Want to Improve Your Outbound Lead Generation? Leverage Marketing

March 12, 2013

jesus said to cast your net over the other side
This is the fourth post in a 5-part series on how managing inter-team collaboration can improve results for outbound lead generation teams.
In my previous post I covered how collaboration on events can yield more appointments for the outbound lead generation team and better results for the marketing team, as long as there some structure to the collaboration. In this post I will cover one of the areas where outbound lead generation teams tend to lean on marketing the most: list generation.

Why Collaboration is Crucial to Effective Lead List Generation

In many companies, marketing is responsible for delivering a list of suspects within the target market segment to the outbound lead generation team. When there isn’t good collaboration between the outbound lead generation team and marketing in this area, the team can easily wind up calling a list of potential prospects that are not in the right segment and/or do not fit the appropriate buyer persona, resulting in wasted efforts from both teams. The last thing you want is to find out that your enterprise outbound lead generation team has coffee shops and pet stores in the list of leads they are calling (it happens more often than you might think).

3 Ways to Build Better Lead Lists

However, there are a number of things that the outbound lead generation team manager and the marketing team can do to optimize this relationship through collaboration and improve the list acquisition process.

1) Set the right expectations with both teams

With outbound lead generation, the marketing team’s job is not to deliver warm leads that are lay-ups, but rather to deliver cold leads within the target customer segment (especially when the product is new to market). A cold lead within the target customer segment can be defined as a person, a company, or a subsidiary/business unit within a parent company. Generally, the more information that comes with lead the better; provided it’s accurate.

2) Control the flow of leads

There is no need to give an outbound lead generation rep more leads than he or she can work with in a given period of time. Leads should be provisioned on a weekly or monthly basis, in the quantity that a rep can handle. Depending on the complexity of the sale and the difficulty of getting the right people on the phone, reps should be able to handle 50 to 200 companies per month.
It is also important to control the number of contacts per company that are provided to the reps. The top three to five contacts that fit the key buyer profiles at each company is plenty. As reps call through their lists and set follow-up tasks according to your outbound process, the number of leads they will require per week or month will level off to a steady number. This way, marketing can be very clear on how many leads they will need to deliver and when. Controlling lead flow also helps prevent cherry-picking and helps the reps follow a consistent outbound process for each lead.

3) Provide regular constructive feedback

Whether the lists are generated by the marketing team, the lead generation team manager, or even the lead generation reps, holding a regular meeting to review feedback on the lead lists and list sources is very important. Outbound lead generation reps should note recurring issues that they find with their lists and share them at the meeting. Some key areas to provide feedback include:

  • Which lists/sources worked well and why?
  • What additional lists/sources could potentially be targeted for scraping?
  • What data was missing from the leads provided that would be helpful?
  • Where/how can the data be captured?
  • Can that data be captured in a scalable way, or are qualifying calls the best method?
  • Where else can we find good leads that fit the target and will allow you to hit your goals?

If you manage an outbound lead generation team then you already know that any help you can get from other teams on the list generation process is great. After all, the less time your reps spend sourcing lists, the more time they can spend on the phone with prospects. At the same time, getting a list of crappy leads doesn’t help anyone. Implementing the steps above can help you improve the list generation process, and can help you get better results from your outbound lead generation team.
In my next and final post in the series on how managing inter-team collaboration can improve results for outbound lead generation teams I’ll cover how the best companies completely integrate outbound lead generation teams into multi-channel, multi-touch, integrated marketing programs.

What tips can you add to this list to help teams generate the best lead lists possible?

VP, Sales

Ori Yankelev is Vice President, Sales at <a href="https://www.ownbackup.com/">Own Backup</a>. He was previously a Sales and Marketing Associate for OpenView.