5 Ways to Shorten Your Sales Cycle With Outsourced Teleprospecting
by:
Brian Berlin
Managers who are serious about wanting to shorten their sales cycle need to understand the value of outsourced prospecting. Utilizing an outsourced sales development team can shorten both time-to-market and time-to-revenue. Focusing only on the latter stages of the complex B2B sale may cause managers to overlook a real opportunity to influence the entire selling lifecycle. When one considers the bigger picture, there are five ways outsourced prospecting can be applied to increase sales efficiency, populate a fatter pipeline and close more deals in less time.
1. Do the Homework. Too often managers sense an opportunity and run to it before doing the homework. Before starting production, i.e. launching a new sales initiative and staffing to it, hire a third party prospecting firm to do the research and then cold canvass samplings of the targets to help size the opportunity.
Conversely, outsourced prospecting can help mitigate management's view that there are "millions" of companies that need the company's offerings. This kind of generalization leads to outsized expectations, and these inflated ideas become huge time-wasters in the event it turns out "millions" is more like "hundreds".
Outsourced prospecting gives you the additional benefit of researching multiple markets if you wished to gain comparative information. Doing so is a great way to resolve management conflicts over the best markets.
Regardless, it's critical at this juncture to create metrics and objectives and measure weekly. Within weeks you'll have enough preliminary data to head off any surprises. The larger the universe of suspects, more conversations can be held and more data gathered. I recommend to my clients not to initiate a campaign unless there's a universe of suspects greater than 500.
2. Move Quickly on a Data-supported Plan. Now that there's supporting data, management can review its options and fast-forward a plan. If you've taken advantage of the expertise and speed of your outsourced prospecting team, you may have already engaged in numerous conversations with prospects. From these conversations you may identify how the prospects like to be sold; learn more about their buying cycles, gain insight on the competition and uncover potential gaps.
It's during this part of the campaign the messaging can be tested for accuracy and receptivity. I've experienced client messaging that elicited indifferent reactions from prospects. Now's the time to find out if your outbound communications are going to hit the mark.
For example, let's say you did the homework; identified a customer market suitable for your product offerings and you planned to use a direct selling model to reach this buying segment. During the research campaign, the targeted buyers indicated a preference for acquiring such an offering from a solution provider that could deliver an integrated offering around components like yours. They wanted their provider to implement, configure, and maintain the environment, eliminating the need for them to contact more than one vendor when trouble arose.
Instead, your messaging touted the benefits of your direct selling model. Had you moved forward without the data provided by your outsourced prospecting campaign, you might have encountered stiff resistance, too late after everyone has bought into the program.
3. Reduce Hiring and On-Boarding Time. With data incorporated into your plan, you're now in a stronger position to staff the plan. Senior level hires take months to complete, including identifying candidates, conducting initial telephone interviews, arranging a round of first and second round of face-to-face interviews, negotiating compensation and finalizing the hire.
In the example above, it would have been easy for the hiring manager to create a job description for someone with direct sales experience. The result could be time lost while these new hires try to breach the targeted organizations only to discover they would progress faster through a channel partner.
Similarly, outreach might uncover a web-based buying preference. In today's market, many solutions are delivered over the internet, and buyers can acquire subscription-based offerings with little or no sales contact. This model would dictate an entirely different sales profile, perhaps someone with more experience selling over the phone.
These factors can become part of the hiring plan if you have the right information. Making the right hire means you'll spend less time profiling, you'll get more applicable resume submissions and you'll spend less time negotiating because you'll be able to prove that you did your homework and the market or territory is ready to be worked. In fact, involving your target buyer in your planning and research phase may elicit potential candidates or solution providers, saving additional time and money.
Hiring candidates who map to your plan also shortens your on-boarding time, i.e., the amount of time it takes to ramp a new rep. The faster a new rep can get up to speed, the shorter the time to revenue.
4. Cut Prospecting Time and Generate More Prospects. Every manager wants to bring in revenue more quickly and efficiently. In the B2B complex sales cycle the buyer has a great deal of control over the process. Sales reps must navigate the buying organizations and catalog all the potential participants--what I like to call cat-herding.
