B2B Lead Generation: Why teleprospecting is a bridge between sales and marketing
For complex B2B sales, there is no better capability than teleprospecting for optimizing funnel efficiency. I suspect that is one of the reasons more and more marketing executives have taken ownership of this function from sales.
One of the reasons that teleprospecting is so important is that it is (or should be) a bridge between upstream marketing campaigns and downstream sales teams. For marketing, the teleprospecting team cannot only convert marketing responses into sales-ready leads, but provide marketing with clarity on how to improve its demand generation efforts.
Let me provide two simple examples:
1. Fine-tuning lead scoring models
There is probably no more promising capability than lead scoring. To evolve the rule set, marketing must take aggregate funnel data from teleprospecting and fine tune the scoring model. For example, usually 20-50 percent of the leads will be unreachable after four or five dials and three or so personal emails from the teleprospecting representative. By comparing a large pool of these unreachable leads with leads that do respond to follow-up of teleprospecting representatives, marketing can often find different characteristics that correlate to responsiveness and dial up the lead score accordingly.
2. Fine-tuning messaging and media strategy
If a large percentage of potential customers the teleprospecting team does reach are out of the target market, then marketing can often fine-tune its messaging and its media/search strategy to improve the percentage of responders who are actually in the target market.
If the teleprospecting team receives similar, simple feedback on the sales-ready leads, that feedback can help the teleprospecting team improve it’s practices. For example, if there is a disproportionate percentage of sales-ready leads that do not respond to the follow up by sales, then the teleprospecting team (or some subset of the team) most likely needs additional training (or talent) in order to better qualify prospects.
What’s important is that there is a repeatable process and that the operation measures the right things. What’s also important is that marketing views the teleprospecting capability as a mechanism for improving upstream marketing efficiency and that the teleprospecting operation views sales feedback in a similar light.
In this light, the real question isn’t whether sales or marketing owns the teleprospecting function, but that everyone sees the potential for teleprospecting to better connect marketing to sales and drive optimization of the funnel.
Related resources
Free Web clinic, March 30th — Converting Leads to Sales: How one B2B company generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in only 8 months
B2B Marketing: The FUEL methodology outlined
How and When to Use Content in the B2B Sales Process (Members library)
