's largest technology companies and newest start-ups turn to Phone Works for lead-generation, lead-qualification, telesales and sales-productivity programs.
You can reach Phone Works at 510.749.9073.
