VSA has always prided ourselves on the collaborative relationships we build with our clients. Learning everything we can about their offerings during onboarding, meeting weekly to share updates and progress reports, and working in tandem to develop fresh strategies all help make for effective lead generation and appointment-setting campaigns.
In most cases, we have one or two main points of contact with a client. Sometimes, though, we work directly with multiple members of an organization to maximize program productivity.
Such is the case with one current long-time client, a medical testing company specializing in high-complexity laboratory services. The company has approximately a dozen sales reps representing different regions of the country, and VSA has worked closely with each of them to help increase their number of opportunities to meet with prospects.
“From the beginning, there’s been a lot of good back and forth with their reps,” says Lee Hendrix, the VSA Program Manager for the campaign. “I wanted to get them involved, find out what they liked and what worked best for them. Early on in the program I spent about 30 to 45 minutes with each of them, and that communication has continued.”
The cold calling program has averaged about three meetings a week for the company’s sales reps, sometimes as many as four or five.
Here are five reasons the campaign has been successful:
1. A program-specific CRM
With so many different reps and moving parts, it was important for our client to have a centralized location to monitor how its sales team was doing and the progress of the leads we were pursuing on their behalf. So Lee and the VSA Tech Team developed a CRM system for Microsoft Teams that provided our client with convenient access to the notes our Business Development Representatives (BDRs) took during phone calls with prospects, as well as any other background information that would be helpful to the sales reps.
This enabled everybody involved on both the VSA side and the client’s side to seamlessly share information vital to the program’s success. Not only does the system provide our client’s managerial team with access to everything they need, but each individual rep can use it as their notes database.
2. Leveraging the sales reps’ knowledge
Nobody knows what resonates with a particular prospect group better than the sales reps who deal with them on a daily basis, so who better to involve in messaging strategies, right?
VSA’s initial, client-approved calling script was not producing the desired results, so Lee shared it with the dozen sales reps on the client’s side. These reps had direct experience making calls, but no longer had the time. Their reaction, essentially, was: “Well, this is why you’re not getting meetings. This is the way we do it.”
VSA rewrote large portions of the script based on the reps’ recommendations, and the change in messaging resulted in an almost immediate uptick in meetings. Since then, there have been additional changes to the script, based on what works or doesn’t work in a particular territory.
3. Changing the target prospect
VSA lead generation programs frequently target busy, high-level decision makers, and while our BDRs are adept at having conversations with these sort of people, it sometimes can be difficult to reach them by phone. That was the case with this client.
So rather than continue to waste dials, we started to target gatekeepers and other lower-level decision-makers. As long as they were able to answer three key qualifying questions, they were considered a viable prospect for an appointment. This strategy dramatically increased the number of conversations, and subsequently led to more scheduled meetings for our client’s sales reps.
4. Changing the minimum requirements for an appointment
Ideally, all sales reps want to target prospects who will bring in the most business and earn them the most money. But over the years, VSA has often found that limiting the prospect base too much can end up costing our clients business.
In this case, the program started with no qualifiers, then added a large minimum threshold before pivoting again and reaching a middle ground. This has ensured we’re still providing our clients with quality leads, without sacrificing the opportunity for potential new business.
5. Relying on the little things
Not every adjustment to a program needs to be as dramatic as rewriting the messaging or changing the target prospect. Sometimes, it can be as simple as an extra training session for the BDRs, or a quick email to a sales rep letting them know exactly when we’ll be calling prospects in their territory.
On this program in particular, the little things have added up and made a difference in the overall success. And it’s all been possible because of our ongoing collaboration with our client’s entire team.
“There’s been great communication among everybody involved,” Lee says. “From the very start, it made sense to me that we get the sales reps involved in our day-to-day process. As long as the sales reps find us useful, we know we’re doing our job.”