I just finished a phone conversation with Trish Bertuzzi, the founder of The Bridge Group, one of the leading Inside Sales Consulting firms in the US.
The topic of our original MIT Study with Dr. James Oldroyd came up and the fact that many people have thrown around a lot of numbers since that research was released.
Trish asked a very poignant statement, “All the immediate response data is very important when a person is wanting you to contact them, but what about when they download a white paper, and probably don’t even want you to call them?”
Her question cuts right to the point.
What is more important, making immediate contact with somebody, or waiting and biding your time to engage them into a later opportunity in hopes of higher chances at a sale?
Let’s say somebody goes to your website, downloads a whitepaper, and you call them minutes or seconds later and they haven’t even had a chance to read it yet. How do they feel? Are they turned off or impressed with your immediate follow through?
Is it worth the dramatic increase in the odds of reaching them (100x) and the significant increase in setting an appointment (21x) for the potential chance of appearing too […]
Technology has trained us to expect things, NOW. When I have a question I’ll Google it and millions of possible answers will be at my fingertips in .27 seconds. I forget that I used to have to go to the library or call a company by looking through the yellow pages.
I forgot my cell phone one day when I went to work. I was lost, unable to do things that not too long ago were impossible with a land line. I can call, text, email, tweet, find a restaurant, make a reservation, get turn by turn directions … hey there’s an app for just about anything.
A prospect who fills out a form on your website is looking for a solution, NOW. They have a problem and it’s unacceptable to contact them 2 days after or not at all.
inside|sales has done research with MIT professor, James Oldroyd, covering the topic of Lead Management with a goal to discover the best time to contact an interested prospect. The results surprised us, as we learned that companies don’t have the luxury of waiting 2 days to contact: or 2 hours. Whether you are a B2B company, or a B2C company, […]
What does it mean to manage a lead effectively? Listed below are the 9 steps to follow when managing your leads.
1. Lead Generation: any of a number of marketing or sales methods used to generate inquiries.
2. Lead Inquiry: a person provides contact information inviting a response.
3. Lead Capture: the method whereby contact information from an inquirer is gathered.
4. Lead Scoring: the practice of grading and prioritizing an inquiry prior to a response to a lead from your sales department.
5. Lead Routing: the geographical, skills-based, random, or other decision process whereby an inquiry is assigned to a rep for response.
6. Lead Distribution: the method used to send inquirer information to a rep for response.
7. Lead Response: the practice of responding immediately, consistently and at optimal times to optimize contact and qualification ratios.
8. Lead Nurturing: the practice of persistently marketing over time to increase awareness, education, and need using ‘permission-marketing’ strategies and tactics.
9. Lead Tracking: the process of gathering key performance indicators and metrics on sources of leads their progress towards sales closure.
We will be reviewing each lead management step in depth. If you have any questions or comments about any of these steps, please, leave them in the comments—we’ll be writing […]
I got asked again today how to talk about InsideSales.com. This question comes up several times a week so I thought it would be good to make is easily accessible in the future.
1. InsideSales.com (IS) was the first company to blend hosted power dialer technology inside a CRM solution. Now we don’t sell much of our own lead management CRM; but we recommend salesforce.com as a much more complete solution instead and we integrate our dialers inside of Salesforce.com.
2. IS sells a power dialer for B2B and complex B2C inside sales, not a predictive dialer for B2C or telemarketing.
3. IS has four main suites of Products: Outbound Dialers, Inbound Call Routing, Lead Management CRM, Intelligent Workflow (automated marketing or lead nurturing) products. These products help respond to leads immediately and consistently to dramatically increase contact and qualification rates.
4. We pioneered and invented Lead Response Management in conjunction with MIT research. This means we built tools to immediately capture leads and respond to them in 8-10 seconds while the person is still by their phone.
5. We work best for companies with lots of web leads and an inside sales or lead generation department.
6. We focus on increasing the qualification of leads from your […]
I first heard of ‘Web 2.0’ from Chris Knudsen and Dave Beisinger, at a vidcast company called 10SpeedMedia. They were helping us make micromercials to test web video as a new lead generation media. They told me enough to get me very interested.
As my research about Web 2.0 began on Google in the summer of 2006, I started with Tim O’Reilly’s landmark article ‘What Is Web 2.0’ and expanded from there. I read Paul Graham and Andrew Keen and dozens of others and was enthralled and amazed at the point and counterpoints surrounding the Web 2.0 buzz.
I wanted to see how all of this related to sales. I immediately wondered what ‘Sales 2.0’ would look like. I knew someone espousing Sales 2.0 would be close behind.
Sure enough. I soon found that everybody out there had come up with their version of ‘Something 2.0’: Call Center 2.0, Business 2.0, Marketing 2.0 and Small Business 2.0 to name a few. The common thread was that they all linked back to the disruptive change brought about by the Internet.
