Overview: Lead Generation and Appointment Setting Lead generation intends, fundamentally, to maximize the success of your sales force by prescreening and weeding out persons and companies that are not your company's best targets. Ask most executives and marketers what their sales people need and most will say, "more leads." But simply supplying "more leads" doesn't solve the problem. In an age where data is smarter and smarter, buying leads is a fairly simple endeavor, accomplished often in a ten-minute phone call. What sales people actually want is better leads, leading to more effective selling time. Salespeople want what you want: more sales.

Despite the growing investments companies are making in sales training and technology, active selling time has not increased over the past year -- in fact, time spent on administrative duties are growing. Sales people in a recent study indicated that less than 50 percent of their time was spent actively selling. Most of their days were spent on paperwork, travel and problem solving for customers:

By outsourcing the prospecting portion and some of the administrative day-to-day appointment-setting work to a professional call center, much more time can be allocated to actually selling your product or service.

When it comes to marketing and sales, there are a few important issues to consider before investing in an expensive marketing /sales program. The success of your program is directly a result of a few important factors: List, offer and channel.

Even if your offer is outstanding and your sales force is incredible, every effort will be in vain if the doors they knock on or numbers they dial are wrong. Further, calling or calling on customers who cannot buy from you won't do you any good, either. So knowing whom to market to is more than convenient; it saves you time and money. And it saves your sales force the frustration of fruitlessly contacting customers who will never or can never buy from you.

Lead Generation and Appointment Setting Programs Phone lead generation program benefits:

· Higher utilization and effectiveness of internal sales resources. · The leads generated are active/HOT leads. · Dual benefit to you- callers promote your product/service and generate leads at the same time. · By utilizing call center technology, large markets can be covered in a short time span. · You gain market intelligence about your potential customers by asking the right questions when calling. · You learn about your competitors and gain a competitive advantage. · The call center can set up the appointment for your sales force, and minimize their administrative workload. · You can take the opportunity to update your customer database, keeping on top of your market area.

Lead Quality The quality of any lead depends entirely on the quality of the questions used to establish lead status. It is vital that the right questions, ones that accurately assess whether the potential customer is a potential lead or not, be asked. Sometimes location and size provide accurate enough information to ascertain lead status. But many times, more insightful questions such as "Do you find your work situation stressful?" or "Controlling the cost of doing business is a daily task that is becoming harder and harder to handle. Do you know how much it currently costs you to complete one order?" will be more accurate tools to determine lead quality. It takes experience to identify the right questions to ask.

Another determiner of lead quality is the role of the potential customer contacted. Is the position the person possesses endowed with the ability to make purchase decisions? This commonly depends on the product offered. In institutional purchasing, buying decisions are often made by a group, rather than any one individual. It is important that the call center generating the lead understands this and is able to successfully explore the facility to find all the decision makers. That way, your sales people can approach all people involved in the buying decision, greatly increasing their success and efficiency.

Business-to-Business Lead Generation When acting in a business-to-business environment, the demands on the expertise of a call center agent are much higher. This is particularly true when your potential customers are executives and upper management. Having solid phone skills and sales skills are not enough. The lead generator must have concise product and service knowledge to speak with potential customers at this corporate level- those customers will ask incisive and direct questions about your products. They know more, and they expect your representatives to know more. As an advocate of the company he or she is calling on behalf of, your call center agent needs to be able to service your potential lead from the minute they get the contact on the phone. Enabling lead generators to transfer a customer that is eager to purchase right away to your inside sales organization, or process the sale right away, is a wonderful way to dovetail this type of high-level, service-oriented lead generation with your core sales team.

Multilevel Lead Generation It is important that any call center you utilize for lead generation knows how to handle multilevel lead generation, particularly when working in a commercial setting. Many corporations have divisions and subdivisions, frequently with the same or similar functions. Some corporations centralize all their purchasing and others do not. Using a call center for lead generation allows you to map out the purchasing structure of each individual target company and present them to your sales force in an easy to understand manner. These company charts come complete with names and direct phone numbers to all different levels involved, describing each function in each company's purchasing process. This is an important part of gaining an understanding of a corporation's purchasing structure. It is a time-consuming effort you can save your sales people from, and ultimately deliver your sales staff a list of the right people, in the right departments.

