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

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?

If you’re somewhere close to my age (35) you may remember a brand of toy cars called Micro Machines.  Micro Machines were pretty much what you’d expect, they were smaller versions of what was considered a normal toy car in the 1980’s.  Micro Machines were basically mini-Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars and they were pretty popular at the time.  The one thing that I remember most about Micro Machines was their commercial’s spokesman, John Moschitta, Jr.  Now, by name alone you probably don’t know who this guy is, but if I told you he was the speed talking voice-over announcer for stuff in the ‘80s, you’re probably nodding your head saying, “Oh yeah – that guy!”  John Moschitta, Jr., according to his Wikipedia entry, held the Guinness World Record for speed talking at 586 words per minute.  That is crazy!  I think it’s great that Moschitta, Jr. was able to find his niche in life in terms of using his talent to do commercials and voice-overs, but I’ll tell you this – he wouldn’t have made a good teleprospector talking that fast!

A teleprospector, or business development rep, who could talk at the speed of Moschitta, Jr., just wouldn’t really find success in B2B lead generation.  Sure, we need BDR’s who are comfortable talking to prospects, just not at that speed.  Your in-house team of lead generators, or your vendor’s team, needs to know how to talk, sure, but more importantly, they need to know how to get your prospects to talk.  You see, it’s one thing to know how to hold a conversation.  Pretty much anyone can do that.  To get a prospect talking and giving your BDR’s information to qualify sales opportunities, that’s a whole other ballgame.  I think if your BDR’s, or the BDR’s who are making calls on your behalf through your vendor, are going to get your prospects talking, they need to be able to do three things: 

1. They need to ask smart questions.
2. They need to ask open ended questions.
3. They need to listen, listen, and listen!

Since the typical target of a teleprospecting campaign begins high, at the C-level, we can agree that those folks are pretty intelligent.  So first, if you want prospects to talk to your BDR’s, then it stands to reason that they need to ask smart questions.  They need to take the time to really understand the technology or the services that their qualifying for.  They need to take that understanding (or their manager needs, too) and use that as a lens with which to understand a prospects need or pain.  Better understanding, better comprehension of how their technology or services solve business problems allows for the ability to ask smarter questions to their prospects.  Look, I’ve been on my fair share of projects where, at their start, I didn’t really grasp the technology that my client was offering.  My questioning skills were at pretty remedial levels because I was afraid to ask deeper probing questions for fear that I wouldn’t be able to hang with the prospect, conversationally speaking.  Now, as those projects aged, and I had made more dials and had more conversations and spent more time with my client understanding their technology, my conversations with prospects improved.  I was able to ask smarter questions; questions that, as Pete Gracey talks about in part two of his eBook Driving Marketing ROI, gets our prospect telling us things we want to hear from them.  Smarter questions = questions that have been forged through the refining process of better technological/product services understanding.  They are questions that give the prospect the hint that your BDR’s know what they’re talking about.

Second, and this is about as basic as it gets, but your BDR’s need to ask open-ended questions.  Let’s all take a trip in our time machines and go back to sixth grade English class for a second – open-ended questions are ones that illicit a response from someone greater than a one word answer.  We’re not looking for “yes” and “no” type questions here.  Your BDR’s need to have, at their disposal, as many open-ended qualification questions as you can put in front of them.  If the goal is to get a prospect talking, what good does it do to have an order taker on the phone qualifying your sales opportunities?  “Got this OS?”  “Don’t you want to save money?” “Do you have money to purchase?” “Are you feeling (insert business pain here)?”  You get the drift.  Maybe in late ‘90s you could have an order taker, but not today.  Spend some time with your BDR’s and develop some great open-ended questions that give your prospects the chance to spill their guts of all of their problems that (hopefully) your technology or services can solve.  It’s so critical that your BDR’s get this one right, folks.  A conversation full of open-ended versus closed-ended questions is the difference between a fully qualified sales opportunity and an opportunity lost.  Here is a list of 30 good open-ended questions from Just Sell that your BDR’s should be using today.

