The CRAP Report

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite Christmas stories.  I love the idea of someone getting visited by four ghosts to show him how the errors of his ways can determine his future.  It’s a story about second chances, too.  Ebenezer Scrooge is a terribly wicked man at the beginning of the tale, and by the end, he’s barely recognizable because his outlook on life is a complete turn from what people had been used to.  How can anyone not enjoy a story like that!?  You know, the ending of one year and the beginning of another brings that same feel of a second chance with it.  When it comes to your B2B lead generation efforts and your sales prospecting campaigns, what are you going to do differently to make 2010 better than 2009?

Obviously, in order to answer that question, you need to look back on 2009 and determine what worked and what didn’t work.  You’ve got to run reports on the campaigns that you initiated and on the programs that you kicked off and look at the results of each.  Maybe you outsourced some of your lead generation efforts to a third party vendor this year and determined that next year, you’re just going to build your own inside teleprospecting team to drive qualified leads to your sales team.  Maybe, though, you had your own inside team this year and they just didn’t perform to the levels that you needed them to and you’re seriously thinking that maybe some of these “outsourcers” may actually have a bead on sales prospecting.  Whatever you do in 2010, here are three areas that I think you need to focus on: 

1. Focus on creating a prospecting strategy.
2. Focus on better teleprospecting lists.
3. Focus on making your BDR’s better.

The first area that I think you need to focus on in 2010 is to create a prospecting strategy.  A prospecting strategy, mind you, that goes beyond smiling and dialing.  Put some thought into what works and what doesn’t in terms of getting prospects to call your BDR’s back or return their emails.  How many times should you call a prospect per day?  Per week?  When should you and when shouldn’t you leave a voicemail message when you get an answering machine?  How often should you follow up with an email?  These are all things that you need to have some sort of a plan around.  If you look back at 2009 and feel like your teleprospecting efforts didn’t go quite the way you wanted them to, maybe you should start by looking at the strategy you used to get yourself there.  Having a well thought out process in place for your teleprospectors to follow is key to having a better 2010, lead generation-wise.

The second area that you should focus on in 2010 is to get better teleprospecting lists for your BDR’s to call into.  Easier said than done, right?  Easy is SO 2009 my friends; it’s time to work harder than we ever have, and that includes grunt work like list building.  I’m not saying that YOU specifically have to get a better list, but make sure someone in your organization is tasked with getting an improved database for your teleprospectors to call into.  If you can afford it, have someone generate the list for you from scratch.  Get your targets in all of your territories identified and then task someone to build that database of contacts from the ground up.  If your BDR’s have a better list from which to prospect from, and they use that list to fortify all of the other inbound marketing data sets that you’re going to generate throughout 2010, your pipeline should escalate very quickly.  You do what you want, obviously, but this is one area worth spending time on in the New Year.

Lastly, regarding your B2B lead generation efforts in 2010, you should focus on making your BDR’s better.  This one should be a no brainer for you; better BDR’s equal better sales qualified leads.  Put some programs together for you teleprospectors to make them better at generating leads.  Put together a book club and choose a book about sales or marketing to read together, get trainers to come in on a quarterly basis and run seminars for them, create a mentoring program – I don’t really care what you do for them, but the point is that you should do something.  Their jobs can get monotonous and they are the frontline of your organization to your prospects.  If you help them to be better at what they do, your prospects are going to have a better outlook on your organization as a whole because your BDR’s will feel more empowered because of the added effort you’ve put into making them better (that’s a mouthful, but no less true).  You want improvement in 2010 for your teleprospectors, then make your BDR’s better at their jobs.

Let me ask you, now – what are you going to do to change your prospecting efforts in 2010?