The CRAP Report

“There are three rules that I live by: never get less than twelve hours sleep; never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city; and never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick to that, and everything else is cream cheese.” – Coach Bobby Finstock

Great words to live by from Coach Finstock.  So, you’ve got yourself an outsourced “telemarketing” team looking to generate leads (targeted leads, no less), but who’s coaching those Business Development Reps for you?  That, friends, is something that you should be concerned about.

As you’re looking to increase the number of qualified leads funneling in to your sales team, you should be concerned with how the BDR’s passing those leads are being coached.  Certainly, you as the client, have to own some of that, but your sales prospecting vendor does, too.  On your part, you need to do all that you can to prepare your vendor of choice to make calls on your behalf.  You need a plan that effectively transfers all of your product knowledge and boils that down so it can be shared in the span of about 20 seconds.  Your elevator pitch really should now, in this day, be called a Twitter pitch; “You’ve got 140 characters to sell me…go!”  That is really more of a training issue, though.  Once you do that, it’s up to your B2B Lead Generation firm to coach the BDR’s.

The purpose of coaching is simple, right?  Improvement; that is why people get coached in all areas of their lives.  In this instance, what you want is to make sure that the BDR’s who are generating qualified sales leads for you are being trained on a regular basis to improve their skills on the phone.  Lead generation is much more than just (and I know I’ve said it before) “smiling and dialing.”  If that is all you want, you need more help than I can give you.  You want your BDR’s coached because you want people calling on your technology or service to be at the top of their game.  If they’re not being coached, I can promise you, they’re not knocking it out of the park for you.  Geoff Alexander has a great blog article that talks all about improving telesales performance through effective call coaching, and I would suggest reading that when you get a chance.

I’d encourage you to ask your vendor what their coaching programs are like.  Are BDR’s left to fend for themselves once their initial training is over?  Is there an extensive skills improvement plan in place?  A good coach is going to ensure that a BDR who is making targeted, outbound dials into your desired audience is doing so at their best.  A better coached BDR means better leads for you.  That’s the end game, right?

You stick to that, and like Coach Finstock said, “everything else is cream cheese.”