So I feel like there’s been a lot of blogs lately stating that cold calling is or is not dead, and today I read another one.  Matt Gethins, from B2B telemarketing firm Professional Prospecting Systems, wrote an article yesterday entitled Cold Calling Dead?  Not For B2B Appointment Setting.  Matt makes the common observation that all that is heard today is that all a company needs to do is focus on their inbound marketing and social media efforts, and they’ll be all set in regards to lead generation.  Matt’s response, “This is, in many cases, ridiculously bad advice and completely untrue.”  I totally agree with him.

Matt goes on to share seven reasons why cold calling is not dead, and I certainly think that you should read them.  Of particular interest to me, though, was number six on his list:

“6.  Outbound accelerates Inbound – That’s right, if you have your act together with outbound (cold calling, getting on the phone) you will make more money from your Inbound marketing. I’ve sold inbound lead generation products, the clients that had good outbound always made more money than those that did not, there was no variation in this. As we say in the South, Inbound Marketing is not going to cause the fried chicken to fly into your mouth, you have to get on the phone.”

I’m not from the South, so I really can’t speak to the fried chicken analogy, but I think he’s spot on in adding this point to his list.  I’m a big believer in Inbound Marketing – I love what folks like David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah and their whole HubSpot crew have done for Marketing as a whole.  In particular, Scott and his whole New Rules are all about bringing prospects TO you.  Halligan and Shah have founded a company whose entire mission is to offer software that helps other companies get found.  I still believe that at the end of the day, you still need to utilize teleprospecting to further qualify the folks that find you.  On top of that, I also believe that no matter how great the content is that you create, there are going to be some folks in your target market who you want as a client but must reach out to them through the phone to initiate a dialogue.

I like the phrase that Mike Damphousse has come up with for amalgamating your inbound and outbound efforts – “unified marketing.”  I think cold calling has its place in a unified marketing environment, right alongside blogging, viral videos, and eBooks.

What do you think?

*Photo credit: Liyin the Designer-in-Pajamas via Flickr

As I perused my TweetDeck this morning, I noticed Garth Moulton’s (the world’s biggest rolodex Jigsaw’s VP of Community and co-founder) blog entry from yesterday, “Cold Calling is not even on the Endangered List.”  Great blog entry where Garth concludes with the following:

“So the truly efficient organization (I’m talking B2B here) has to have at least a couple people (researching first!) braving the last matrix of hell known as cold calling to start the conversation that will eventually lead to a deal.”

I liked the article a lot, and loved the comments from Sales 2.0 big dog Nigel Edelshain, inside sales expert Trish Bertuzzi, and cold calling authority Steve Richard.  Do yourself a favor and go check it out.

What really got me though, was Garth’s use of a movie clip to illustrate his point.  He used a clip of Will Smith from The Pursuit of Happiness, but it wasn’t that clip that really spoke to me.  After watching Will Smith’s clip, YouTube shows a bunch of other “related” clips to watch.  I see one from the movie Boiler Room (an all time favorite of mine).  I watch it, and there’s something that Ben Affleck, who’s playing the sales trainer in the movie, says to his new recruits that just really moved me.  To set the scene, he’s mad because none of the rookies are passing enough leads.  They’re being blown off their calls with rebuttal after rebuttal, rejection after rejection.  He closes with this:

“A sale is made on every call you make.  Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you on a reason he can’t.  Either way, a sale is made.  The only question is who’s going to close, you or him?”

As cheesy as some may make this movie out to be, that line is true.  And as it relates to teleprospecting, we either sell a prospect a time to speak with a product specialist or they sell us on a reason they’re not interested.  Either way, someone’s closing, and it’s up to teleprospecting management to do all they can to give their reps the advantage. 

I don’t know, what do you think?  This line has been in my head all day long, and I’m wondering what other people think about it.

Steve Richard, co-founder for sales training organization Vorsight, wrote a guest blog article yesterday for sales strategist Chad Levitt’s New Sales Economy Blog.  The article, entitled “11 Sales Tips for Cold Calling and Prospecting,” offered some good insight into making the most out of each and every attempt to get in touch with your potential buyers.  One of the questions that Steve suggests asking yourself is this:

“Do you revisit your talking points periodically to more effectively tell your story and stand out from the vendor noise and static?”

