Teleprospecting results are on the rise, particularly for high tech infrastructure solutions. The biggest gains are realized by recognizing growth opportunities and then shaping your teleprospecting approach to get more qualified leads into your sales pipeline.
Here are a few strategies you can implement to make sure your pipeline grows along with the market.
Recognize current growth opportunities
The perfect outbound marketing campaign will not garner positive results if the market just isn’t buying. Undoubtedly, market factors will impact results.
Improvements in the economy, coupled with increasing technological demands, have paved the way for a rise in spending on infrastructure technology over the last 12 months. The surge of private clouds, the explosion of devices and the requirement for accessibility to everything are just a few of the factors driving the increase demand for server and storage capacity and networking.
By dissecting campaign metrics and results, you’ll quickly recognize which market segments yield the highest growth opportunity. For instance, our teleprospecting results point to six industries as the strongest infrastructure buyers—manufacturing, education, technology, financial services, health & life sciences, and professional services. Increasing focus within these six industries has had a marked improvement on overall results. Our volume of qualified, sales-ready leads has increased on nearly every technology infrastructure campaign – ranging from a 12 to 58% improvement over the last 12 months on a leads-per-day basis.
Improve your data
In the world of outbound teleprospecting, data is king. Outdated, inaccurate and poorly targeted data will quickly kill teleprospecting results. Thus, improving data will have a quick, marked improvement in qualified lead output.
Here are some data improvement strategies to consider:
- Employ strategic retouch and nurturing. Every call shouldn’t be cold. Strategically using data from past conversations improves connection rates and facilitates more robust, meaningful conversations, resulting in higher lead conversion rates.
- Capitalize on what is already known. Creating and utilizing a marketing data repository will help to turn data into actionable intelligence to fuel and improve outbound teleprospecting. Rather than starting from scratch on each new list or marketing responder, records should be enhanced and augmented using your known data (i.e. data from your last campaigns). By eliminating calls to contacts known to be incorrect or to phone numbers known to be inaccurate, agents spend more time engaging in decision-maker conversations.
- Augment with proven data sources, eliminate the rest. There are hundreds of vendors selling lists with big promises, but only a handful are worth the investment. Sometimes improvement strategies can be relatively simple – use sources that are proven to be effective, and quickly evaluate and eliminate those that are not.
Strengthen your message and call flow
While solution-based messaging strategies are commonplace in high-tech marketing, opening a first-time conversation with a very specific message can result in a high quantity of quick “no thank you” replies—particularly if you don’t know enough details about your target prospects and what makes them tick.
As an alternative, try broadening the opening statement to stimulate a more natural conversation flow. As the prospects’ situations are revealed through effective probing questions, relevant solution messaging is brought into the discussions. This approach creates more meaningful dialogue, enabling cross-selling and increasing the quantity of qualified leads.
Kathy Rizzo is the co-founder and vice president of sales and marketing at TeleNet Marketing Solutions.
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