A large software company is looking to hire a senior enterprise lead generation person for, conservatively $150,000 burdened.
They want this person to generate 100 qualified leads per year. In other words, they are willing to pay $1,500 per qualified lead. Interesting.
The range seems to be $150 and up for an initial contact lead and up to $1,500 for a qualified lead.
Small or un-venture funded businesses need not apply.
In an earlier post I said that I have not had good results with voice mail when cold calling. This remains true. However, I have had good result with voice mail to warm lists.
I just got a nice big fat return call from USPS after leaving a trade show follow-up call voice mail.
I know, it’s common sense that voice mail to warm lists would work better than voice mail to cold call lists. I guess this is just a reminder to myself.
Most technology companies have a CRM (customer relationship management) system in place. It is often one of the first things to get implemented.
As a result, it gets used as a bucket to put any kind of prospect and or customer information into. Trade show leads, partnership deal leads, individual sales rep contacts, purchased names, response-inquiry names, to mention a few.
Before they know it, these companies have ten thousand names in the bucket, of which the vast majority are useless. It’s actually worse then that. They are less than useless because they make it much harder to find and focus on worthwhile leads.
Having to navigate hundreds or thousands of, untargeted, obsolete and useless old trade show leads is more of a challenge than a lot of sales people are up for. Not everyone has a database administrator at their disposal. The most common scenario is that the sales person is left to his/her own devices to “data mine” the wheat from the chaff.
I offer no great solutions here, only a rant.
A slightly different take and source but still helpful. The more I look the more it seems that $200 per lead (response) is within the bounds of reason. This one deals with Webinars as opposed to a cold calling focus. Worth a look.
Here is an interesting and perhaps helpful spreadsheet model to determine the cost of a technology sales lead.
The author’s default shows a cost of $1,000 per qualified sales lead. I’m assuming we are talking about “ready to buy now” leads. It also shows a cost of $100 per inquiry.
It interestingly also shows that most inquiries don’t pan out. I always assumed that any inbound inquiry was of high quality (i.e. likely to close), as compared to cold call generated leads.
A very interesting question indeed.
I’m curious because I generate lots of leads for my company (employer) and I’d like an idea of the economic value.
It turns out, according to this article that it’s a lot and generally a lot more than most people think. It’s also hard to determine so most companies have no idea.
It’s a good read.
We talk all the time about sale leads. But what do we mean? What is a sales lead? What is the definition of a sales lead?
Here’s one I found on Wikipedia:
“A sales lead is the identity of a person or entity potentially interested in purchasing a product or service, and represents the first stage of a sales process.”
You can read the entire description here.
My summation would be, “finding people who may want to buy your product.” I would further narrow it to, “finding people who may want to buy your product, may well need or want it and can afford it.”
I like to do what I call list qualification. List qualification is when you prepare a cold calling list that only includes contacts you would not mind selling to. In other words, anyone on the list is desirable as a prospect and or customer. If you only create and use lists like this, then anytime you get a “hit” while cold calling it’s great news.
As opposed to using what I call “dirty lists.” A dirty list is one in which your target market is a subset. In other words, this list contains names that may not be of interest to you. This could be company names or titles that are not part of your target zone.
Some sales people like to call people and basically ask if they are leads or prospects (…do you have budget?, project?, etc…blah), after cozying up via relationship-building chat. There is a much better way to kickoff the process.
All you have to do is cold call, reach someone on your list and read a sub-thirteen (13) second duration offer of information script. If the information is of interest and the offer not too cumbersome, you will get a response rate of between a half and five percent (sometimes more).
When they say “yes” to your offer of information, you ask them for their email address and send it to them.
I call this behavior-based because they must 1) listen to your short pitch without hanging up or cutting you off and 2) give you their email address. These behaviors, together, qualify them as leads.
This technique, coupled with a dialer will allow you to find more leads in a morning, than most will find in several days.
This technique is based on this amazing book.
To learn about how to write a script that will work look here.
Oh, bye the way. This technique is the most fun you will ever have cold calling. The executives you reach appreciate the brevity and clarity of a good offer-based script, regardless of how they respond. Those who say “yes” to your offer of information are excited about getting the information because it is of interest to them. You are happy because people are nice to you and that makes things much easier.
Now this looks really interesting. It’s a service that will tell you when someone reads an email you sent them.
This could be valuable because I cold call to get prospects by offering and having accepted, offers of information. The information is fulfilled by email.
After a call I email the prospect a note recapping the call and providing the information in an attachment. In this email, I begin the process of handing the lead off to the applicable regional sales representative.
I do this by including the regional sales representative’s contact information in the email and asking the prospect to contact them, not me, with any questions they may have.
When I send the email I copy the regional sales representative. I also schedule a followup call for the regional sales representative in our CRM.
Didtheyreadit.com would let me tag these emails so that I would get an email back when and if the email is read or forwarded by the prospect.
The process is invisible to the prospect. When I get a “hit” on one of these, I then quickly contact the applicable regional sales representative and let them know so they can follow-up stat, while the iron is hot.
It appears cheap and easy to use, my kind of tool.
I’ve written in the past that speed is what you should look for in a dialer.
Based on recent experience, I’m revising my recommendation. Go for rock-solid reliability. Few things in this business are more of a pain-in-the-neck than a dialer that crashes a dozen or more times per day.
In addition to frustration, you lose a lot of productivity.
You can’t be successful cold calling without a dialer, in my opinion. The dialer is the tool you live in all day every day.
Reliability first, speed second, U.I. third, data handling fourth and quality multi-user scalability fifth.
We just finished a trade show in which we “swiped” thirty four names. After calling all of them, eight were determined to want continued dialog. These eight “advances” were pushed to the regional sales manager via our CRM. We got a twenty three percent (23%)response or advance rate.
Cold calling typically runs the gamut of from half a percent (.5%) to five percent (5%) as a response rate.
Warm calling resulted in a twenty three percent (23%) response rate.
That sounds about right to me.