This is a great question!  It makes me wonder how many times prospects hang up on teleprospectors because they do nothing to make themselves unique in terms of their messaging.  There is some interesting discussion going on over at that post, and I think you should take a look at it and join in the conversation.

*Picture credit:  Linda Cronin via Flickr

Okay, if you’ve got a stick of gum, a paper clip, three pennies, a ball made of rubber bands, and an acorn who are you?  A lot of folks may say that you’re the contents of the front pocket of a seven year old boy, but they would be wrong.  Actually, the real answer is a flame thrower if you’re in the hands of one Angus MacGyver – yes, THE MacGyver.  You remember him, right?  They guy with a penchant for getting out of inescapable situations by creating some contraption out of things he’d find on the ground or in his or a partner’s pockets.  MacGyver was awesome (besides the mullet) and one of the cooler aspects of that show was actually trying to figure out how he was going to do what he needed to do, and with what.  Like I said, the guy could make a tank out of a broken baby-stroller and a coat rack.  More than anything, MacGyver was inventive, and without a doubt, one of the top 100 qualities of a great teleprospecting rep is being inventive.

MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, had a great number of skills that really do not pertain to sales prospecting and B2B lead generation; most notably, the guy was a physicist and chemist.  Not necessarily skill sets that make one a fantastic qualifier of potential sales opportunities.  Now, the fact that the guy was inventive?  That is a skill that BDR’s need.  I can see three ways that being inventive is a great quality for your teleprospecting reps to have: 

1. They invent new ways to shape messages.
2. They invent new ways to get in front of prospects.
3. They invent new ways of streamlining their job.

First of all, being inventive comes in handy for your BDR’s because they are always going to need new ways to shape their teleprospecting messages.  If you’ve got an in-house teleprospecting team or maybe you’ve partnered with a vendor to supply you with sales qualified leads, you’ve got to remember that at some point, “new messaging” becomes “old messaging.”  Who better to help you tweak and reshape their call scripts than a great BDR.  The really good ones are already doing this, anyways!  They’re taking what works and what doesn’t and amalgamating them into one really successful teleprospecting script.

Second, being inventive is necessary because getting in front of prospects gets harder everyday.  Administrative Assistants get colder to the cold call, and decision makers are picking up their phones less and less.  Great teleprospectors invent new ways to get time with their (or their client’s) targeted prospects.  Take for example, one of my colleague’s BDR’s.  Now, although someone else may have come up with this idea, this particular BDR was the first to do it in his group.  He had gotten tired of never hearing back from prospects that he was emailing, so he decided to take a bold step and send out an Outlook invitation for five minutes to talk about his product.  It worked.  He got more prospects to respond than he ever had.  Now granted, more of them were declinations, but he got a lot of prospects to give him five minutes, which is all he needed to get his foot in the door.  Again, maybe someone else did this before, but never in my buddy’s organization.  They standardized sending Outlook invites, and while some prospects get offended, more often than not their praised for their inventiveness.

Lastly, being inventive is important because you want a BDR who is looking for ways to streamline their job.  A teleprospector spends their day making phone calls, and the good ones always make more.  The great ones invent new ways to get more done with the hours they have.  Now, I’m not talking about inventing new software or telephony products (though that would be awesome), I’m really talking more about processes.  Whether it’s inventing a new system to get more calls made in an hour or a new way to write up the sales qualified leads that they’ve found, they’re doing something.  It may be as simple as the way they set up their CRM and their web browsers, but to them, they’ve invented a new way of doing things that makes them more effective.

There you have it, my reasons why a great teleprospector is an inventive one.  What did I miss, or what can you add to this topic on inventiveness?

With today being December 31st, the last day of the calendar year in 2009, I wanted to continue (but not finish) my countdown, or my top five “wants,” for your teleprospectors in 2010.  If you were here on Monday, you read that my first desire for your BDR’s in the coming year was more confidence.  I’ve shared with you many times over the last four months about the importance of confidence for your BDR’s.  Confidence makes them better teleprospectors – you can’t argue that.  What else, though, should you want your BDR’s to have, though?  Well, good thing you stopped by!  Here are my numbers two and three top “wants” for your B2B lead generators in 2010.

