Outbound Prospecting: How Many Leads Can I Expect? (Part 1)

I hear this very common question when a client decides to develop and implement an outbound prospecting initiative.

“How many leads can I expect to produce from my outbound prospecting initiative?”

The best and truest answer is also the most unpopular. The answer is: it depends.

What does your expected number of leads depend on?  If sales and marketing live and dies on your metrics, how can it be so difficult to predict the exact number of leads? How is it that after so much previous experience, even those people closest to the numbers are not able to pinpoint the number of leads to be generated from an outbound prospecting campaign?

Here is why it depends. Ask yourself these questions before asking how many leads your next initiative should generate:

1. How long will the outbound prospecting initiative run?
2. Are you calling customers, prospects or both?
3. If you are calling customers, are they active or dormant?
4. If they are prospects, do they represent your target audience?
5. What is the price of the product or service?
6. How accurate is the contact information: the name, title, phone, and email?
7. How will your representatives connect with the contact:  by phone, email, social network?
8. Are you attempting to deliver appointments or highly qualified leads?
9. Are you selling a commodity or complex solution?
10. How do you define a high quality lead?
11. Do you have lead definitions outlined?
12. What are your lead definitions?
13. What has been your past performance reaching your lead expectations?
14. If they weren’t reached why not?

This list represents a small sample of the types of questions you should consider to help better determine a realistic estimate of leads. Please stay tuned for part 2 in which we will share at least 10 more additional questions to help you create a productive initiative.