This blog is for the sales leader who has a team of under 20 salespeople selling business-to-business. Have you ever asked your sales/marketing manager why they buy lists? We often ask our clients and, usually, the answer is these lists are for marketing to (meaning email marketing to get salespeople leads). On the other hand, in these same dynamics, the salespeople complain that there aren’t enough leads or the leads aren’t of good quality.
Email marketing (to cold prospects) is dead, as is cold spamming on LinkedIn. Buying lists to load up thousands of prospects to market an event, promotion or other endeavour by email will never be as fruitful as direct sales outreach to a highly targeted list.
This is where there is often a break between marketing and sales. Sales says, “I want more leads,” so marketing runs some ads and email campaigns. But has this made it rain, or does your team just continue to putter along?
Your sales team needs the right combination of:
- Cold prospects – to target through direct outreach.
- Warmer prospects – MQL via list building efforts that leverage social PPC.
- Warmest prospects – MQL/SQL from digital marketing efforts like SEO, PPC and ads.
In a perfect world the warmest prospects would be abundant, ready to buy your services. Ideally, when salespeople aren’t too busy, they have a solid base of prospects to follow up.
The crazy part is that, with zero sales meetings and contract prep time, a salesperson who spends 15 minutes on a prospect and has a three-touchpoint sales cadence will only ever be able to touch 200-500 prospects monthly.
In distribution you would take that number, subtract the actual number of SQLs that come in via marketing, and you would find the balance (in terms of what your sales team would need in the CRM for follow-up) through warm and cold prospecting via strategic lists.
Your sales team doesn’t need thousands of prospects. They need the right ones!
Look at what you are spending, whether on insights tools like Zoom Info and 6th Sense, mass email marketing platforms, resources to create content for mass email marketing, and/or premium Sales Navigator seats on LinkedIn. Does this make sense when each of your salespeople only needs a couple hundred high-value prospects (and perhaps a far less expensive research tool to support their own prospecting) to sell to monthly?
Your sales team is there to sell. Too often marketing generates mass lists to pacify sales, which clutters the CRM with prospect data leading your sales team to waste a lot of time. This both hurts your sales results and can also be quite demotivating. You can take control by driving processes, starting with guiding policy on lists, what goes in the CRM and overall approach.
For more information about buying the right prospect lists for your sales team, visit: www.gopulsion.io.