The CRAP Report

You ever wish you could go back in time?  Sometimes I think that would be a good idea, but other times, not so much.  You’ve got to remember what good ol’ Doc Brown said about going back in time and learning the future:  “Even if your intentions are good, it could backfire drastically,” and later, “The consequences could be disastrous.”  I guess you could say that the lesson learned is that we’ve got to make the most out of every situation we’re in, so that there’s never a need to go back in time.  Truer words, when spoken in a sales prospecting perspective, have never been spoken.

If you’ve outsourced your B2B lead generation efforts (or even if you have an inside team), please make sure that the folks you’re working with are treating every conversation they have with your target audience as their last.  Just speaking from experience, I know that a prospect will give us very little, if any, time on a phone call just to peak their interest.  If we, as a teleprospecting community, are not seizing that opportunity to capture as much information as we can, then we are doing our clients a disservice.  There is but one opportunity to qualify an individual and that is the first time that they actually pick up the phone!  If we’re not prepared when that line picks up, we’re dead in the water.

Can you call back the prospect that you’ve just qualified to get more information from?  Sure, you can do that, but I would estimate that the odds of them answering the phone again drop drastically.  It is that reason alone that should drive us to make the most of the opportunity given when a telephone call is answered.  Teleprospecting vendors take heed – like Marty McFly and Doc Brown trying to harness 1.21 gigawatts from a lightning strike on the Clock Tower, we’ve got one chance to get ALL of our qualifications questions answered when that prospect takes our phone call.  Make sure you know what problem your solution solves before you pass it over to sales.  Make sure you know that they are doing MORE than just kicking tires.  God help you if you’re in this game and you’re passing friggin’ tire kickers!  C’mon now!

Bottom line is this:  if you’re looking to hire a sales prospecting company, do your due diligence and make sure that they know how to qualify in one call.  I want you to talk about your high performance B2B lead generation machine in the same way that Doc Brown talked about his time-traveling DeLorean – “..when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious shit.”