Each day as an inside sales rep you have certain “things” that you could do to optimize your chance of someone answering, someone calling you back or someone emailing you back that somehow found interest in what you said. I really do think of prospecting as a game. BUT- there are ways for you to optmize your chance of the calls that you make or outbound attempts actually getting you somewhere. From my experience if you have a day of prospecting where you have nothing else that you are doing. Meaning you don’t have qualifying calls, you don’t have scheduled exploratory calls and you don’t have demos of your product scheduled- you are just prospecting. My go to is that you should make about 70 outreaches via phone and leave vmails for all that don’t pick up as well as send an email pertaining to why you called in the first place.
I think this process works well and I will explain how you should leave your vmail. But the most important part of prospecting is not when you pick up the phone and dial, it is about what you do when you source the lead or get the inbound lead. So either way- if you receive inbound leads or source your own, you are not done. This is not when you should just pick up the phone and dial. You need to do your research.
What I mean by research is that you need to go hunting for relevant information that will help you explain why the heck you are calling this person in the first place. Let’s start with an example if you source your own leads.
Example: Sourcing your own leads.
- First step should be that you are sourcing leads where you know that they are actually worth your time. You should truly understand what a good fit for your business is. Why would someone want to buy or use your product or service. You need to fully understand your value prop and start to figure out innovative ways to find those types of companies that would naturally be a good fit for your service/product.
- At HubSpot, we help companies develop inbound marketing strategies for lead generation through the use of our marketing software and our inbound marketing methodology. A good fit for our software and our process of marketing is a company that has a concept of a lead, that maybe has multiple products or services they offer, offers those products and services to multiple markets or industries, has a website that looks like they paid money on it, has no marketing software running on their website currently, has a Marketing Director and/or marketing team… Those are all things that I would look for initially to make sure that I am sourcing leads that probably would have some type of need for inbound marketing or experimenting with lead gen. From there you should dig further, do your homework. Try to find press releases about them that are current. Look through their news section to read about what is going on with their company. Do they have growth goals that align with what your company solves for?
- What I do next is write down anything and everything that you know about the structure of their team in the notes of that lead. I also write down all the pertinent information from whatever I found out about the company. Maybe ideas on what I think we could help them with based on things I read about on their site or in doing my research. It also helps to check our LinkedIn and see the background of who you are calling. The more you know about that person you are calling and the company, the better chance you have at actually explaining why you are reaching out.
- Every lead you enter manually and source yourself should be potentially good. There is no point in sourcing someone just for the heck of it. If you don’t think there is a fit from your research don’t take the time to put it into CRM because you won’t want to call it when you come across it again. Every lead you put in should have some potential and you should know why. Imagine if every lead you came across in your leads queue daily were good…