Managing the Gatekeeper In many corporate settings the decision maker is protected by secretaries, assistants and other persons managing the decision maker's communication over the phone, or "gatekeepers". Gatekeepers protect their bosses' time by only allowing what is urgent and what is important to pass through. It cannot be understated that any sales effort to large businesses depends largely on the ability of sales staff to gain access to the protected decision makers. Your lead generators must get around the gatekeepers or you will never even have the chance to speak with the decision maker, let alone sell anything. It is important that call center agents know how to ask the right questions and maneuver to get to the desired decision maker. It takes time, experience, and practice to develop these skills, while maintaining affordability.

Getting beyond the gatekeeper is absolutely essential to success, but is only one piece of a successful lead generation program. Once beyond the gatekeeper, call center representatives need to set an appointment with a decision maker. It is here that most sales go by the wayside- the decision makers representatives speak to are often very busy, very well-informed, and wary of any "sales pitches". Without strong listening skills and precise, presentation techniques, the busy decision maker finds it easy to end a conversation before it's really even started. A well-informed, concise presentation will keep that decision maker from disengaging, and get your company in the door far enough to make your case. To further insure the decision maker is ready to spend real time with your sales staff, call center representatives make a follow-up call to remind the decision maker about the appointment, and reinforce the already established rapport before your sales personnel walk through the door. Carried out properly, this lead generation campaign design leaves potential customers with a lasting good impression of your company, whether they buy from you or not.

Appointment setting The ultimate goal of a lead generation campaign is to get your sales representative in the door. That's why appointment setting is an effective tool. The call center lead generator sets up an appointment with the potential customer for your sales representative, and initiates reminder calls to the potential customer confirming the appointment. The process by which appointments are set must be jointly determined. That way, no customer is dropped, and no double booking occurs. CustomerLink often utilizes online calendars or connects live to our clients' internal calendar, working with the same system that the outside sales representatives use. Additionally, many types of sales opportunities can be termed "appointments". An appointment can be a personal visit from your salesperson with the potential customer, a prearranged conference call with many parties present, or an introductory phone presentation by your sales representative.

Common Objections You Can't Generate Leads by Cold Calling There is a camp within the sales universe that believes cold calling, as a method of lead generation, will never work. Another subset of professionals believes that cold calling can work, but because they find it so distasteful, they neither engage in it nor advocate it. In all likelihood, the two share a line of reasoning: cold calling is hard. It is analogous to farming- separating the wheat from the chaff by hand. A tremendous amount of effort yields relatively few grains of wheat. But somehow, the job must get done. This is why so many companies avoid burning out their salespeople by forcing them to do the sorting, and save their energies for the increased number of qualified leads that result from hiring a company that specializes in separating the wheat and the chaff.

We Need to Establish our Product on the Market First Simply put, no, you don't. The lead generation process, properly employed, can establish your brand in the market. Just get directly to the meat of the matter-generating sales leads. Name recognition doesn't hurt, but for the most part, building name recognition should be a byproduct of something else- such as lead-generation campaigns; PR and publishing; hosted events and speaking engagements; or word-of-mouth about your products and services. In the end, regardless of your brand recognition, what you need to do to fill the front end of your sales pipeline is to develop a compelling value proposition and then find qualified prospects.

Lessons Learned BE READY! Customers will have the following objections:

1. Don't want to provide information 2. Skeptical of legitimacy of person and/or company requesting information 3. No need 4. Don't see the benefit 5. Won't commit to setting up appointment 6. No time 7. Price

More information Find out more information regarding call center lead generation and appointment setting. Order the full version of this report at http://www.customerlinkone.com


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