How to Customize your Approach to Outbound Prospecting
October 7, 2010
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.
An outbound prospecting program should be well constructed, but as with all practices, there are many approaches that can lead to a successful effort.
Below, we outline two broad examples to help you determine the best approach for your business:
Approach 1: Test Implementation. Start with a small number of committed people. Hire one individual or deploy a sales resource to work with marketing on a targeted campaign (this should be managed by marketing at this point). Determine the plan for each iteration of the effort after you have a few months of progress and have taken the time to check, reflect, and review your results versus goals. This approach is best used if the senior team is not ready to commit to a full-scale implementation. The downside of this approach is that it will take longer to maximize the impact of the effort and will take more ongoing focus of the senior team and new manager to repeat the training and engagement steps to new prospectors over time.
Approach 2: Full-Scale Implementation. Determine who in the organization should be responsible for the success of the program, and execute a plan for getting a team hired and set up for success (see the role of the manager). This approach should still be iterative in nature, with ongoing adjustments based on results, but will maximize the short-term impact of the effort and allow most of the focus and implementation effort to be contained in a shorter period of time. The downside of this approach is that it will take more time and commitment up-front on the part of the CEO and executive team to ensure that the implementation is successful.
The approach that you determine is best for your company needs to fit within the context of your specific situation. The key is to get a plan together that you can implement relatively quickly and start measuring the progress against your goals.
Next week I’ll be pointing out 3 primary roles in an outbound prospecting practice.