The second thing I think your BDR’s need most in 2010 is a great source of data from which to prospect from.  Last week I shared with you how imperative it is that your teleprospectors have recent, accurate, and pre-touched marketing lists from which to call from.  Better lists for your BDR’s means that you’ll have a greater likelihood of passing more qualified sales opportunities to your sales team.  There are many ways in which you can go about obtaining better call lists for your teleprospectors, from creating one by hand to purchasing to just renting a list.  Regardless of which road you choose, make sure that the data you’re getting is as up to date as possible.  

In addition to that, make sure that your cold call lists are current, too.  Your BDR’s should be using names from your cold call lists to replace the individuals from your warmer lists as they get cycled out of the prospecting process.  As the warmer names move to being either not relevant or not interested, make sure that you’ve got a great cold calling list to backfill for your teleprospectors.  I have been involved in projects before where the names that my client said were “warm” weren’t really so “warm” at all, but their cold calling lists were so good, we were still able to meet our sales qualified lead objectives.  In 2010, I want your teleprospectors to have a great source of data from which to prospect from.

My third want for your teleprospectors in 2010 is a compensation plan that pays out on the quality of their work.  If what business development is supposed to do is find fully qualified sales opportunities, then don’t you agree with me that the folks doing the qualification should be comped based on the quality of their work?  Sure, put call numbers, conversation or talk time numbers, and lead numbers in front of them.  Those numbers are all important and have their place in teleprospecting, but use those numbers to spur on better qualified leads.  Give smaller perks or bonuses for hitting those numbers, but the majority of their bonus should be based on how well the leads they passed over panned out.  Call it a positive feedback percentage, a closed loop percentage, but something that is based on the “quality” of the leads that they passed over will ensure that your sales team is getting the best that your BDR’s can bring.

The benefit to a teleprospecting manager or someone who runs a team of BDR’s that implements a compensation plan like this is that you’ll eventually be able to weed out the bad from the good.  Those BDR’s that you have on your team that may not be as effective will be easier to spot because come bonus time, their quality numbers just won’t measure up to the best.

Better lists and better compensation – two “musts” for your BDR’s in 2010, and only you can make it happen!  Tomorrow, I’ll cover numbers four and five on my “want” list for your teleprospectors next year.  

Happy New Year’s Eve to you all!

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.”

I’m sure around the holidays that you, like me, will have a good number of parties to attend.  Now, some may be family affairs while others may be for work, but for the most part those holiday parties typically have the same thing in common – food.  Wherever you go, I’m sure that there’ll be plenty of food to eat.  Folks will have spent time preparing and cooking great appetizers and main dishes, and desserts, too.  One of the things that may run through your mind while you’re at an event, and probably while you’re eating, is “how can I make this at home?” For a lot of you, though, the better question will be, “how can I make this better at home?”  That’s what cooks, do, right?  They find something they like and then they make it better.  The same thing can be said for your teleprospecting efforts, you know?  You’re sales prospecting machine may be great, but there’s always a way to make it better right?  Of course there is!

Often times business development gets caught somewhere between Sales and Marketing, and though I do believe that teleprospecting bridges the gap between the two.  That being said, and speaking from experience, it typically is a Marketing responsibility.  For the majority of projects that I’ve worked on, both as a BDR and as a Director, my main point of contact has been someone from my client’s Marketing department.  Surprisingly enough, right, that there was little involvement from the Sales side?  I’m here to say, though, that if you want to make your BDR’s better, regardless of whose responsibility B2B lead generation is in your organization, get your sales reps involved.  I see three ways that your sales team can make your BDR’s (or your vendor’s on your behalf) better: 

