The CRAP Report

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?