Your business can improve sales by up to 100%, regardless of whether your prospecting is purchased or homegrown. It’s not just how well companies use the phone but how they manage their list that is the key to success.
You can use your list of new businesses to make sure that you have a successful campaign by doing the following five things.
Segment your list into smaller and more targeted lists
By segmenting and focusing lists, companies can boost their response rates by 50% or more. Prospects are interested in what their peers are doing and what is relevant to them. Contacts can be grouped into smaller lists and segmented to make them easier for you to track.
Marketers can segment contacts in any way that is appropriate for their business. Segmentation is usually done by title, industry, revenue range, size of staff, or location. Instead of sending a generic message to all segments, marketers should create messages that are relevant to each piece.
Segmented lists are useful for assessing campaign results. A large list would make it difficult to distinguish the information.
Check the list before you start the campaign
It is expensive to work with an old list for two reasons: wasted resources and missed opportunities.
Inside-sales reps who spend time finding correct phone numbers or contacts are a drain on resources–especially because it often can take a rep more than four calls to reach what turns out to be an invalid contact. Sales reps who remove the wrong contacts from their list also lose opportunities.
The longer companies wait to clean data, the higher the cost of their campaigns. A list can contain more than 40% invalid information. Cleaning the list prior to calling can save you up to 25% on the cost of follow-up sales.
It’s a waste to give a list to the sales team that hasn’t been cleaned, as they won’t dig too deep into it once they discover that data is not updated.
Test and identify the best campaign messages and cadence
The list should guide marketers on how to and how frequently to contact contacts. Prior to a telephone call, some segments may respond better to direct mail or email. Some features may respond better to repeated phone calls.
Set up a campaign rhythm that you can measure and adjust. If, for example, list contacts are more likely to become appointments after the second contact, it’s not necessary to make eight phone calls. Budgets can be spent more effectively. Alternatively, for some lists, it may take more than eight calls to get the best response rate.
Test and tweak your messages. Reference selling has proven to be the most successful strategy as long as your messages are relevant. If the list is aimed at a particular industry, for example, you can include references in that industry. You can reference companies in the range of revenue if you have segmented your list.
Productivity Increase
Set up a system to measure campaign success and capture important information that will improve campaigns. We were able, by finding the best approach, to double our productivity in calling. The best design will record call history and capture and categorize information to enrich list data.
Productivity will skyrocket if sales reps have access to information (with a few clicks) and are organized in a way that they can all call the same group at once with the exact message and cadence.
Marketers should measure activity volume, connection rates (what percent of calls reach a person), and conversion rates. Look for a system that allows reps to collect valuable information on why someone has not expressed interest. It is important to use each contact as an opportunity to learn about the company, competitors, and purchasing schedules.
How to measure the performance of the list
Review the performance of each segment on the list to evaluate campaign success. It is more important to look at the results of a campaign in parts than in its entirety. This allows you to get boardroom-ready data on which markets respond best, which messages work best, and which changes are necessary for marketing.
By quickly testing new messages, we were able to grow the sales pipeline for one company by five times in one year and reduce its sales cycle time by nearly two-thirds. We implemented a lead nurturing program for those prospects who weren’t ready to switch vendors. This resulted in more sales for the company.
You can go into the boardroom with your results and find unique opportunities that you would not have otherwise realized. We found, for example, that the software client’s primary focus industry was the third most responsive.
Ohne measurement, this valuable information wouldn’t bubble up to the surface.