1. Give them “dream” accounts to call into.
2. Let them listen in on sales calls.
3. Give them feedback on all leads.

You give your teleprospectors marketing lists to call on, sure.  Those names are from tradeshows and webinars, white paper and eBook downloads, and even purchased lists.  That data is great, no doubt, but if you want your sales reps help in making your teleprospectors better, have them give your BDR’s “dream” accounts to call into.  Sales guys all have this list – the name of marquee companies that they want to close, and especially the ones they haven’t even broken into yet.  Giving this list to your BDR’s helps them to be better because it gives them incentive to impress.  If there is one thing that I’ve learned most about the BDR’s that I work with, it’s that money is not always the number one motivator for them.  Maybe it’s their generation, or maybe they’re just better with their money than I am, but for the most part, they would MUCH rather receive recognition for a job well done than extra money (crazy, I know!).  I know that when I was a BDR, if a sales rep told me that he or she “couldn’t” get into Company A, that I busted my ass to make sure that I did.  Getting a list of “dream” accounts to call into made teleprospecting fun for me, and it helped me to raise my game because I understood the importance of getting my sales rep in front of that important account.

Next, your sales team can make your BDR’s better by letting them listen in on sales calls.  I’ve talked a lot about shadowing in on calls with your BDR’s, but they need to shadow your sales reps.  Giving them that opportunity lets your BDR’s hear how objections are handled by the folks in your organization who are the best equipped to handle them.  Listening on sales calls also allows your BDR’s to focus on an important skill without any pressure – listening.  There is a lot of pressure to listen while on a prospecting call.  At the same time you’re supposed to focusing in on listening to a potential sales opportunity, you’re also trying to process what questions they’re posing and what objection they’re throwing at you, and how you’re going to answer them both.  Shadowing in on calls with your sales team affords your BDR’s the chance to just listen.  That’s all they’ve got to do.  It can be a nice break for your teleprospectors while at the same time gives them the chance to learn a lot about the sales process.

Lastly, the very BEST way to get your sales team to make your BDR’s better is to have sales give them feedback on all leads.  This is the closed loop strategy; you’re closing the loop on the opportunities that sales receives.  There is no single better way to shape your BDR’s qualification skills then by having your sales team go over each lead that gets passed to them and detail what the end result was for each.  Was the information that they received initially validated?  What worked well?  What information wasn’t accurate and what information wasn’t provided that really should?  What is the next step in the life cycle of this lead?  All of this feedback only stands to make your BDR’s better.  I know that my BDR’s look forward to each interaction they have with the sales reps that they’re passing leads to because they want to know if what they’re doing is effective.  They want to be better at qualifying leads and when they hear the feedback from the folks who actually follow up on their leads, it spurs them on to achieve success.  My colleague, Lindsay Roberts, talked about having a closed loop strategy earlier this week in a webcast entitled Perspectives in Teleprospecting – A Closed Loop Strategy, and you should check that out here.

There are other ways, I’m sure, that your sales team can make your teleprospecting team better, so tell me what you think we should add to this list?

I’m not too young that I can’t remember Lee Majors as Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man.  Sure, it came out in 1974 and ran until 1978, when I turned five years old, but I know I watched it on reruns.  I even had the really cool Bionic Man action figure; you know, the one where you look through his eye for bionic vision?  That show (and action figure) was awesome!  Here’s this astronaut who is badly injured during a crash and the government comes along and gives him cybernetic parts, and basically turns him into a superhero.  The opening to the show was so cool, too.  “We can make him better than he was before.  Better, stronger, faster.”  How can you do that with your teleprospecting campaigns?  How can you take a sales prospecting effort that’s crashed and burned and rebuild it?

That was the premise of The Six Million Dollar Man – the government took a broken man and made him better.  I believe that you can do that with a B2B lead generation campaign.  Look, whether you’ve got a team of inside reps generating qualified sales opportunities or you’re working with a vendor to provide your sales team with sales qualified leads, at some point, you’re going to have a failing campaign.  Something is not going to go right, and you may just have to go back to the drawing board and “make [the campaign] better than [it] was before.  Better, stronger, faster.”  If you’re going to do that, I’d advise you to focus on the following three improvements for your Bionic Teleprospecting Campaign: 