Lastly, if your BDR’s are going to get prospects to talk, they need to listen, listen, and listen.  If everything in real estate hinges on location, location, location, “listening” is its teleprospecting counterpart.  I’ve been on the end of phone conversations listening in to BDR’s who just wouldn’t shut up and let the prospect talk.  They’d spend the majority of the time interrupting the prospect with how our clients could do this for them, and how our clients could do that.  Interrupt a prospect, who by the way, is cursing him-or-herself for actually picking UP your BDR’s phone call, and they’re going to close down faster than ANY restaurant next to Jay’s on Route 28 in West Bridgewater. Yes, it’s a geographical reference, but trust me when I tell you, as soon as their having their Grand Opening, they’re having their Grand Closing.  A couple of weeks ago I asked you if your BDR’s were listening to your prospects, and you can check that out here.  My point here, though, is that if your BDR’s are too busy interrupting your prospects, they’re sending a message that says, “I’m really just in this for me, not to help you.”  Let your prospect feel that for a minute and you’ve lost them.  If your BDR’s are listening, that means they’re giving your prospects time to talk, and THAT, my friends, is what we’re after here – talking prospects.

If you want your prospects to talk with your BDR’s, they need to ask smart, open-ended questions, and then listen.  If your BDR’s are doing that, congrats!  If not, shoot me an email and we can talk about fixing that.

My colleague Lindsay wrote about shifting teleprospecting strategies this week, and it got me thinking…

I realize I may be alienating any readers who are not fans of the Boston Red Sox with the following analogy, but what can I say?  I’m a Masshole!  Seriously, though, maybe this happens to your favorite baseball team, so just try to substitute the Sox for your team, and David Ortiz for the player on your team this happens to.  If you notice, when David Ortiz is up to bat, the opposing team typically “puts the shift on.”  The entire infield shifts over to right, because that is, more often than not (when its not a home run) the location of where Ortiz tends to hit the ball.  Other teams in baseball have realized this, and in turn, when Ortiz is up to bat, the players shift position.  In the same light, your teleprospecting team (or manager for that matter) needs to know when to “put the shift on” when your sales prospecting efforts may not be as effective as they should be.

There have been many projects that I’ve worked on when my client and I have determined that we needed to shift strategies for a teleprospecting campaign that was not yielding as many leads as we both believed it should have.  If you’ve got an outsourced sales prospecting team qualifying leads for you, or if you’ve got a team of your own in-house doing that, make sure they know when its time to change directions for a telesales effort that may not be as successful as you think it should be.  Amongst many ways you should (or your BDR Manager should) know when to “put the shift on,” if you answer any of the following three questions with a “no,” then I’d say its time: 

1. Are you targeting the right individual?
2. Are you making enough attempts?
3. Is your messaging as simplified as it can be?

First, are you targeting the right individual?  This may seem like a simple question, or that it has a simple answer, but its one that needs to be asked regardless.  If you’re not sure that you’re targeting the right person, and your teleprospectors report back to you that people have no idea what they’re talking about on the phone, I’d say its time to rethink who you’re targeting.  I’ve worked with folks before who believed that their target audience was in the Operational side of an organization, yet when my BDR’s called them, nobody knew what the hell they were talking about.  They would get pushed over to the IT side of the house, and have people interested in why they were calling, but my client would say, “Well, what about Operations?”  They needed to be told it was time to “put the shift on” with the Operations side – we needed to target IT because IT understood my BDR’s and actually wanted to talk with my client.  I know that it goes without saying, but you’ve got someone making teleprospecting calls for you and passing you sales qualified leads, you’d better be targeting the right person.

Second, are your BDR’s making enough attempts into the prospect base?  This is huge, man!  Just because you’ve got a team inside making dials or you’ve got a vendor doing it, doesn’t mean they’re making enough dials for you.  If you’re not seeing the production that you think you should be, find out if your BDR’s are trying hard enough.  Remember, though, I’m not solely speaking about “calls.”  We’re in the digital age right?  Hell, if you’re reading this you know how to use a computer.  We’re ALL more likely to reply to an email than we are to pick up a ringing telephone.  Emails count here, folks.  You should be able to trust your inside team or your vendor to know when the output is not at a level indicative of the leads that you expect to be receiving on a monthly basis.  Just think of what five extra calls and five extra emails per day might get you?  At the end of just one week, we’re talking an additional 50 attempts into your prospects, or an extra 200 per month.  That is huge!

