The CRAP Report

Do you know the definition of what a “vicious circle” is?  According to dictionary.com it’s, “a situation in which effort to solve a given problem results in aggravation of the problem or the creation of a worse problem.”  Maybe you’ve seen it comically played out in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.  Spoiler alert for those of you who’ve never seen it in the last ten years, but there was a character in it named Fat Bastard, a Scottish hit man, played by Mike Meyers.  Per his name, he really is a fat guy under the employ of the movie’s main antagonist, Dr. Evil.  Near the end of the film, Fat Bastard tries to kill Austin Powers and his co-spy in the movie, Felicity Shagwell, by pretending to be a UPS delivery guy.  Fat Bastard crashes through their front door and tries to kill them, and eventually breaks down in tears and admits that, “I eat because I’m unhappy, and I’m unhappy because I eat. It’s a vicious cycle. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s someone I need to get in touch with and forgive: meself.”  If you find yourself thinking that you don’t have any budget to put towards teleprospecting in 2010, I think you’re going to find yourself falling into the same vicious circle that got you to that point in the first place.

Budgets are tight, right?  I mean, that’s a given.  In fact, who says, “Hey, I’ve got tons of cash to throw around at any and everything I can think of?”  Not many.  I can’t think of anyone who’s come to me and said that about adding additional headcount to a teleprospecting effort.  Understanding that budgets are more constricted now than they ever have been, let’s think about how they got there.  At a very rudimentary level, they got there because not enough sales closed the year before for that budget number to increase.  If sales closes “x” number of deals, most departments get “y” dollars more in their budget to spend next year.  Remember, I said rudimentary!  Here are three questions that you should ask yourself before you say that you don’t have enough budget for teleprospecting in 2010: 

1. How are you going to get more qualified sales opportunities into your sales reps hands?
2. How do you plan on reaching all of your inbound marketing hand-raisers?
3. How do you plan on supporting a potentially faulty non teleprospecting supported marketing campaign?

How are you going to get more qualified sales opportunities into your sales reps hands?  Your sales reps certainly aren’t going to do that, and even if you task them to do so, you don’t want them doing that.  Qualifying potential sales opportunities is not what sales reps do best, nor should they be doing it because it takes them away from what their skilled at – closing business.  Your sales reps need to have more sales qualified leads in front of them in 2010 more than ever.  Prospects are holding on to their money more now, too.  Sure, they’re more interested in talking, but not necessarily with parting with their money.  If you don’t build an in-house lead generation team or partner with a teleprospecting firm to separate the “buying” wheat from the “tire kicking” chaff, someone in your organization is going to have to do that, and having that fall under the responsibility of sales is a poor choice.  You don’t want the folks you have in place to close business, to bring in more corporate dollars, to have to generate their own opportunities.  Think of it like this – if you were brought on as the CMO for your organization, chances are you wouldn’t task yourself with writing and sending your quarterly campaign mass emails.  You can do it, sure, but that’s not what you’re best suited for.  The same thing goes for your sales reps.  Give them more qualified sales opportunities to close more business.

How do you plan on reaching all of your inbound marketing hand-raisers?  You’ve probably got a slew of marketing efforts going on right now, and you’re probably planning even better ones for next year.  The thing is this, though – what if all of your campaigns hit their targets?  Think about it.  What if they’re fantastic and you have more inbound prospects than you ever thought possible.  Don’t think it’s possible?  Just check out what Mike Damphousse, CEO of the appointment setting firm Green Leads, is doing with inbound marketing gurus HubSpot to bring in more opportunities.  It is now more likely than ever that you’re inbound marketing efforts can bring in more prospects that you could think of.  If you get all of those hand-raisers, then I ask you, who is going to reach out to them?  They still need to be contacted, and more than just through email.  The same rings true, here, as it did above, in that someone still needs to separate the good from the bad; if you’ve got a lot of inbound leads coming in, a teleprospecting team can get those low hanging fruit in front of sales faster than just handing sales the list of hand-raisers from their territories.  Additionally, they’re not going to nurture them either – they just don’t do that because they’re too busy, but we’ve already established that.

Lastly, how do you plan on supporting a potentially faulty non teleprospecting supported marketing campaign?  Look, let’s face it – maybe those great ideas that you have for 2010 aren’t really as great as you think they are.  They might be, and I hope they are, but what if they’re not?  You should be running a targeted cold calling effort behind all of your marketing efforts just in case.  Every building has a fire alarm in, right?  Think of your cold calling efforts as your Sales and Marketing “break in case of fire” alarm.  Just in case your marketing campaigns don’t, well, don’t hit the mark, if you’re backing that up with a teleprospecting effort, chances are you won’t feel the effects of it too bad.  Just speaking from experience, when I’ve had clients give me their marketing leads and their cold call lists, historically, the cold call lists tend to yield more opportunities.  Now sure, that is most likely because the marketing lists were poor, but hey, isn’t that what we’re talking about?

Just think about it – if you’re telling me that you don’t have any money to spend on teleprospecting, why is that?  If sales prospecting isn’t part of your 2010 plan, I’d love to know why, but you’ve got to give me something better than, “We don’t have the budget.”