Inside Sales Tip: Persistence vs Annoyance – How Not to Cross the Line

When reaching out to potential leads, it’s important that your outreach efforts not become so excessive that your lead forgets any interest they previously had in your product and replace it with annoyance. The line between persistency and annoyance is a thin one, but it’s vital that sales reps understand the difference.

In the eBook, “31 Inside Sales Must Haves for Driving Leads, Appointments, and Sales,” Ken Krogue outlines two media sequences to ensure that you’re wringing the most value out of your leads without becoming a pest.

Outbound Call Media Sequence

For outbound initiatives, inside sales reps can become an annoyance more quickly than with inbound initiatives. For an outbound call sequence, a sales rep should reach out a total of six times using their dialer.

Call 1 – leave a voicemail and email

Calls 2-3 – no voicemail or email

Call 4 – leave second voicemail and email

Call 5 – no voicemail or email

Call 6 – leave final voicemail and email

Inbound Call Media Sequence

For an inbound initiative, your lead came and reached out to you. With that in mind, it makes sense that they can handle a bit more persistency before becoming annoyed. In this type of situation, it’s appropriate to make nine contact attempts.

Call 1 – leave a voicemail and email

Calls 2-4 – no voicemail or email

Call 5 – leave second voicemail and email

Calls 6-8 – no voicemail or email

Call 9 – leave final voicemail and email

It’s important when leaving these sales voicemails that you mention you will be sending a follow up voicemail and vice versa. Using this best practice will actually increase the effectiveness and will generate a larger lead response rate. Additionally, it’s important to provide unique pieces of information in each outreach attempt to provide new, fresh content.

What is your experience in reaching out to leads? Have you found a magic number to ensure your attempts don’t become an annoyance? Let us know in the comment box below.

To further increase your sales teams’ efficiency, check out the PowerDialer for Salesforce – the most downloaded app on the salesforce.com AppExchange.

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