Category Archives: Teleprospecting

Utilize telephone outreach to build high quality sales leads and prospect interest

Unique Dynamics of “Cold Call” Prospecting Telephone Sales Calls

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Most sales people have a pavlovian reaction to “cold call” telephone sales — quick glances from left to right (anywhere but straight eye to eye contact) and a determined effort to vacate the premises. The fact is that “cold call” telemarketing tasks are uncomfortable and far removed from the type of ego inflating activity that most sales people require to gin themselves up to the task of hitting their numbers on a month in/month out basis.

But the truth is that “cold call” telephone sales provides a highly targeted, controllable method of expanding market visibility with precision. In fact, if properly managed and executed, cold calls can be utilized to increase market awareness of a product precisely as planned. Therefore, I regard this method of prospecting as the most precise and efficient method available to any type of business marketing any type of product or service. While the number of prospects contacted depends entirely on the number of telemarketers at work (I eschew any mention of “robo dialers”, which dialers I consider to be entirely useless and a waste of precious funds that could be better spent on buying a telemarketers time), the contact, itself, is highly effective.

In contrast, advertising (even inclusive of online, context-sensitive display ads) is inherently a broad market passive technique of juxtaposing text, photos, suggestions, etc (which may all have the very same forward, presumptuous characteristics of a cold call) alongside subject matter that attracts prospect interest but, nonetheless, irrelevant to the ads themselves. The return on investment for advertising, I argue, is far less and certainly not appropriate for tight lipped businesses with leading edge technology that need to operate under the radar.

Usually sales people break out into one of two character types–so-called “farmers” and so-called “hunters”. I like to refer to farmers as the guys with the address books, the nice guys who are well liked by their contacts who have usually bought different products from the same sales person (my nice guy) over several sales “lives”. “Farmers” do not like cold calls. It’s the “hunters” who can be taught to use cold call telemarketing techniques. These sales people are generally in sales not only for the money, but also to satisfy a need for competition and achievement.

“Hunters” may not do a good job of maintaining business friendships, but they certainly can be trained in “cold call” telemarketing for prospecting. With a new technique like cold calling firmly ensconced in their quiver of sales methods, “hunters” can relied upon to not only deliver the orders, but to open the market precisely as planned for a controlled, yet covert, expansion of business.

Don’t pass up on cold call prospecting.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Use Just a Pinch of Commodity Sell to Rev Up Direct Marketing for Products Still Under the Radar

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The “commodity sell” is, generally, anathema for the complex sale. Nevertheless, for clients of mine with products that operate “under the radar,” just a bit of “commodity sell” does the trick to drive the performance of direct marketing (essentially a combination of telemarketing, teleprospecting, and webinars) as a driver for the complex sale.

If contacts at enterprise size business prospects know nothing about your product, and little about your niche (regardless of its strategic importance) there is no other option than to include a presentation of what you offer within your early conversations with the prospect. This presentation provides just the “pinch” of commodity sell to spark contact interest in furthering conversations and, thereby, the gathering of information that you must do to qualify just who this contact is and what he/she does relative to important related projects and plans (or the lack thereof) at your enterprise business prospect.

It is absolutely essential that the information that you convey via the presentation be completely consistent with any subsequent information your sales team may communicate to the specific contact as well as any other contacts at the prospect. Understand that your product is still under the radar of the marketplace; therefore, the information constitutes the only branding that you possess. Whenever the information changes, then your brand changes and, therefore, the power of repetition along with the development of subliminal associations is substantially diminished. Keep the presentation consistent, better yet, require that any and all references to features, benefits, value proposition, etc make refernce to the same uniform information.

The importance of this point is doubly critical if your product is an integrated solution. Permitting communication of ambiguous information abvout an integrated solution provides the prospect with an opportunity to break up your solution into components. This opportunity spells doom for the complex sale and lots of revenue will be left on the table. I have worked with clients with this problem who saw projected revenue growth delayed by six months, and longer, as planned complex sales trended into commodity sales of components with dangerously lower pricing to customers.

