Most sales leaders feel that calling is an artistic skill with inherent charm and skill; however they are mistaken.
Telemarketing is industrial.
When managers have a failed B2B campaign they blame everything on the script or the sales rep's tone and waste hours listening to recordings in search of the "magic" word to fix the problem. The truth of the matter is, if the math is broken, the campaign will fail. If your data is dead, then your connect rates will plummet. If your connect rates plummet, then your calendar will remain empty. You can’t charm a disconnected phone number.
To build a true B2B telemarketing machine, a manager must set aside their emotions and focus on the raw data.
Core Math Behind Telemarketing for B2B Lead Generation
Math is King! Cold calling campaigns utilize strict math principles. Do not just tell your sales development rep (SDR) to "work harder". You need to know how many times someone connects from their first dial to finally booking a meeting.
If you do not track what happens in between the dial and the calendar invite, you are operating in a blind manner. According to the latest information from reputable telemarketing vendors Belkins and SalesHive, there is a clear baseline:
The connect rate is 3% to 10% on average.
8 attempts to reach a prospect on average.
370 total dials for 1 final booked meeting on average.
The Cost of Bad Data
The biggest impediment to success is the quality of your data. After you collect your names and email addresses from the leads, the lists will rapidly become obsolete. Your contact database will lose about 2.1% of contacts as time passes so that means that after one year, 22.5% of your contacts will be worthless.
When an SDR routes calls to numbers that don’t work, he/she spends a lot of time going through automated phone systems, struggling with rude receptionists and leaving voicemails for full mailboxes, etc. All of this lost time adds up to over 27% of your sales team's productive time — time that is incurred when trying to close deals using bad data.
To combat this issue, leading teams invest heavily in finding verified mobile direct-dial (D-D) numbers through reputable vendors (e.g., Cognism, Lusha, Apollo, ZoomInfo) so that their SDRs can call until they find someone with the ability to review and approve meetings.
Callers bypass the traditional company switchboard and ultimately save time when executing telemarketing for B2B lead generation.
Real Lead Costs
The cost associated with phone calls is much higher than cold emails, which range from $30-$50 per lead on average, whereas telemarketing leads can be anywhere from $30 to $500+ on a fully loaded basis.
In order to use the phone successfully as a sales channel, your annual contract value (ACV) must be substantially higher than the costs associated with telemarketing. If a company wants to sell an inexpensive product using telemarketing, the expenses will result in bankruptcy for their overall marketing efforts.
Conversely, selling a high-value enterprise-level solution has a substantially smaller cost(s) associated with it when compared to selling an inexpensive product; hence $500 per lead is a financial asset for the telemarketer.
Combining Channels in Telemarketing for B2B Lead Generation
A dial tone is not a self-contained event. Gone are the days of handing an SDR a list of phone numbers to call along with a desk phone to generate leads through calls.
An SDR must use multiple communication channels, such as email and social media, together with sequential phone calls to generate leads successfully. According to recent statistics, following up an email with a phone call significantly increases your chances of receiving a response to your email.
By making a call, you increase the likelihood that an email recipient will respond from 1.81% to 3.4%. It seems that there appears to be synergy between the two channels (email and phone).
Due to the multitude of channels available now in the cadence of sales activities, you often must make 8 to 12 total touches via multiple methods to acquire a simple yes or no response.
Watch the Calendar
The timing of your calls has a significant impact on whether or not you reach someone, as well as who you are trying to reach. It also determines how effective you are at reaching out to them.
The time of day will have an effect on your connect rate. For example, late afternoons (specifically, from approximately 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.) will usually yield the greatest number of people who pick up their phones.
Conversely, most early morning calls will likely result in your leaving a voicemail message, especially for executive-level recipients, as they are clearing out their email inbox in the morning.
Seasonal Meeting Slumps
You will have a different level of "business" in the same month across various years (e.g. February, May and July).
Many sales teams set a flat quota for the same number of monthly meetings for every month of the year. Unfortunately, this does not take into consideration the seasonality of the business calendar.
February and May are the peak months for booking meetings (nearly 9 percent conversion rate). However, July is often a month of extreme summer lows. The meeting rates for July can drop to 2.7 percent.