Lastly, you’ve got to ask yourself if your messaging is as simplified as it can be.  For some of you reading, this may be tough due to a complex solution, but you’ve got to try.  As someone who’s actually made teleprospecting calls before, I know that a prospect doesn’t have a lot of time to talk.  If I have to spend the majority of my 30 seconds with them trying to explain my client’s complicated solution, I’m dead in the water.  Your BDR Manager should be responsible enough to you to tell you that the messaging needs to be simpler.  If there’s a lot of product dumping in your teleprospecting script, put the shift on my friend.  Your BDR’s are LUCKY if they get 30 seconds from a prospect.  Make their job easier by helping them to formulate a script that is as easy to understand as your technology allows.  Spend some time with the reps on the phone and listen to what they’re actually saying to prospects.  Does it even make sense to you?  I’ve received prospecting scripts back from clients before that were several paragraphs in length, and it always amazes me that they think a BDR can get all of that out without being hung up on.  Then, when I have the BDR read it back to them during a role play, the light goes on in their head and they understand that the BDR sounds ridiculous trying to say all of that gobbledygook.  Put the shift on if your messaging can be made simpler.

So as I said, there are other ways you can “put the shift on”; these are just a few.  Make sure, though, if you’re not seeing the output that you believe you should from your teleprospecting efforts that you ask yourself the above questions.  What else am I forgetting?  Oh yeah, go SOX!

I bet most of you are probably like me – you’ve made countless numbers of cold calls, warm calls, and “Good-God-please-pick-up-the-phone” calls.  And probably just like me, at some point in your teleprospecting career, you’ve used tips and tricks to get a prospect talking with you.  Some work, some don’t.  Regardless of what was successful for getting your prospect talking, getting them to understand why they should be talking with you is paramount.  How do you go about doing this?  How do you take those few precious seconds after saying, “Hi, this is _____” and actually get a prospect to talk with you?  For me, I think it’s all in having a prospect understand why they need to talk with you.

I’ve worked with a bunch of clients who are really good at describing what they do.  They understand the pains that their solutions solve and they have a really good handle on why their target audience wants to talk with them.  If you’ve got your own inside sales prospecting team, or maybe you’ve got a vendor finding sales qualified leads for you, you’ve got to make sure your BDR’s have that messaging down.  Prospects need to understand why they need to talk with them if they’re going to have success passing quality sales opportunities over to your sales team.  The way I see it, there are three ways you can help your BDR’s (and your prospects) out in this area: 

1. Help them understand a prospect’s pain.
2. Help them understand how your solution solves it.
3. Help them to shape their messaging by leading with value.

First, to help your prospects understand why they should talk with your organization, help your BDR’s to understand a prospect’s pain.  This is teleprospecting 101, I know, but because of its importance it needs to be stated.  If your BDR’s do not understand what business pains your target audience has that your solution/service can solve, you’ve got a lot of work to do.  Your BDR’s should be able to understand, at different decision making levels, the pains that each level experiences.  Why might a C-Level prospect be kept up at night about a problem that your service/solution solves?  Her Director?  His Manager?  The end user?  Lots of folks out there have problems – especially your prospects.  Ensuring that your BDR’s understand their problems is going to help them to better qualify prospects, and in turn, pass better sales qualified opportunities.

Second, help your BDR’s to understand how your solution solves your prospects pains.  Its good if your BDR’s know what pains your target market has; its great if they can articulate how your solution/service solves said pains.  What does your solution do for a company?  Why does it make them a better organization?  These are questions that need to be answered for your BDR’s, and answered in such a way that they are able to relay it simply to your prospects.  With greater understanding comes greater levels of conversations with prospects, and the more substantive conversations that they have with prospects, the better your qualified leads will be.  The better the lead, the greater the likelihood that it hits pipeline and closes.  Pete Gracey talks more about this in part one of his eBook, Driving Marketing ROI, and you can read that here.

Lastly, help your BDR’s to shape their messaging by leading with value.  Your BDR’s understand business pains across multiple management levels, and they understand how your product or service alleviates those pains.  Make sure that when they actually get a prospect on the phone, they’re leading with the value that your solutions bring.  No feature dumping…God please, NO feature dumping.  Nobody wants to get a call from a BDR.  There, I said it.  But NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY, wants to get a call from a BDR who’s verbally puking on the phone about all the bells and whistles that his/her product has.  Help your BDR’s (or your vendor’s BDR’s) by working with them to created messaging that leads with your value.  Your prospects will appreciate it!

