Your Outbound Campaign is like a surprise party…don’t forget the guest of honor.

This post was written by Peter Gracey, Co-Founder and COO of AG Salesworks

Building a successful outbound lead generation campaign without keeping your sales team in the loop is a lot like planning an elaborate surprise party, but neglecting to assign someone to make sure that the guest of honor arrives at the right time and place. You booked the venue, spared no expense on food and refreshments, invited friends and family from across the country to attend, and everything’s in place for a big surprise and successful event. All except that last crucial detail…

And when the big night comes, you’ve got a great party in full swing, but no guest of honor and all that hard work and preparation was for naught.

Now apply this analogy to your own outbound lead generation efforts.  You profiled the target audience and generated the list of prospects.  You dialed in the messaging and prepped your marketing automation for email campaigning. Your web site is equipped and ready with content and technology to capture and convert your inbound traffic. And your teleprospectors are prepared to fully qualify all of the inbound traffic.

But you can’t stop there; now you need to get your sales team involved and ready for the increased traffic.

Imagine that the sales team represents the person assigned to deliver the guest of honor to the party mentioned above from our earlier analogy.  They can’t help you if you don’t involve them in the process. At AG Salesworks, we’ve witnessed this scenario unfold more times than necessary while implementing 400 unique teleprospecting engagements over the past 10 years.  The best crafted outbound marketing efforts too often go to waste because the sales team simply had no idea what was going on and was ill prepared to handle the “uptick” in fully qualified lead volume.

The solution to this common dilemma is simple.  Involve your sales management team in the planning process from day one.  That doesn’t mean they have to attend your brainstorming meetings, or that you have to solicit their input on how the campaign(s) are going to be run.  But let them know a plan is being formulated and provide a general overview of what it will entail. Second, give them milestone updates as the plan is being executed. Third, facilitate a live handoff of all qualified leads from your teleprospecting rep directly to the sales person that is picking up the process.  Lastly, have your teleprospecting rep track what happens next with the scheduled call in your CRM.  This will allow you to gain immediate soft ROI numbers in terms of how much stage 1 pipeline you are generating.

This may seem like the simplest part of the process, and that may be part of the problem.  Sometimes the most basic components are overlooked during the planning and execution of a campaign – and that can lead to catastrophically marginal results.  So, next time be sure to keep your sales team in the loop. And make sure the guest of honor arrives at the party on time.

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About AG Salesworks
AG Salesworks is a B2B teleprospecting and marketing services firm that helps technology, media, financial services, and communications companies significantly increase their sales pipeline. AG Salesworks services empower its clients to focus on their core business and provide them the qualified opportunities they need to grow their sales pipeline. The company has perfected a process that uses the best combination of people, methodology, and execution to ensure industry leading results. AG Salesworks provides sales opportunity development, database development, event optimization, channel development and support, and marketing intelligence acquisition that helps clients drive growth. By taking a “quality over quantity” approach to teleprospecting and delivering fully qualified sales leads, the company is committed to its role as the middle of the funnel between sales and marketing. Founded in 2002, the company is headquartered in Norwood, Massachusetts and is privately held. For more information, visit www.agsalesworks.com.

About Peter Gracey
Peter Gracey, is the Chief Operations Officer and co-Founder of AG Salesworks. He started the company in 2002 with his business partner, Paul Alves, with a goal of providing technology companies with high quality and fully qualified sales leads. In his current position, Pete oversees the daily operations of AG Salesworks, which includes client engagement, personnel management, business strategy, across-the-board data analysis and long-term strategic planning.