If you're fortunate enough to be selling a solution that creates a sense of urgency on the buyer's part, congratulations. A lot of the sales organizations for whom I consult have great products or technologies that bring great value to the buying organization. The urgency to adopt the solution must be created, which in turn generates a longer selling and buying cycle.
Typically companies in this category describe their sales cycles in ranges, like 90 to 120 days, sometimes as long as a year, etc. All would love to see the sales cycle shrink, but feel the buyer has more control of the process. To a certain extent this is true, but the selling organization does have leverage at the outset. It's getting to that first productive conversation with the prospect that will determine the timeframe.
Outsourced prospecting can provide leverage to the sales organization and shorten the time it takes to get to that critical first conversation.
Let's examine a typical selling process:
i. Identify contacts by title, role, influence and ultimate accountability.
ii. Contact the prospects and arrange a meeting, presentation or demo.
iii. Send the contact a pre-meeting email that contains the information they want to see before committing to a meeting.
iv. Meet with interested prospects, demonstrate solution, gain insight into challenges and map to these issues. Identify all potential influencers if possible, and try to understand how the organization goes about acquiring solutions like yours.
v. Follow up to fill in additional gaps, identify decision-makers, validate solution, arrange follow up meetings. Discuss preliminary pricing based on buyer's parameters and requirements.
vi. Follow up and continue to run all traps, honing deal points and formalizing the sale.
Here's my point: steps 1-3 could take 30 to 60 days or more, depending on the level of prospect being targeted. Steps 4-6 could easily take 90-120 days, depending on the size of the deal and the circle of buying influencers. Outsourced prospecting can dramatically reduce the amount of time involved in steps 1 through 3, while creating a lasting effect that can shorten the time involved in steps 4-6.
First step in shortening this cycle is to generate more prospects. By outsourcing this phase more ground can be covered, more conversations can be held, and more meetings can be obtained for the sales team. Activity handled by the outsourced prospecting team includes the identification, profiling and contact of prospects, as well as sending out the initial informational email and then following up to secure the meeting.
Off-loading this top-of-funnel activity could lop off 30-50% of a 90 day sales cycle. Then even more efficiency can be gained once the real selling begins.
5. Eliminate Wasted Time on Weaker Prospects. In a complex sale, reps should be having 4-6 productive conversations per week, if not more. With these kinds of meeting numbers, the sales pipeline begins to fill with more prospects. Now the sales individual contributors have the good fortune to stratify their available opportunities and work the ones that have the greatest sense of urgency, or the near-term issues your solution can resolve.
Sales managers can now focus their attention on helping their reps close deals rather than spending time trying to determine if a lone opportunity will close, thereby saving the quarter. This manager's team is working real opportunities instead of clinging to bad ones, a significant contributor to lengthy sales cycles.
Face it: some companies are not ready to buy in your timeframe. But others are, and in order to have more of those types of prospects to close, you'll need a continuous supply of sales calls. By outsourcing prospecting managers can be assured of having a richer pipeline of deals, which will not only shorten the closing cycle 20-30% but will reduce time wasted on prospects that are not in a near-term buying timeframe.
Organizations that utilize outsourced prospecting firms effectively can shorten their time-to-market by eliminating wasted efforts on hurried plans. Armed with better data, managers can hire better and faster, and arm the sales team with more prospects, create a fatter pipeline and gain a more realistic view of revenues. The key is to view the entire selling lifecycle, from idea to execution.
About the Author:
Brian Berlin is President of Straightline Strategies, an outsourced sales, marketing and business development consulting firm focused on helping niche-oriented technology firms cover gaps in their go-to-market plans. Straightline handles all phases of business development, from research and planning, to teleprospecting, to closing deals. To learn more about Straightline's channel services, please click this link:
http://slssinc.com/index.php/services.html.
No. of Times this article has been viewed :
427
Date Published :
Oct 20 2009
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