Manage Your In-House Appointment Setting and Lead Generation Effort

26 Jun Manage Your In-House Appointment Setting and Lead Generation Effort

Are you planning your own appointment setting and lead generation effort? Without proper planning, lead generation programs often fail. The first and most important part of a successful program is to hire the right person. Here are six tips to help you find and train the person who can make your in-house program a success:

1. Gauge your prospective new lead generator employee on his/her attitude and your feel for the new employee’s personality, not just on experience – although less experience means more training and should always be considered. A person with no experience who is personable and has an innate ability to develop rapport can surprisingly often be a more productive lead generator than the seasoned pro with decades of experience.
2. Prepare your lead generation people well, with a script guideline, objections and rebuttals to quickly help them capture the essence of what they should be saying and start them on the right path. A member of the MarketReach Executive Team is happy to take a look at your script guideline if you’d like to run it by us! Emailinfo@MarketReach.biz to inquire.
3. Keep your people accountable by giving them benchmarks and goals. Have an idea of how many appointments you expect from them in a day or week. Sometimes, the only way to determine these benchmarks is to make some calls yourself or hire an outsourced team like MarketReach to provide those benchmarks for you. You will want to determine how many appointments can be expected in a week based on number of hours dedicated and the list you are targeting, before anyone gets on the phone!
4. Along those lines, expect at least 15-25 dials per hour if making calls is the caller’s only task for those hours. If you don’t have any sophisticated tracking system, you can ask your phone carrier how to track dials. Most phone carriers have a tracking system in the phone itself, allowing you to gauge the lead generators’ dials per hour. Of course, if you’re reviewing their metrics spreadsheet weekly, you can likely gain an idea of numbers based on the spreadsheet. A lead generator must be skilled at balancing their quantity of dials with the quality of their conversations.
5. Keep them on a tracking system, and be sure they can use Excel to update prospect records with notes and decision makers’ name. If you have a contact management system, that’s even better. If not, Excel acts as a good entry level substitute. Insert a column called, “Last Results/Next steps” wherein to record the summary and next step for each record. Also, inset a column for notes on each record so that a running list of notes indicated by date can be recorded after each call. It is key is to capture all information about each call. If your lead generators are not working in your office or online, it is important to have them submit their spreadsheets to a manager at least once a week. There is nothing worse than having years of work done on a prospecting list, only to have it disappear with the employee!
6. No in-house caller should be permitted to make calls without recording every bit of information into your system. If an employee leaves tomorrow, you’ll want to ensure that they have captured all the market insight gleaned in their months or years of well-paid hard work. They should be required to edit each record, add email addresses and updated contact names to use in your direct mail, future lead generation, and newsletter, (even if you do not yet have one) and of course, record notes of all conversations.

Want to get consultation on effective in-house appointment setting management, or perhaps you would like to outsource the whole enchilada to MarketReach? Contact us today at 609-448-6364 .