The CRAP Report

One of the games I liked playing as a kid was Connect Four.  You remember that game, right?  It was like tic-tac-toe and checkers had a crazy love child.  You have to strategically connect four of the same checkers before your opponent does.  Playing the game with someone who’s never played before was fun, because it was easy to win.  More fun than that, though, was playing someone who had played before.  As a kid you could play for hours going back and forth with, “okay, how about best 9 out of 17?” or something like that.  The strategy of that simple game, much like that with tic-tac-toe, obviously determines the winner.  The same thing goes with teleprospecting and connecting with your intended contact.  How, then, do you as a manager (or maybe as the client of a B2B lead generation company) help your BDR’s connect “more”?

Your teleprospectors are on the phones all day, right, so naturally they’re having boat-loads of quality conversations?  Um, maybe.  I mean, that depends.  Do you count when a prospect says to your rep, “I haven’t had time to look at your information.  Call me next week,” as a quality conversation?  If yes, then I bet they have had a lot.  I don’t know about you, but MY clients certainly don’t count that type of a conversation as “quality.”  So I’ll pose my question again – how do you help your BDR’s connect with their prospects more often?  How do you help them make the most out of every phone call they have.  I think there are three things that, if implemented now, will have an immediate impact on your reps’ connect rates: 

1. Use “0-#” ALL the time.
2. Use, “Before I let you go, let me ask you this…”
3. Broaden your initial reach.

If you want your BDR’s to have greater connects with their prospects, then you have to teach them to use “0-#” all the time.  If you’ve ever made teleprospecting calls, then you know that the majority of the phone calls that you make end up going to voicemail.  That is the perfect opportunity for your reps to hit the “0-#” buttons on their phones and get connected to someone else.  More often than not, you get routed to an operator or an administrative assistant.  Sometimes, though, you get someone who may be covering for your prospect if they’re out of town.  Either way, you’ve got an opportunity to ask someone else for some qualification information.  If you get the operator or the admin on the phone, find out if you’re even talking to the right person.  I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure we can both agree that often times the lists that our reps are calling from are not always full of the most accurate data.  Use the admins and the operators to help get you pointed in the right direction, and then get transferred to that person.  If that person isn’t in, “0-#” again and find someone else who may have knowledge about the information that you are looking for.  Better, though, is getting transferred to someone else in that department who may be taking over for a vacationing prospect.  Get them on the phone and get as much of the base level qualification information as you can – what is the current scene like, what are you using now, who else is in your group, etc.

Now, this next one I’ve heard from several people before – saying, “before I let you go, let me ask you this…”  I was trained by Geoff Alexander some years ago to act like Columbo with prospects who are trying to get off the phone with me.  You remember Columbo, right?  Peter Falk’s detective character?  He used to ask suspects this as he was questioning them about some crime, and always got more information out of them than they were probably expecting to give.  Mike Damphousse, CEO of the appointment setting firm Green Leads, blogged about this technique a few weeks ago, and you can check out what he has to say about using this question here.  It is really a great way to get more information out of a prospect.  It actually sets a prospect at ease because you’re implying that you’re going to let them off the phone soon, and what do the majority of prospects want?  They want to get off of the phone with your BDR.  Teach your BDR’s to use this trick and they’re going to have more meaningful conversations with prospects because a prospect that is put to ease is more likely to answer qualification questions than those who are not.   Use those precious few minutes to extract as much pains and needs-type questions from your prospects, and you may find that they’re going on longer than your BDR’s were expecting, because maybe their questioning has struck a itch that they just have to scratch.

Lastly, to help your BDR’s increase the amount of connects they’re having with prospects, teach them to broaden their initial reach.  Let’s say you’ve given your BDR’s a teleprospecting list of 100 companies to call, with 100 contacts at each.  That is a great start, but how many of those 100 contacts are actually going to answer their phone the first time through?  And how certain are you that the contacts on that list are the exact person you want your sales team to be in front of?  What I would do is encourage your BDR to add two or three more people to each one of those organizations.  Let’s say you offer an email encryption solution and you’ve got a list of 100 CIO’s.  Sure, you want your sales rep in front of those CIO’s, but do you really think the CIO is the one who manages email encryption issues?  I doubt it.  Teach your BDR’s (or better yet your marketing list researchers) to add two or three more IT contacts into your list.  Do that, and now your list of 100 contacts jumps to a list of 300.  If your BDR’s are calling 300 versus 100, I guarantee that they’re going to have more conversations, and pass more sales qualified leads, because of that boost in potential contacts – and that, friends, is the ultimate goal:  more sales qualified leads.

I know that some of those tips may seem elementary, but they are no less important.  I’m often surprised at how many BDR’s let hitting “0-#” go by the wayside.  How about you, though?  How do you help reps increase their connect rates?