Don’t Learn the Hard Way!

Conducting a lead generation campaign isn’t as easy as it seems. That’s why so many companies approach firms like VSA.

Most of our clients decide to work with an outside partner after fully assessing their in-house resources—realizing that successful cold calling requires much more than just an extra phone line and several hours’ worth of dedicated staff time each week. Unfortunately, though, others have learned the hard way.

Here are 5 unexpected challenges you’re likely to face if you go it alone:

1. Calling through your list takes a lot longer than you thought. It may seem reasonable to expect a motivated sales rep to make 20 or 30 dials in an hour. But of course, the whole point of cold calling is to get into conversations, and a productive conversation takes time.
   VSA’s most successful team members usually only make about 10 calls per hour—sometimes even fewer, if the campaign is particularly complex. At that rate, it takes a whole team—not just one person—to get the most from a large list.
2. You don’t have the right IT infrastructure. You might have access to an extra phone line, but do you have the email capacity to correspond with hundreds of prospects? Is your CRM capable of collecting and analyzing data on thousands of calls?
   The right tools make a huge difference, but they can also be hugely expensive. It’s usually more cost-effective to work with a partner who already has this infrastructure.
3. You don’t have administrative capacity. Writing scripts, developing procedures, taking notes and dispositioning calls for follow up… these tasks are all critical to a campaign’s success, and they all require a keen attention to detail. Most sales teams discover that it’s best to entrust these jobs to specialists, rather than scrambling to do it all themselves. Without the right administrative capacity, you’ll quickly fall behind!
4. Your schedule doesn’t match up with your prospects’. Your sales reps may have time to make cold call in, for example, the late afternoon, but that doesn’t mean that’s the best time for prospects in your market to answer them. And if you’re into multiple time zones, that adds yet another wrinkle. By investing in a full team of BDRs—not just one or two people—you’ll always have someone making dials, no matter what time of day.
5. There’s simply too much else to do. The most common reason why internal sales reps don’t make successful cold callers is that they’re simply too busy. Consistency, organization, and attention to detail are the keys to gain traction on a calling list. When sales reps are already juggling lots of different responsibilities, important details are bound to slip through the cracks.

It’s tempting to think that by simply spending a few minutes here and there, your lead gen campaign will be successful. Those who try it, though, often learn the hard way—cold calling isn’t something you can just do in your downtime.

VSA can help you understand your market and assess the best way to ensure your lead gen efforts are ROI-positive. Just give us a call if you’d like to chat!