1. Better sources of data.
2. Open the floodgates of what gets called.
3. Better designed messaging.

First and foremost, if you’re going to rebuild a teleprospecting campaign, start with getting better sources of data.  Where did you get the database of targets that you’re going to have your highly trained BDR’s calling into?  Were they tradeshow attendees from 2006?  Have they just been sitting in your CRM for a few years or a few months?  Seems crazy of me to ask, I know, buy you’d be surprised at what I’ve been asked to have my teleprospectors call on.  One of the keys to a very successful sales prospecting operation is to have a great database in place.  If you’re going to have a great database in place for your BDR’s to call from, you’ve got to spend some time thinking about where that data is going to come from.  Make sure that you’ve spent a good amount of time scrubbing any and all webinar and tradeshow attendees list, any white paper download lists, and every inbound lead you’ve received.  Firm up those names with a personally (okay, doesn’t have to be made by you, but someone who works for you) developed cold calling list.  Build it from scratch – just like pancakes baby, the ones made from scratch are better than any store bought kind.  The better the data your BDR’s have to call on, the greater the likelihood that they’ll be passing highly qualified leads faster. 

Next, when rebuilding your teleprospecting campaign, open the floodgates of what gets called.  I understand that your solution or services may play well in a certain vertical; I can appreciate that.  However, if you’re going to increase the number of qualified sales opportunities that your sales reps see, the name of the game here is to be as limitless (as opposed to limiting) as you can be.  If you can help it, don’t limit territories, either.  Also, make sure that your BDR’s are trained on all of your product offerings so that they don’t miss a potential opportunity when calling for one specific product; help your BDR’s to be better consultants.  If you’re organization’s “sweet spot” is companies with revenue numbers between $50M and $100M and you didn’t hit your teleprospecting numbers, think about broadening your reach up and down those revenue numbers.  You may be more focused than you need to be.  The greater the reach you can give your teleprospectors, the greater the chance they have of passing you qualified opportunities.

Lastly, when rebuilding a failed sales prospecting effort, make sure you have better designed messaging.  Spend time researching the pain points of every one who has the potential to benefit from your product and build individualized messaging and talking points for them.  Review what worked and what didn’t work.  The best sources you have here to help you out are your teleprospectors – or better yet the information they’re documenting from their phone calls.  If your BDR’s are properly utilizing your CRM, you should be able to report on all of the conversations they’ve had.  From there, you can utilize that information to build messaging around the various titles of individuals that they’ve spoken to.  The point here is that although I’m suggesting that you not limit what gets called, I am suggesting that you have targeted messaging for the people that your BDR’s talk with.  To be better equipped teleprospectors, they need to know why a C-level individual cares about your solution/service, and they also need to know why everyone who reports that person cares, too.  This, maybe even more important than building your cold calling list from scratch, is going to be the most time consuming, but the payoff is going to be huge.  Imagine your BDR’s talking to each person along the decision making process and having detailed information on each as to why they need your solution/service?

Those are just a few ways you can make your teleprospecting campaigns “better, faster, and stronger.”  What about you?  What would you do?

We’ve all got friends in our lives that say that they’re going to do something and then they don’t do it, right?  It’s not just me, is it?  Hell, I know I’ve BEEN that person before.  I’m not proud of that, but it’s the truth.  For the most part though, hopefully we can forgive our friends if the gaffe wasn’t too great, and hopefully they’re able to do the same thing for us.  But when it comes to work, it’s a little different, isn’t it?  If you’re counting on someone to do something for you and they just never get it done, that isn’t as easily forgivable, especially if you’ve got deadlines to keep.  How do you keep people accountable to doing what they’re supposed to be doing?  And speaking about teleprospecting in particular, how do you keep BDR’s accountable?

Typically everyone has someone to keep them accountable to doing what they’re supposed to be doing at work – that person is called your boss.  If you’ve outsourced your teleprospecting efforts, or even if you have your own team generating sales qualified leads for you in-house, keeping those folks accountable to your marketing and sales teams is of the utmost important.  Its more than just being accountable to a boss, they also have a customer that they have to answer to, be it external or internal.  I’ve blogged before about key performance indicators such as conversation numbers, lead rates, and closed loop percentages, and those are great ways to keep your teleprospecting teams responsible for producing the number of sales qualified leads that you need them to generate.  Additionally, though, I think there are three other ways we can keep BDR’s accountable: 

1. Make them give presentations before a project kicks off.
2. Have them participate in weekly client meetings.
3. Make sure your clients listen in on their calls.