If you opt for a direct marketing approach to product promotion and lead generation then do consider a hybrid method that includes a highly controlled and consistent presentation to contacts. Review any/all printed and electronic collateral to ensure that information is completely consistent. Revise as required or risk diluting your potential for complex sales, not to mention precious revenue.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Use Teleprospecting to Validate Decision Making Processes for Complex Sales

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I use prospecting over the telephone, or teleprospecting, to perform a key function within the sales planning process for complex sales to enterprise prospects — test and verify all important assumptions about the prospect. Important assumptions include:

  • Who needs the complex product or solution
  • Why the need makes sense for the prospect
  • When will they need to satisfy this need
  • Who will approve the purchase
  • Who will use the complex product or solution
  • What the final integrated solution should look like, and
  • How they plan to get to the final integrated solution

In my experience, acting on untested assumptions, more often than not, results in wasted time and effort for the sales team. Close ratios can be doubled by simply increasing the number of conversations with contacts at the prospect business and verifying that answers to my Who/Why/When/What/How questions, as listed above, are accurate and, therefore, useful.

Examples of untested assumptions include job titles, published prospect initiatives, and planned capital expenditures. The facts are that job titles are often poor indicators of decision-making authority; published initiatives can, and often do change and, finally, budgeted capital expenditures can be preempted. Better to learn what the real drivers are for the prospect and who is leading the charge.

A team of telemarketers who are dedicated entirely to prospecting and gathering specific pieces of information about prospects can be used successfully to test any and all sales campaign assumptions. Candidates for membership in such a team must be able to demonstrate an ability to engage high level individuals in meaningful dialogue crafted to produce required answers. Further, these candidates must demonstrate a thorough understanding of the complex product or solution and a commensurate understanding of how the complex product or solution interconnects with other complex products or solutions already ensconced within the organization or on the schedule to be added within the same time frame envisioned by the sales campaign.

Once the teleprospecting team has been selected, depending upon the size of prospect businesses, this information gathering activity can be ongoing. Be sure not to start validation efforts until the sales team approves public discussion of contacts, prospect plans, etc. This timing requirement is critically important. Keep in mind that the actual names of contacts, and apparent prospect plans, must be topics of discussion within the teleprospecting calls if they are going to produce any useful information. In reciprocal fashion, steps in the sales campaign should be timed correctly so that important meetings transpire after the information collected by the prospecting work has been discussed and plans modified as required to better align with emerging facts about the prospect.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

What a Pair! Elusive Decision Makers and Ambiguous Needs–Welcome to the World of Complex Sales

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Sure, it’s very hard to motivate a sales operation without buyers, and even harder when the reasons buyers cannot be found can be attributed to ambiguous needs and ambivalent interest in complex solutions. Nevertheless, sales must be made. Buyers, like birds hidden by shrubs, must be flushed out. Sales people have to shine a light on buyer needs and pique buyer interest. Ultimately, sales must build buyer commitment to purchase complex solutions. Happens every day. But how?

As I’ve written earlier in this blog, telephone prospecting, teleprospecting, provides a very useful foundation for complex sales. For example, prospecting over the telephone provides an excellent method of revealing buyers within enterprise businesses for complex sales. Prospecting over the telephone amounts to engaging with many contacts within a prospect enterprise business in telephone conversations to determine three critical pieces of information:

  1. The level of maturity of the prospect relative to other prospects with regard to the complex product or solution offered for sale
  2. The groups within the prospect business who will use the complex product or solution, who will propose the purchase and, finally, who will approve the purchase
  3. The perceived value of the complex product or solution for the enterprise prospect, and the probable timing of a decision to purchase

A teleprospecting campaign to determine the answers to these three points can take several months or even years to complete, depending upon the product and the size of typical prospects. Nevertheless, if vetted correctly, the quality of information collected from telephone discussions will be high and, therefore, the information will be indispensable to formulating a sales plan for the prospect.