It was August of 2006, I couldn’t find a thing on the web about Sales 2.0. I bought the domain Sales2-0.com to have a way to communicate our thoughts.
I didn’t […]
As always I want to make things clear, and today I’ve set my sights on some acronyms that are used a lot in remote sales: B2B and B2C. What do they stand for? ‘Business to Business’ and ‘Business to Customer’ respectively.
Some may argue (and do if you read some of the blogs out there) that there are virtually no differences in the sales processes targeting these to groups. B2B and B2C become arbitrary classifications to these people. Instead of tallying up the many ways they are the same, I want to highlight some of the key differences between the two categories and explain why that warrants a different sales tactic.
Quantity: There are two major differences in quantity between B2B and B2C markets: a difference in number of clients, and a difference in size of their budget. There are millions of individual customers while some B2B operations struggle to have customer bases creep into the thousands category. But what businesses lack in shear number they more than make up for in how much each individual customer is able to spend. Because of these differences each sale to a B2B customer has more […]
The web has disrupted everything we know about sales and marketing. Even the time-honored practice of cold-calling has fallen by the wayside, and face-to-face selling, advertising, yellow pages, and direct mail are limping along. But in return, the Internet is opening up the greatest opportunities ever available for sales organizations who learn it’s secrets.
InsideSales.com was originally founded to generate cost effective leads through outbound cold-calling technology. We were the first web-based sales tracking Lead Management CRM system with fully integrated dialers and voice messaging tools … and though far ahead of the competition, we were obsolete before we launched.
Why? Because we thought we were building the ultimate system for cold-calling, and cold calling had already become obsolete, we just didn’t know it.
At the end of 2004 my partner Dave Elkington and I had developed nearly two dozen telephony ‘Power Tools’ like automatic dialers that we embedded within online CRM solutions and we were getting crazy productivity increases helping our clients with cold calling. Our sales were picking up and things were going well. So much so, that we decided to pull together a test to see just what we really could do.
We had already built a sales team of ‘closers’ that worked […]
Why do we Hate Predictive Dialers (and Love Power Dialers?)
18 September 2009 — Ken Krogue
1 Comment
Wow, we get this question a lot.
The honest answer is that we don’t want to be part of the telemarketing crowd that calls you at dinner time and makes you say, “No, I don’t want that!” seven times before they finally hang up.
We want to work with professional inside sales people who happen to sell remotely, not telemarketers. It’s a specific choice we made.
Our biggest source of clients is those who come to us looking for a predictive dialer to call their business to consumer (B2C) leads. The first question we ask them is, “How much are you paying for your leads and can you afford to burn many of them?”
They always say “I pay a lot. And no, of course not – I don’t want to burn them… what do you mean?”
Then we point them to the FCC web pages with legislation against predictive dialers and the high annoyance they have caused over the years that have resulted in laws being passed. We show them that Predictive Dialers annoy and burn as many as 3% of their leads EVERY TIME THEY ARE CALLED. If you multiply that by the 7 to 12 times it takes to call a lead before you make […]
Remote Sales needs leads. Good Leads. Leads that will become customers. This kind of lead is not easy to find, though there are some companies that would tell you otherwise.
These companies make their profits by selling what they want you to believe are leads. In reality they are often little more than a long list of contact information. Anybody with a phone book could gather a lead just as useful (or useless!).
What separates lists from leads is qualification. Leads are qualified by four factors, and to be good leads they need at least 2 or three of these factors. The four factors are:
Need
Urgency
Decision Making Capability
Money
While there are some companies that sell leads that are more pre-qualified than those next to useless lists – there may be no better source for leads that meet the four qualifying factors than your own corporate website.
Visitors to your site are already showing a sign of interest – and many of them came to your site looking for a solution to a need. Visitors who use the internet expect immediate results – reflecting urgency. Already two of the four qualifiers […]
Last week I wrote about what you can do to get the most out of your Auto Dialer. Look forward to me highlighting in the future different kinds of dialers, and what you can expect from them. This week .
What’s the best kind of Dialer for you? Part 1
Several varieties of dialers exist. Click-to-call, auto dialers, ratio, and predictive dialers have each been available and used by remote sales businesses for decades. These dialers were developed by companies who wanted to be able to churn through thousands of leads a day while identifying the easiest sales. Over time advancements in dialer technology has led to a more refined and customer focused alternative. This alternative is the power dialer.
Power dialers still meet the fundamental goal of all dialers – they help sales representatives call more leads each day. An average rep can call two or three times the amount of leads in a day using a power dialer than he could call dialing manually. While this number is lower than with some other kinds of dialers, its impressive enough to justify the investment in such software.
Power dialers go beyond increasing […]
