The question has plagued sales and marketing departments forever: How many times should a sales rep reach out to each individual prospect during a cold-calling campaign?
Everybody knows there’s a fine line between too few sales calls and too many. In the first scenario, you’re not giving yourself a legitimate chance for success; in the second, you’re most likely wasting your time.
So what is the magic number that sits in the middle of those two extremes?
If you knew the answer to that question, you’d be a sales and marketing genius.
You’d also be lying.
When it comes to lead generation and appointment-setting campaigns, there is no perfect number of dials. That’s because every program is different, based on factors such as the types of decision-makers involved, the ease of getting them on the phone, and the nature of the offering, among other variables.
Statistics show that it takes a sales team or sales rep an average of eight cold-call attempts to reach a prospect, but that number can fluctuate widely and shouldn’t be seen as a catchall strategy for every program or salesperson. Often you don’t learn the optimal number of dials per record until after calling begins, and the data begins to emerge.
VSA takes a deep dive into the data for all our client programs, helping us determine key pieces of information such as the best titles to call, the right times of day to call, and, yes, how often to call.
“A lot of folks have this impression that each program has the same cadence of our BDRs (business development representatives) calling 9 to 5 Monday to Friday,” says Ken Peffer, VSA’s VP of Sales and Marketing. “We’re a very data-driven organization. Every program has a different audience, and prospects are going to respond differently. We learn a lot in the first few weeks of cold calling and, with our team-based approach, we can quickly make adjustments such as focusing the team’s calling efforts during times of the week that prove most effective for a specific program, or even changing the number of follow-up calls and attempts per record based on the data we collect for that program.”
The data analysis for two recent client programs reveals two very different stories about how often we should reach out to a single prospect.
Here’s how they compare:
Program 1: A manufacturer of industrial measurement products and technology
For this client, we found that 60% of the appointments we set came on the first call. We continued to find success early in the cadence, with 20% of appointments set on the second call, 13% on the third call, and 5% on the fourth.
All told, 100% of the appointments for this client’s sales professionals were set within the first eight calls to a prospect. If we didn’t schedule a meeting by then, we weren’t scheduling a meeting at all.
We soon realized it didn’t make sense to continue following up after eight attempts—information gleaned directly from accessing and analyzing the data that helps to define a specific campaign’s best practices.
Program 2: A company that focuses on sterilizing hospital equipment
This program produced the opposite results; we were finding almost no success early in the calling cadence. It generally took between 9 and 25 attempts to reach the right decision maker, find out when they’re free, and set the appointment. Often, we’d even need to make subsequent outbound calls to reschedule meetings because prospects were tied up in surgery or other commitments.
In this case, had we given up after eight attempts, we would have missed out on multiple opportunities for our client. Once again, the data dictated our strategy and let us know it was important to keep dialing, even after 10, 15, and 20 attempts.
“Here are two examples, both B2B, both complicated programs, that ended up needing a completely different number of calls,” says Valerie Schlitt, VSA’s founder, and CEO. “Sometimes, you can’t project at the start of a program what the number of attempts should be. That’s why we started doing this analysis, which has allowed us to reach new leads and a higher overall conversion rate.”
While no two programs are exactly alike, there are enough similarities among certain clients and the decision makers they’re targeting that the data derived from some campaigns can be used to increase productivity for others and thus a better success rate—ultimately resulting in new sales.
“Sometimes, we’ll find that if we call a prospect beyond 8, 10 times, or even 5 times, they’re much less likely to set up a meeting,” Ms. Schlitt says. “So it’s good to look at what we’ve done for a few different clients, see the average number of attempts it takes to set up a meeting and cap it there. That’s led to an increase in scheduled meetings because we’re going after fresh records, as opposed to continuing to call old records that never answer.”
She continues: “On the other hand, there are some programs that require a lot of touches to get an appointment, much more than usual. In those cases, we just keep on going and we’d never cut it off until we got to a certain point.”
Regardless of when we cap the number of calls to a prospect, VSA leaves very little to chance. It’s all about following the data, which helps to provide insights and maximize productivity for our clients.
If you’d like to learn more about how VSA’s data-driven lead gen processes can help fill your sales funnel, give us a call. We’d love to collaborate on a program that works for you.