By following the above steps, you’re letting your prospects understand why they should speak with someone in your organization when your BDR’s call.  When you prospects have better clarification on that, I’m betting that your lead production will increase.  Good luck!

So, if you’ve been reading The CRAP Report now, you know that I’m typically writing for folks that may either be looking to outsource their teleprospecting efforts or that may have their own internal sales prospecting team.  I’m also writing for folks that are looking to improve their Business Development Rep’s, be they a vendor or an in-house team.  Oh yeah, and my Mom.  Today, though, I really want to speak to those folks who’ve outsourced their sales opportunity generation efforts.  There may be some take-aways for others, but if you’re working with a vendor who is finding sales qualified leads for you and your sales team, this one’s for you.

Like the title says, I’m asking if your teleprospecting vendor listens to you.  I guess I need to be a little more detailed here, right?  You’ve spent A LOT of money outsourcing lead development and because of that, I’m hoping that you’re getting what you’ve asked for.  There are three key areas that you should be focusing on getting what you’ve paid for: 

1. Does your vendor share YOUR definition of a qualified lead?
2. Do they target your key prospects?
3. Are you getting access to the BDR’s calling on your behalf?

First off, does your vendor share YOUR definition of what a qualified lead looks like?  There have been many blog articles lately about making sure that Marketing and Sales share the same definition (see here and here for examples), but in this instance, you and your vendor had better share that same one, too.  This one is obviously the most critical.  During the initial implementation phase, my suggestion to you is to spend as much time hashing out with your outsourcer just what you feel a qualified lead looks like.  If all you care about is understanding a prospect’s business pains but your vendor’s BDR’s are qualifying for budget, something’s amiss.  I can’t stress this point enough, in fact, for those of you reading that are going to outsource and have not done so yet, get your “qualified lead” definition straightened out first.  Ensuring that you and your outsourced sales prospecting vendor share the exact same definition of what a qualified lead looks like is going to save you headaches in the long run.

Second, do they target your key prospects?  Did your vendor listen to you when THEY qualified you?  Do they know your target audience?  They’re making dials every day on your behalf, so make sure that you know that they’re calling the prospects you want them to.  A good portion of this problem can be alleviated if you come to the table with a list that you want them to call into (my colleague, Craig Ferrara, talks about putting lists together, and you can read his thoughts on that here).  If you already have a focused list, then there really may not be much to worry about, however, I have worked with clients in the past who want us to put lists together for them.  That’s okay, but make sure you review the list before giving the green light to make calls.  Nothing is more embarrassing for a BDR than calling a client’s customer because the client didn’t review the prospecting list and remove their name from it.

Lastly, are you getting access to the BDR’s calling on your behalf?  People who are making calls under your company’s banner should be made available to you, and pretty much whenever you want to talk to them, within reason.  I use the caveat of “within reason” because if you’ve outsourced to an expert, you shouldn’t impede their time on the phones too often.  Getting the opportunity to sit in on calls with the rep working for/with you will tell you all you need to know about whether or not your vendor has listened to you.  You’ll be able to pick up on all of the tweaks you’ve made to your messaging and make sure that what you want to be said to prospects is being said.

While I imagine that most outsourcers do a good job at these, you should keep the above three questions in mind regarding your relationship with your lead gen vendor and whether or not they really listen to you.

Yesterday, Rebel Brown, Strategist for People Who Know, had a great blog entry in her blog Phoenix Rising.  She makes the point that “Three adjectives and a noun are not a value proposition.”  In other words, “create compelling value propositions.”  I completely agree with her.  I think she’s spot on and I think it speaks to teleprospecting. Rebel talks about using words that matter to customers, keeping the message simple, and applying value.  I couldn’t agree more.  Relating it to teleprospecting, if you’ve got an inside lead generation team, or maybe you’ve outsourced your sales prospecting, you’ve got to make sure that your BDR’s are speaking to prospects on their level.  Our BDR’s have such precious little time when a prospect actually picks up their phone, that we can’t waste that time with (pardon the pun) crap. 

