Building your list of outbound prospects can be a thorny issue. Unresolved conflicts can rear their ugly heads every time you start to develop your outbound prospecting contacts. An important part of an outbound sales prospecting initiative is to develop a highly targeted list of contacts, with appropriate titles, to reach out to.
Consider these questions as you build your outbound prospecting list, to help you get clear about the data you’ll be using to plan your initiative:
- Will the list consist of customers or prospects?
- Will you be working with named accounts or territory accounts?
- What titles will be contacted?
Usually, either sales reps, or an in-house or outsourced lead development team will conduct an outbound prospecting effort against the list.
Here are 5 key points to consider to avoid conflicts amongst those reaching out to prospects and customers:
- Ensure that your sales representatives review the list before those assigned to reach out to prospects begin calling
- Make sure the list contacts meet the list objective
- For prospect based lists: Make sure that customer contacts are excluded
- For customer based lists: Make sure that prospect contacts are excluded
- Give credit where it’s due. Sometimes, a lead is developed from a contact left on a list by mistake. If sales reviews the outbound prospecting list, it’s possible to miss a contact they would have otherwise removed. If your in-house or outsourced lead development group develops the lead, give credit to the team that uncovered the lead.
- Help each other. If you are conducting the outreach initiative and something seem wrong, say so. For example, if you are calling on sales executives and you see contact data for consulting executives on the list, mention this to your team. Don’t blindly call. Question why they were included.
- Check for and remove duplicates in the data. Be sure the list is clean and duplicates are eliminated. One contact exists and is properly assigned to one representative in the company’s SFA system.
This quick checklist should help you remove obstacles to lead development success.