Top 7 Best Practices When Outsourcing Teleprospecting

Top 7 Best Practices When Outsourcing Teleprospecting

Outsourcing the teleprospecting function provides B2B sales organizations with a high-touch, low-cost alternative to building an in-house team. The objective of any good teleprospecting campaign is to generate live conversations.

To ensure that your outsourced teleprospecting project functions efficiently, companies must provision a 3rd party team as thoroughly as they would their own. Here are the top 7 outsourced teleprospecting best practices.

1. Start with a Complete List

Prior to starting any teleprospecting campaign, you must start with a substantial list of contacts (at least 200 contacts, but 500 is better) with complete company and contact information--ideally including direct phone or extension and email address.

Making cold calls into organizations for the purpose of first finding the right person with which to speak is counter-productive and wastes time and money. If the caller has good contact information she can focus on connecting live. The connect rate is more important than the number of dials.

There are 3 main sources of data suitable for building teleprospecting campaign lists:

1. Existing CRM data. Sources could include trade show leads, inbound inquiries, webinar attendees, former customers and current customers. Before you turn the teleprospectors loose on this kind of data, scrub it for completeness (company, name, title, direct phone, email and lead source) and organize it into lists so that the callers can focus on dialing, not navigating your CRM.

Additionally you should run reports in the CRM so that all the contacts are readily visible and the caller can dial down without being forced to stop and find the next one. Group the contacts according to the lead source in order to get a feel for connect rates and meetings from different sources.

Rank the contacts according to Born on Date and either start calling oldest to newest or vice versa. If you have a ton of inquiries older than 1-2 years, group those together and focus on dispensing with them until exhausted.

2. Business data vendors. Companies like Jigsaw, OneSource, Hoovers and InsideView specialize in providing B2B contact info, albeit differently.

In deciding where to source 3rd party data it's important to understand your ideal prospect profile. If company size, employee counts and industry categories are the most important, OneSource and Hoovers will provide you with the tools to build those lists and will include top executives.

If you know your prospect profile and having deeper contact levels and complete information including email addresses, Jigsaw and InsideView will serve you better (InsideView licenses Jigsaw data for some its contacts).

Jigsaw is a community of members that share their contact information, but members may also search, build, purchase and export lists with complete contact info including email addresses.

InsideView scours the Internet for data and organizes it into searchable information. Subscribers may find contacts in real time or build lists. IV also posts company financials, ownership, employee counts, news, jobs and trigger events.

IV pulls from a variety of sources, including NetProspex, a Jigsaw competitor. Netprospex claims that it scrubs its data by validating all contact info, a monumental task considering the millions of names they have stored.

OneSource and Hoovers are best known for their business data, including financials, employee counts, parents, SIC, NAICS and corporate executives, but not always email addresses.

3. 3rd Party Role-based Discovery Providers. What if you're targeting roles versus titles? Many contacts wear a lot of hats, or their primary responsibilities are obscured.

One example of this is the "Business Development" title. In some organizations this title's role is to negotiate licenses or deals with 3rd party companies to create new products and services for its company. But Business Development may also mean that the position role is to find new customers or new markets.

Lacking this nuanced differentiation will waste the caller's time. If you need to build a list of contacts with their roles defined, then you should consider outsourcing the process of role discovery to firms like Salesify and ReadyContacts. Either of these firms will work from your role-based profiles and dial into companies until they find the right person(s).

All contact information is gathered and cataloged. This presents a huge productivity gain for callers when they are not forced to "find the person in charge of...". Providing the teleprospecting team with the role-based contact list may incur an fairly substantial up front cost, but will pay off in the end because the callers will going directly after the right person.

2. Provide Access to Your CRM

The teleprospecting team must have access to your CRM. The callers need read/write access in order to update or create new lead contact information, assign hand-off tasks, send emails and track activities. The data created in a teleprospecting campaign becomes a valuable company asset.

3. Provide Email and Calendar Access

The most efficient way to schedule appointments and increase the odds that all parties (prospect and sales team) have the meeting in their calendars is to allow the teleprospecting team to email the invite to both prospect and sales rep. The teleprospectors also need to receive email so they can monitor responses and meeting confirmations.

4. Decide on a Scheduling Plan

Companies that hire teleprospecting firms to set appointments must make their sales personnel available for these meetings. There are desktop sharing meetings (Webex, GoToMeeting), conference calls (no slides or demos) and onsite meetings.

Most onsite meetings require advance logistics management. A common scenario is when the sales rep will be visiting her territory and wants the caller to arrange more meetings around the anchor appointment.

Generating new prospects and appointments generally means a phone call or online presentation, so the sales team must decide how they want the caller to schedule these appointments.

* Caller is free to schedule the meeting according the prospect's availability. The meeting request is handed off to the sales lead (manager) who then delegates the meeting invitation task to one of the available reps.

* Sales reps who will be the beneficiaries of scheduled meetings set aside blocks of time in their weekly calendars. This method works well with desktop sharing and conference call meetings.

* Caller has access to the sales reps' calendars and has been given guidance on best days and times. This is the ideal method for scheduling as it allows the teleprospector to create the meeting and email invitations to the rep and the prospect, ensuring they both have it in their calendars, and providing monitoring on acceptances. But it also means the reps must keep their calendars up to date.

5. Make Key Personnel Available

Those that are making the calls and qualifying contacts need access to the recipients of the meetings--the sales team. Email, cell phone, direct line and Instant Messaging are all important communication channels for the teleprospector to use to loop in the rep on a hot prospect. Many times a hot call can be mitigated on the spot if the caller can quickly run down the rep.

6. Measure What is Important

Measure what's important. The number of outbound dials is a key indicator, but only when juxtaposed with the number of connects. Connect rate is a productivity number. Dial volume is an activity number.

Connectivity is heavily influenced by the quality and completeness of contact information, so when you're seeing a low number of connects and a high number of dials, the problem is typically the contact info. Teleprospecting cannot be wholly dependent on phone calls either. Email is a potent augmentation tool for reaching contacts that screen their calls or hide behind voicemail.

7. Report on What is Relevant

CRM reports should track caller activities, lead status and dispensation. This means that the CRM must be customized so that their are fields that can capture key inputs. For leads those inputs would describe the prospect reaction: Send info first, Not Interested, Hang Up, Already a Customer, Disconnected, Wrong Person, No Longer Employed, etc.

Activities should be automatically logged as they occur: Completed calls, Assigned Tasks for follow up, Emails sent, etc. Reporting on this data gives a clear picture on the project progress and provides real numbers for analysis.

If your CRM allows dial tracking, that's fine. Otherwise I wouldn't log every dial--only the connected calls.

These 7 best practices can't overcome bad timing or market-readiness, but will ensure that the outsourced teleprospecting team wastes little time on bad info and maximum time talking with live prospects...