How to Create a Successful Outbound Campaign

This is a part of a series that was cre­at­ed to help you get the prac­tice of out­bound prospect­ing built into your com­pany.  This series will walk through the process, nec­es­sary roles, in addi­tion to guides for each role to help your com­pany get started quickly.  In the next few posts, I’ll be releasing the contents of a quick start guide for the outbound prospecting manager to use to attain success during this process.

There are four steps you are responsible for when it comes to creating and managing each campaign.

Your marketing team will need to be involved with the early stages of the campaign to assist with research and content creation.

1. Prioritizing campaigns
   1. Develop target segment prioritization scheme based on key criteria*
   2. Prioritize your target segments
   3. Launch campaigns in priority order based on the number of leads a segment(s) will return
2. Planning the campaign
   1. Understand the target segment*
   2. Prepare target-specific content for each campaign (e.g., e-mail templates, call scripts, use cases, buyer personas)*
   3. Brief the business development reps on the campaign*
3. Qualify leads
   1. Define minimum qualifying criteria for leads
   2. Screen out bad leads based on minimum qualifying criteria
4. Provision the leads
   1. Provision leads on a weekly or bi-weekly rhythm
   2. Provision leads from New Qualified, Qualified Leads w/follow-up, and Qualified Leads w/next action in upcoming week
   3. Only provision as many as the reps need to hit their weekly targets

*Marketing should be involved

Additional resources:

Cold Calling in the 21^st Century: The New Rules, Part II, Wendy Weiss

How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales, Inc.com, Elizabeth Wasserman

Market Segmentation:  A Fresh Look at a Familiar Topic, Angela Stewart and R. Bradley, First Resource

Next week, I’ll be walking you through the steps to create your support content.