People are on vacation, and hence they are not starting new projects. Thus, a RevOps leader who sets an expectation for the same number of meetings in July as they do in May is setting their sales team up for failure when managing telemarketing for B2B lead generation.
Humans Versus Technology
Elite teams use technology as a differentiator from average teams.
On average, a standard sales development representative (SDR) can expect to make somewhere around 40 to 50 manual dials each day while simultaneously handling their email tasks.
In order for businesses to grow their operations even further, they would turn to artificial intelligence (AI) dialers, as well as parallel dialing platforms, which are software tools that are designed to enable businesses to dial dozens or hundreds of different telephone numbers simultaneously when making outbound telephone calls.
Once a human being answers the phone, the AI dialer drops the sales development representative (SDR) into the call.
While a business can use AI to help them with their business development and lead generation efforts, there is nothing that AI can do to compensate for a bad offer to potential buyers and leads.
Once the potential buyer or lead answers the call, the phone conversation will almost be exclusively focused on the individual buying organization. The prospect does not care about the revenue targets or quotas of the sales development representative.
The prospect is worried about their own issues. Immediately, the call must focus on the issues within that organization’s specific vertical market segment.
Analytics tools, like Gong’s call review software, have proven that the best-performing sales professionals spend much more time listening and asking targeted follow-up questions during a call than they do speaking.
The Verdict Is In: Do Not Rely on Gut Instincts but Rather Rely on Numbers
Telemarketing is a viable means for businesses to generate new leads. There is an enormous amount of noise in the inboxes of decision-makers in large corporations due to the increasing amount of automated spam email communications being sent.
A proper follow-up telephone call that goes directly to an individual’s mobile phone number can make a significant difference compared to other methods of lead generation that may be less effective.
The only time that a telemarketing effort will work is if organizations approach their telemarketing efforts in a scientific manner, using clean and accurate data for lead generation, tracking conversion rates at all points of the business development funnel and setting expectations according to the seasons.
When an organization measures the right data points, it will be able to accurately forecast its predicted short-term and long-term sales from telemarketing for B2B lead generation.
Questions and Answers on Call Operations
Why does our base connect rate decrease month-over-month?
Your contact information is becoming less accurate each month. Each month an organization loses approximately 2.1 percent of its contact list accuracy due to turnover (due to retirements, promotions, and job changes).
Generally, over 12% of a static list has now gone bankrupt if you purchased one 6 months ago. You need a continuous refresh cycle for your data and to allocate more budget to verified mobile numbers instead of generic company headquarters numbers.
When is the best time for my team to call?
Now that you have that data, you know that mid-week afternoons have the best connection rates. The data shows that Wednesday and Thursday afternoons peak between 3:00 PM and 4:00 PM local time for successful connections, while you should avoid calling Friday afternoons altogether.
In addition, you should adjust your monthly quotas accordingly. You should set lower call quotas for July due to the summer vacation slump, and you should set your highest quotas in February and May because this is when buyers are actively planning.
Should we create our own calling team or outsource it?
This will depend on your speed-to-market requirements and the management capacity you have available to oversee an internal calling team. Vendors, such as SalesHive and Martal, have the infrastructure and technology stacks and the trained reps to start making calls immediately.
When you use vendors to make calls, you are paying for speed. However, if you build an internal calling team, you will have complete control over your brand voice and will be able to provide in-depth product training.
Still, building an internal team takes months to hire, train and scale, so if you need a pipeline tomorrow, go with a vendor for telemarketing for B2B lead generation. If you are building a long-term enterprise motion, build it internally.
What impact do deal size and seller seniority have on calling?
Seniority affects the engagement rules. Contacting C-level executives is extremely challenging, with a positive connection rate of less than 1%. Therefore, you could spend days trying to reach a CEO.
Managers and directors, on the other hand, are much more accessible and will schedule the majority of your meetings.
In addition, your product's annual contract value (ACV) should justify the cost of calling leads. $300-$500 in telemarketing for leads will not justify calling leads for a $50/month subscription software solution; therefore, you will only be able to afford to call leads for products that offer significant value for the price you will be charging.