One way that we can make sure that teleprospectors are really doing what they’re supposed to be doing in terms of learning about the solution or services that they’re calling on is to make them give presentations before a project kicks off.  Its really important that our BDR’s know what they’re talking about to our prospects, so make them present it back to you.  If you can, make it a full blown presentation with PowerPoint slides and invite others to sit in on it with you.  If you’re a vendor, make the BDR do it for your client.  If you’ve got an in-house team of lead generators, make them do it for your sales and/or marketing team.  Jerry Seinfeld does a bit about people being more afraid of public speaking than of death, and I know I’ve read that elsewhere, but here’s an opportunity to light a fire under someone’s ass to make sure they’re as prepared as they can be.  If the majority of folks are afraid of public speaking, they’re more than likely going to over-prepare (I know, I’m hopeful) for a presentation in front of their boss and clients.  As a side note, this is also a great way to weed out really bad hires, too.  I’ve had BDR’s come to my team without me having interviewed them, and I can tell as soon as they do their presentation whether or not I’m going to keep them or help them find a job that they’re going to succeed at.

Another way to keep BDR’s accountable for their productivity is to have them participate on weekly client meetings.  Regardless of who your client is, be they another company you’re generating leads for or your own sales team, you’re probably meeting with these folks pretty regularly.  I’m advocating that the folks making calls on their behalf be involved in those meetings, as well.  Give your client the opportunity to ask them questions about conversations that they’re having, or check to see if they’ve brushed up on the latest release of whatever.  I’m not saying that you should throw a BDR under the bus – not by any stretch.  What I am saying, though, is to let them be held responsible for what they’re supposed to be doing in front of their client.  One of the newer guys on  a project got grilled one day by the CEO of my client, and my rep could hear the frustration in the CEO’s voice when he didn’t have an answer to his question (about a detail from a conversation a week prior).  You’d better believe that during our next weekly call with that client my BDR was well prepared for any question that could have come up.  He was held accountable for his responsibilities, and it made him an all around better BDR because he knew I wasn’t the only one checking up on him.

Lastly, and I know I beat this drum all the time, but it is no less important, but make sure your clients are listening in on calls with your BDR’s.  Beg them if you have to.  I’m even advocating groveling here because of how important this one is.  There was never a time where I wasn’t as prepared as I could be than when my client was listening in on calls with me.  I even had a client shadow calls while sitting in my cube with me!  You know what, though?  It made me a better rep.  If you ever want to find out whether or not your BDR “gets” what they’re calling on, there is no better way than to listen to them try to qualify a cold call prospect.  If you’ve spent money to outsource lead generation and you haven’t listened in on calls with your vendor’s teleprospectors, shame-shame know your name!  If you can’t do it, get someone in your organization that can.  Make sure that the message that is being delivered is the one you want delivered, especially if you’re not seeing the production that you think you should be.  If you have an in-house team, make sure someone from the sales side (or marketing if lead gen is a sales function in your office) is listening in.  A warning, though – some BDR’s are fantastic but can’t handle the pressure of having someone listen in on calls with them.  If you know they’re good, encourage them that call shadowing is only going to make them better.  If they’re not good, well, use it as a way to weed them out.

There are other ways to keep BDR’s accountable for their output, but beyond the typical metrics, I think these will help you help your client.  What about you?  What are other methods you use to keep a teleprospector accountable?

Oh man – we’ve all made them right?  Mistakes?  I can think of some mistakes I’ve made in my life and am glad I’ve learned from them.  No mistake, though, will be greater than what I call 2002’s Worst Job Move Ever.  I needed a job and took the first one that was offered to me from the- medical-technology-company-that-shall-remain-nameless.  This was a bad move all around for me.  For starters, it was business casual all the time.  Oh, except for Fridays when I could wear black jeans.  Yes, you read that right, black jeans.  Who wore black jeans in 2002?  My ex-boss, that’s who.  He made the determination as to what “casual Fridays” would be like, and black jeans were the only option.  Next, there was the travel.  I’m not a fan of flying – I’m not all John Madden about it, but I don’t like it.  I was told, at most, I’d travel 4 times a year.  Well, after 3 trips in 2 months, I realized I’d been duped.  We all make mistakes, but not all of us learn from them.  I’d like to talk with you about some teleprospecting mistakes and how your BDR’s can learn from them.