The best approach for soliciting teleprospecting discussions with contacts can be found in an expressed interest in gathering information, much in the manner of a survey. Contacts are much more willing to share an opinion than to entertain a sales presentation. This greater willingness to talk can be used to engage contacts and collect the information required to qualify the enterprise business prospect’s likely interest in purchasing and successfully implementing the product.

Understanding the likelihood that a prospect can successfully implement a complex product or solution should be critically important to correctly determining whether or not a sales campaign makes sense for a prospect. After all, a favorable image of a brand within an enterprise market can only be built on satisfied customers who have successfully implemented a solution and derived the greatest possible value. Embarking on a sales campaign for a prospect that lacks the maturity to successfully implement a complex product or solution is only asking for trouble.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Best Practices: Outbound Teleprospecting for Complex Products Post #2 — Where Time Matters

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When time matters (for a company with a complex product for enterprise customers), and capital is limited, the lead generation strategy should be built, at least in part, around outbound teleprospecting, but without an effort to survey prospects. I am not going to treat interactive tactics to augment outbound teleprospecting in this post, but will shortly write a series of posts describing the use of one set of interactive tactics–social media–within a powerful and comprehensive lead generation strategy. Rather, in this post I want to talk about variations on the survey approach to teleprospecting to hasten along the sales cycle.

The most obvious means of hastening a sales cycle is to focus sales efforts only on prospects with clear needs. Selling efforts should only be made on those leads where indisputable, confirmed decision-makers have been identified within companies. Further, these decision-makers must be managing funded projects that are scheduled for completion over the next near term (the actual length of the “near term” will vary depending upon the “typical” sales cycle for the product). For the record, the drawback implicit to this approach is that it eliminates the group of prospects who do not know what they need as well as those who think they need the wrong thing. But a company pressed for time and running on limited means must make some sacrifice in order to achieve sales goals. An additional drawback is that some of the projects identified through this process will be mature and at a level where the prospect is “shopping” a specific solution, meaning a commodity in the market.

Nevertheless, the hook for generating most of these leads will be discussions about well known solutions (effectively the highest quality commodities in a particular market) with interested parties. These discussions are not an optimum basis for a conversation, but at least a workable technique. Determining a reliable ratio between telephone calls and discussions will vary; however, as a rule, each set of 100 calls should result in at least 15 discussions. Further, 2 or more sales calls should result from 15 teleprospecting discussions at some point in the sales cycle. If actual efforts do not deliver results in keeping with these assumptions, then the lead contact list must be evaluated to ensure that the right contacts have been included.

Typically, utilizing this approach, a teleprospecting team will have to plan on at least one additional discussion with a prospect prior to passing along a useful lead to sales than would be the case for a focus on securing surveys with the same prospects. The script for this additional discussion will include questions to determine important information about a prospect and his/her company prior to scheduling a meeting with a subject matter expert. The result will be a considerably enhanced, and substantially narrower selling effort. This combination may provide a CEO with a viable solution to limited time and budget. Of course, the dialogue with the prospect may, over time, reveal opportunities to widen the lens and chase more lucrative opportunities based on what a prospect doesn’t know.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Best Practices: Outbound Teleprospecting for Complex Products for Enterprise Business

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As I have written earlier in this blog, a teleprospecting campaign can yield substantial results for sales of complex products targeted at enterprise business prospects. These substantial results can amount to high quality sales leads, depending on how successfully the campaign is managed. The key to quality, of course, is the level to which leads are correctly qualified for the specific product offering and the targeted market. But how to run such a campaign?

The best method of running a teleprospecting campaign as an outbound lead generator for complex products targeted to the enterprise business market is in some variation of a survey. Taking a survey is rarely perceived by participants as a sales effort. But if the survey questionnaire is crafted correctly, the information gathered can be very useful as the sales force “fills in the blanks” about the enterprise prospect. Don’t lose sight of the fact that the enterprise prospect is actually a complicated organization with a system for purchasing products and services that includes many individual participants and a set of required procedural milestones that must be properly completed or else there will be no sale.