On top of that, the message that BDR’s bring to the market have got to be simple.  Those of us that are writing scripts and creating messaging that BDR’s use on the phones have got to make sure that we’re keeping them simple – to a point.  Simple enough to be understood by the BDR saying it, and simple enough that the prospect on the other end understands and, better yet, knows that we understand that message so well that we’ve simplified it.  This can be tough when talking tech.  Tech can only be simplified so much, but we’ve got to try. 

Lastly, and I think this one is the most important, we’ve got to apply our value.  If our BDR’s are not leading with value, we’re sunk before a telephone receiver is even picked up.  Having a value forward message, one that delivers an impact to an audience that desperately needs to be impacted, is a must.  Rebel makes the point to say, “Asking our audiences to extract the value from generic, buzz-ridden claims is risky at best.”  Need I say more?  Yours, mine, OUR prospects cannot be expected to “get” our value on their own.  It’s our job to make sure they get it, and the only way to do that is lead with value.  What sets you apart from everybody else?  What pains do you solve?  What problems do you fix?  How can you accelerate “blank”?  For me, I owe it to my clients to make sure that their messages are value forward.  For you, whether you do it in-house or outsource, make sure your teleprospecting teams are doing it the same way.

One of my favorite Brady Bunch episodes was the one were Greg was asked to become a singer named Johnny Bravo.  He thought he had made it!  What Greg didn’t know was that he wasn’t really wanted for his singing ability, as his first song becomes electronically enhanced (much to his chagrin).  By the end of the episode, though, we find out that Greg was only wanted because “he fit the [Johnny Bravo] suit.”  Greg wanted to sing his own songs, and not have them doctored.  When he realized he was just wanted because he fit some mold, he was ready to move on.

When it comes to teleprospecting rep’s (TPR’s), though it would be awesome to see a bunch of people wearing Johnny Bravo suits around my office, I want TPR’s to have Greg’s attitude when it comes to making calls.  I want them to be their own person.

What do I mean by that?  I’m talking about scripting, actually.  TPR’s should certainly have some framework with which to follow, but at the end of the day, we shouldn’t want them to read a script like they’re Judy the Time Life operator (no offense Judy).  They’ve got to be able to have business conversations with prospects.  Unfortunately, quality can’t be scripted.  If you’re looking to put qualified sales opportunities in front of your sales team, you’ve got to get them from TPR’s who can get them without sticking to a script.  God forbid a prospect asks a question that isn’t on the script!  You ever see a TPR who can’t break from a script during a situation like this?  It’s not pretty.  It’s about as uncomfortable as an afterschool special in ’73 (I’m looking at you My Dad Lives in a Downtown Hotel).

Having business conversations with prospects outside the outline of a script is a must.  If you’re evaluating vendors to supply you with qualified sales opportunities, make sure they can talk your product.  If you’re just looking for TPR’s who can fit the suit, you’re not only selling yourself short, you’re telling your prospects a lot about how you value their time.

I once worked with a customer who told me that the easiest way to describe his offering was to tell me that they provided 90% of the functionality that a competitor (who’s name rhymes with “Bicrosoft”!) offers at twice the price, and then asked me to find him quality sales opportunities. 

Let that sink in for a minute. 

Okay, now that you’re head’s stopped spinning, let’s analyze what you’ve just read.  If the most straightforward way to describe your solution is telling me that it provides less functionality at a greater cost than your competitors, then its time to go back to the drawing board.  As an outsourced sales opportunity development professional, that messaging might make sense to me, but it certainly isn’t one that I can bring to your target market.  To be fair, my client didn’t expect me to share that to their intended audience, but talk about making messaging difficult! 

If you’re ready to partner with an organization to develop and nurture a pipeline of quality sales opportunities for you, you have to make sure you’ve got all of your ducks in a row.  This client obviously needed some help shaping their value proposition before even thinking about how they were going to bring in new sales leads.  Again, that wasn’t their value forward message to their prospects, but if that’s how they describe their services to a partner, something’s wrong.  Spending a lot of money to find good, qualified sales opportunities is smart – if you’re ready, but if you’re not, it’s a sure way to show your lack of preparedness.  Don’t believe me?  Ask me about this project sometime; I’d be more than happy to tell you how many times people told me they were happy with “Bicrosoft.”