Lead Generation: Getting More Sales “At-Bats”

Nov. 3, 2011 – For most sales organizations, closing deals isn’t as difficult as finding good, closeable sales leads in the first place.

Get a good lead in the door, understand their pain points, build good rapport, convince them you have a great solution at reasonable cost – all that is doable.  But getting the “at-bat” can be the bigger challenge.

There are many tools for finding leads, and one of the best, and most “tried and true,” is cold calling.  Lead generation and appointment setting – a.k.a., outbound telemarketing – take single-minded focus and concentrated effort.  It requires a combination of sales talent and doggedness.  Cold caller superstars find hot sales leads, but so do less talented salespeople who make a high number of calls and land on the right account at the right time.

That’s why sales managers reverse engineer annual sales goals.  They figure out how many cold calls it takes to turn up a lead, how many leads are needed to achieve a sales opportunity, and how sales opportunities turn into closed deals.  It’s a numbers game: in order to achieve his or her annual sales goal, each salesperson, typically, needs to make between 15 and 30 cold calls a day.

How hard can that be, right?  Not so fast. 

It doesn’t take much to push the daily cold call goal off track.  Salespeople have a lot to do besides cold calling.  They write sales proposals, close deals, and travel to sales appointments and trade shows.  Miss one day of cold calling and the next day you need to make between 30 and 60 cold calls in a day.  Miss two days of cold calls… well, you get the picture.

Oh, and need we mention that most salespeople rarely prioritize and more often dislike cold calling?  They will do anything – reorganizing their files, clean out the office refrigerator – before they “dial for dollars.”

This is where a firm that specializes in outbound lead generation and sales appointment setting can be a major asset.

The only thing an outsourced B2B cold calling company does is generate leads.  They are optimized lead generation engines.  Here at OnBrand24, we hire salespeople at our call center who actually like cold calling.  They are comfortable talking to strangers on the phone, and they do not get discouraged.

They are trained in the techniques of quickly establishing rapport with sales prospects, of articulating the key pain points and benefits of a product or service, and turning leads over to our clients as rapidly as possible.

In addition, we have a lead generation software platform that quickly captures contact information, records the outcome of the call, informs our clients of next steps in the sales cycle, and auto-dials the next account.

Beyond lead generation and sales appointments, outsourced call centers have other ways to divine the needs of potential customers.  We do customer and market surveys, asking people about the products they use and their purchasing plans.  Likely buyers are turned over to our clients for follow-up contact.  And we conduct win-back programs, calling customers who have become inactive and pitching them new products and special offers.

The main point: Our outbound agents’ only task for the day is to focus on their calls.  They have no distractions from cold calling.  The result: We fill the pipeline of our clients’ sales channels, identifying quality leads for closing.

Nothing boosts the morale of a salesperson like being handed a hot sales lead.  Unless it’s telling them they don’t have to cold call anymore.

Mark Fichera, CEO
OnBrand24
Beverly, MA