If you’re managing a team of in-house BDR’s, or maybe you’ve contracted with an organization to manage your teleprospecting efforts, then you know that, like most of life, lead generation has its ups and downs.  There are moments when you sit in and listen to calls with a green rep and you’re cheering for them because they’re qualifying a prospect with the dexterity of a seasoned vet.  On the other hand though, there are those moments when you sit in and listen to calls with a seasoned vet, and for some reason they’re not “feeling it” and they sound like they’ve never picked up a phone before.  In shadowing in on calls with BDR’s, I often see three common mistakes that they typically make: 

1. Expecting no one to pick up the phone.
2. Not being prepared.
3. Letting an opportunity to talk go.

Don’t kid yourself about this first one – we’ve ALL been there.  If you’ve ever made a teleprospecting call, you know that hardly anyone ever picks up the phone.  The mistake, though, is expecting no one to pick up the phone.  What happens when you fall into that rut is that you start to work on auto-pilot.  Last time I checked, but humans aren’t 747’s; we’re not meant to run on auto-pilot.  We get dazed and we become almost zombified (without the horrible disease) and start to just “smile and dial.”  You forget to hit “0-#” when you get the voicemail.  You miss an opportunity to find a new decision maker and instead just focus on hitting an activity goal.  We don’t pay attention to what we’re doing because hey, no one is going to pick up anyways.  It’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, almost like willing the person we’re calling to ignore us.  BDR’s need to shake themselves out of that rut.  They need to get up, stretch, or take a break.  If you work with me, you’re probably talking about movies or something like that.  Regardless, you’ve got to help your reps to not fall into this rut.  This mistake can be costly because there is no time to be mindless while mining for qualified sales opportunities.

Not being prepared is another big mistake BDR’s make.  I’ve blogged at great lengths (here and here) about pre-call planning, and if its done, it will help your BDR’s (and mine) from falling in this trap.  It is not fun to be on the shadowing end of a BDR who is not prepared to speak with a prospect when that prospect has picked up the phone.  The “ums” and “uhs” alone are enough to make you cringe, but how many times can you say to a prospect, “that’s a great question.  I’ll get back to you on that,” before the prospect just disregards you altogether?  Not being prepared has cost you that one potential opportunity.  Help your BDR’s by holding quick project meetings with them, just to make sure they’re up on the product or service that they’re calling on.  Obviously you meet with your employees on a regular basis, but make this meeting more about preparedness.  Task your BDR to create their own “sales card” that has everything they need to know about what they’re calling on and then make one yourself; see who’s is better and make a competition out of it.  The thing here is that our BDR’s can never be too prepared.  Since they’ve never spoken with EVERY one of their prospects, someone always has the potential to bring up a question that they’ve never come across.  Help your BDR’s to be like the Boy Scouts – to be prepared.

Lastly, I’d have to say the MOST cringe-worthy mistake a BDR can make is letting an opportunity to talk go.  Sometimes with more rookie-level BDR’s, they’re too self conscious about what they perceive to be “bothering” someone.  If a prospect picks up the phone and the tone in their voice is one of quickness or they’re short, I’ve been with reps who just ask for a better time to talk.  I want to say, “Yeah, you just HAD it, and you’re not going to get it again!”  Help your BDR’s by role playing difficult situations with them.  Get them used to hearing someone be quick with them on the phone.  Sometimes a prospect is quick because they have to be, because they’re busy.  Sure, there are times when a brisk prospect just doesn’t want to talk, and they never would have been an opportunity there, but work with your BDR’s (or your vendors) to help them understand the difference between the two.  Make reps call those prospects back, too.  If a prospect has blown your rep off the line with something they didn’t know how to respond back with, make them call the prospect back immediately with you there feeding them the answer.  Regardless of what you do, help your BDR’s to make every moment that they have with a prospect on the phone count.

How about you?  What mistakes have you made in your teleprospecting career or have your reps made and how have you corrected them?