We have seen it time and time again, potential leads going dark or engagement dropping off, we have years of experience working with stale leads, and with these insights you kick start the conversation, and bring these leads back into your sales funnel.
First Steps in Working with New Leads
We recently started working with a new client who was looking for help with their outbound sales efforts. This client had tried an outbound sales campaign several years ago, however they had issues following up with contacts, which resulted in stale leads. We got to work, and put a plan in place. With the help of the client, our sales team compiled a list of over 158 organizations which included multiple contacts for each organization based on the buyer persona. We needed to re-engage these stale contacts, and thankfully with the help or HubSpot, we were able to get up to speed relatively quickly. A good CRM is key to any sales operation, especially when working with stale leads.
Our goal was to make direct outbound calls and emails to these stale contacts as quickly as possible. To get started working on these contacts we needed to check the organizations for any existing contacts or notes attached from previous engagements. We used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to verify if these contacts are still with that respective organization today. If the contact was no longer with that organization we would search for a new contact based on the identified buyer personas. One of the most consistent challenges we hear from our clients is the difficulty of conducting follow ups to prospects.
Begin Your Outreach to These Leads
As part of our sales plan for this client we developed a sales cadence that would consist of 3 emails and several calls. This cadence would begin with an introductory email to prospects detailing the value proposition of the product we were trying to sell. Once this email went out, we would set a follow up task for 3 days afterward for the prospect. From here, we would follow up with a phone call to the prospect. We use a number of free tools you can leverage to gain work phone numbers to contacts. If we did not reach the contact over the phone, we would set another phone call follow-up task another 3 days in the future. We found it usually takes between 7-12 follow up points with a contact to qualify them at that point where they are either interested in learning more about your product or they are not. If we did make contact with a prospect either over the phone or by email, we would look to schedule a sales meeting with them to show how the product we are selling can solve a problem for them in their current job. All information and notes from engagements with prospects are logged in the CRM at the time contact is made, so we had an accurate log of where we were in the sales process in reactivating these stale contacts.
Identifying Opportunities
The goal of our outreach to prospects is to see if they are interested in learning more about the product we are selling, and how it can help them solve a problem in their current job. When a contact expresses interest in learning more about the product they become an opportunity. In most CRMs you can move a lead to the opportunity stage in the pipeline. This helps you to organize where your current opportunities are in the buyer’s journey. A contact may express interest in learning more about the product however, they may wish to wait a period before setting up a sales meeting. This is quite common in sales work and it is important to work on the timeline communicated by contacts and take this timeline into account when setting your anticipated close date for those respective opportunities. Most sales work is catching prospects at the right time when they have identified a problem in their current work and need a solution that will solve this problem. They may be unaware of your product when this problem is identified so most of the time they will only learn of your product through your outreach to them by either phone calls or emails. “You have to be present to play” is often the story of outbound sales efforts, and this is especially true when working with stale leads.
While the buyer personas and target markets differ between clients we try to maintain the consistent level of outbound sales strategy for each client, and remember that working with stale leads might take more time and care to get them into the sales funnel. If you are looking for more information on how to transform your B2B sales practices, connect with me.
