Outbound Is Hard! This Can Make it Easier.

It’s hard to get warm prospects out of a cold list. Putting the “not interested” prospects to the side, your sales development reps (SDRs) end up connecting with decision makers who are interested but too busy to talk or whose company is not at the right point in the buying cycle to purchase right away, or with a person who isn’t anywhere close to being a decision maker. It’s dishonest to pretend that calls like these are not discouraging. Those calls feel like lost opportunities to SDRs: no meetings set means no sales will be made.

The magic of compounding

At ConnectAndSell, we’ve determined that the most common trait of organizations that outpace others, using the measure of a significantly reduced cost-per-meeting as comparison, is their dedication to building and utilizing a follow-up list. ConnectAndSell’s research has shown that having two conversations with a prospect — about 30 to 90 days apart — results in 9% of those prospects setting meetings, that 16% will set a meeting during a third conversation with them, and that a whopping 25% of the prospects contacted for a fourth conversation are willing to set a meeting during that call.

These are great numbers. These are outbound numbers. And all these results are from pursuing the prospects who looked so disappointing during the first call, but who now make up your follow-up list of warm leads. That’s why it’s imperative that you put those “lost opportunities” on your call-them-back-later list.

The simple trick that makes hard prospecting easy

So, time to build those follow-ups into a sales-building asset. At a modest investment of two hours per day on a ConnectAndSell Lightning™ session, a rep will end up talking to 20 or more prospects per day on his company’s cold list. Say he is able to set up a follow-up call or get a referral from just 50% of those prospects (60% is the norm for a reasonable list); that 50% will build his follow-up inventory by 10 prospects a day! Within a month, he is sitting on top of about 200 qualified prospects, and at the end of the quarter, he’ll have a stable of 600 warm leads.

The result is that conversions jump to 9%. At a regular cadence of 20 conversations per day, that is 2 meetings a day from your follow-up list alone. And it just keeps growing. Naturally, many of these leads will turn into opportunities, removing them from the follow-up list; but cold calling keeps augmenting that list with new follow-ups and referrals, building this inventory month by month. Now these warm leads are all in one place, ready to have calls made to each of them on a prescribed basis.

Because this is another thing that we learned from our data: setting up a zero-effort follow-up call 90 days out is essential in order to reach qualified leads during that future time when they are ready to engage. ConnectAndSell’s Lightning platform makes this automatic. This means that dialing follow-up calls is not left to the memories of the SDRs, or their spare time, or to their best intentions. With Lightning, follow-up calls are automatically managed. It’s simple. No more hassle. No failure to reconnect. No fear of missing a business’s buying cycle. No lost opportunities. ConnectAndSell will get the decision maker on the phone. All your rep has to do is be ready to have that next conversation, the one that may set the meeting.

Now that doesn’t seem too hard, does it? At least, not with ConnectAndSell!