Launching a Lead Qualification Team: Who Has the Capacity to Manage It?

February 28, 2012

You’ve decided to launch a lead qualification initiative at your expansion stage technology company. Everyone agrees it’s top priority. Your recruiters are set to hire a dedicated team of outbound callers that will be responsible for aggressively and methodically calling into your target market(s) and uncovering new opportunities for your sales team to win. You’ve got your best target verticals selected, your assets created, your goals and metrics defined, and your process designed. You’re golden.

Unless, of course, you don’t have the resources to properly manage this type of team.

Yes, building an outbound prospecting team at your expansion stage organization can help catapult your business to the next level. But if your organization has not prioritized the management piece of it, your new team will surely flop.

Having helped launch nearly a dozen lead qualification teams in our portfolio, I’ve seen numerous managers placed into their roles without the capacity to keep the team humming.

Below you will find a sample work plan for a Lead Qualification manager in the first two months of the new lead qualification team’s existence. Included are the standard meetings and sessions that your manager should be leading, and also the planning items that should be top of mind:

So before you launch your lead qualification team, senior management needs to ask themselves these questions:

  • Do we have someone internally who is both qualified AND has the capacity to manage a lead qualification team?
  • Is this person bought-in to the responsibilities that are necessary to manage a lead qualification team?
  • Who will be absorbing the responsibilities of the person who is moving into the manager role?
  • Should we consider recruiting and hiring a new manager, making certain this team has a truly dedicated resource to ensure the success of the program?
  • Who will be responsible for training/coaching this manager, whether it is an internal transfer or an external new hire?

 

Equally important to the work plan after the new manager’s start date is the preparation that needs to go into actually launching a lead qualification team. For more on that, please check out a sample work plan here.