For the subset of complex products targeted to enterprise business that will require a reorganization of processes across a customer’s business (should a decision to purchase be forthcoming), the need to compile information about important individuals, recent business history, etc is especially important in advance of a sale or even the overture of a sales effort. The fact is that the core purchase process may be broken and dysfunctional. Further, the participants may not play the perceived role and the agenda of priorities may be deceiving.

This latter characteristic of some complex products for enterprise business, that a reorganization of business processes will be required as the product is implemented by the customer, plays a powerful role within the sales effort. Janus-like this aspect of the product, as implemented, can be either a smile or a forlorn frown as the sales effort wends its way to success or failure. The way is especially volatile where the perceived value of the product within the marketplace is ambiguous. Truly intangibles, sometimes these products deliver substantial benefits and sometimes not. Examples of this type of product include solutions for Operational Risk Management, and Enterprise Risk Management. What is most vexing for the market is that such a product, within heavily regulated businesses like Financial Services (including Banks, Asset Managers, Brokers & Dealers, Insurers, etc), is required and mandated by regulators, but the “how to succeed” directions are no where to be found.

In the best of all worlds for the firm offering such a complex product (with unclear perceived value in the enterprise business market), formulating an outbound teleprospecting campaign within the shape of a survey is mandatory. The firms that can follow this script typically have lots of time and, generally, lots of capital to slowly and carefully sell into the market.

But what about other firms with less time and, typically, less capital to build a market? Is there a way to use teleprospecting to advantage in a less than perfect world? I will provide an answer in my next post.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Use Teleprospecting to Build Targeted Leads

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Direct Marketing and, specifically, “teleprospecting” adds substantial value to sales for complex products targeted at enterprise customers.

“Teleprospecting” is a new buzz word with a definition in flux. You can observe some of the ambiguity of the definition of this direct marketing technique in a debate on “Telemarketing vs. Teleprospecting vs. Inside Sales” (http://www NULL.focus NULL.com/questions/marketing/telemarketing-vs-teleprospecting-vs-inside-sales-are-they/).

I define teleprospecting as the use of direct telephone contact to individuals within targeted prospect companies to determine organizational structure, decision trees, stake holders, roles, projects, plans and other matters of interest. The collection of information that results from this teleprospecting activity is a very rich resource which a nimble business with a complex product or service can use to develop accurate understanding of the “critical perspective” (Jeff Thull, “Mastering the Complex Sale”, John Wiley & Sons. Second Edition, Page 124) of targeted prospects.

I, myself, have written earlier in this blog about the necessity of developing this precise understanding in a post on why the old adage that a sales person with an address book can be so true, as long as the sales person carries a useful reputation and a prior history of business with his or her contacts.

The fact is that qualifying prospects without recourse to a foundation of knowledge and understanding about the business, roles, etc., can produce unreliable information. Prospects may not open up during untrusted conversations; therefore, an outbound contact effort has to be built on useful business intelligence.

The objective of teleprospecting, as I understand it and as I make use of it is twofold:

  1. to promote conversations with stake holders by scheduling meetings between subject matter experts and prospects and
  2. to create a “map” of targeted prospect businesses complete with roles, decision trees, etc

The objective is not to sell anything. Further, efforts to transform teleprospecting contacts into customers will generally be fruitless. The nature of the conversation in teleprospecting as compared to the nature of a conversation in a selling technique like telemarketing is fundamentally different. The first is exploratory, expansive, intentionally non threatening and clearly a pure information gathering exercise, while the latter is focused, concentrated and clearly intended to accomplish an objective: a sale as well as providing the customer with a desired solution.

So how do we get from teleprospecting to sales? Via the meeting noted in objective number 1 above. These meetings (and it may take several meetings to collect the required information and then modulate from information-gathering to sales) provide the setting for transforming the discussion into a sales campaign.

Try it, I think you’ll like it.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved