The CRAP Report

So you’re thinking about building an in-house teleprospecting team, huh? I mean, someone has to follow up on all of those inbound leads you’re getting, right? Maybe you’re hosting webinars and need those attendees followed up on, right? The most logical thing to do would be to build some sort of qualification machine to follow up on all the contacts you’ve got from all of the marketing programs/events/campaigns you’ve run (and more than likely never got around to getting in touch with). You could give them to your sales guys, no doubt. Trish Bertuzzi, President and Chief Strategist over at the inside sales consulting firm, The Bridge Group, blogged about this with some help from Kirko Papjanis over at her blog, Inside Sales Experts Blog, where Kirko urges folks to put their sales reps in front of prospects sooner. While I agree with him, it’s been my experience that not all sales reps are willing to be put in front of prospects without having them fully qualified, nor are they as effective. So, if you’re thinking about building an in-house teleprospecting team to generate sales qualified leads, there are some things you need to think of.

Running a B2B lead generation team may or may not be as easy/difficult as you may think it to be. It all depends on what your background is. Sales prospecting may be a passion of yours, it may not. Regardless, if you’re in the position where you’re determining whether or not you should build one, I think that there are three things you need to seriously consider before taking the leap to have your own inside teleprospecting team:

1. Do you know how to qualify a lead over the phone? Have you done it before?
2. Do you know the type of candidate who makes the best teleprospecting rep?
3. Do you know how to measure a teleprospecting team’s success?

Do you know how to qualify a lead over the phone? Have you done it before? These are important questions that you need to ask yourself, and I believe that if the answer is no, you need to rethink this idea altogether. If you’ve never spent time qualifying a prospect and expect to lead people who are going to do that for you, you really have your work cut out for you. I’m not saying that you need to be some sort of a cold calling guru, but you need to have actually done the job you’re putting a team together to do. You can’t lead people to places you’ve never been, and on top of that, if your own qualification skills are at a 3 (on a scale of 1 – 10, with 10 being tops), you’re never going to be able to train your team to be better than a 3.  John Maxwell calls it the Law of the Lid in his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – “…your organization or business will not rise beyond the level your leadership allows.” I’m not saying you can’t do it, I’m saying that if you’re going to, you’ve got a lot to learn.

Do you know the type of candidate who makes the best teleprospecting rep? You need to think about this question, too. You can’t hire just anybody to qualify sales opportunities for you. Like Charlie Bowdre said in Young Guns, “..you can’t be any geek off the street. Gotta be handy with the steel, if you know what I mean? Earn your keep.” Sure, in this case I’m substituting qualification skills for a gun, but the sentence is no less true. Hire someone who’s done it before and they may bring in poor habits from someone else who trained them. Hire someone who’s too green, and they’re going to get eaten alive by rude or obnoxious prospects (not that they exist, right?). If you’re going to build a team in-house, you’ve got to know who the best candidate is before you can start.

Do you know how to measure a teleprospecting team’s success?  Teleprospecting is more than just making phone calls and qualifying leads. Those are the two most important aspects of it, yes, but a team’s success is more than just the number of dials made and the number of leads passed. You’ve got to think of other things like connect rates, lead rates, feedback percentages, leads to forecast percentage, etc. If you’ve never worked IN business development from a teleprospecting perspective, then how do you know what metrics are the most important? You’ve got a lot of research to do there. Again, I’m not saying that you can’t do it, you just need to prepare. A lot. You also don’t want someone else in your organization telling you what they’re going to be measuring your team’s success on – you need to set the tone for that. If sales prospecting falls under marketing’s direction, you don’t want poor sales follow up to be a detriment to your success, and if you fall under sales’ direction, you don’t want poor marketing efforts to do the same.

Have I missed anything? What do you think? Also, please feel free to contact me directly if you have questions about building a team yourself.