Most salespeople give up on reaching out to prospects after 3 attempts met with no response. Even though research shows that it takes 8 to 12 attempts to reach prospects, even when they are interested in the offering. The primary reasons reps do not continue to follow up are poor CRM hygiene, reward systems that incentivize prioritization of recency, and a lack of reporting to catch errors that occur.
Often salespeople do not document each attempt to contact a prospective customer, as such they do not have a good idea as to how many times an unresponsive prospect has been contacted. CRM hygiene is a common culprit as salespeople move fast and attempt to cover as much ground as possible. There are tools that sales ops leaders can add to the sales stack to ensure that salespeople execute the appropriate amount of touches, solutions like Insidesales.com and Outreach.io can help automate contact attempts and your sales ops teams should integrate these tools with your CRM app to ensure that this data is also documented via automation.
Salespeople are also frequently working within scenarios where new leads must be touched within a specific timeframe. This dynamic can cause a salesperson to fall into habits wherein recency and prospect responsiveness guide activity instead of strict adherence to a 10 attempt outreach process. One way to address this is to create a high visibility clean-up report displayed per sales rep that shows prospects who are unresponsive and have less than 10 attempts. As long as this report is used to orient procedure vs embarrass sales team members, the team will get better at truly exhausting attempts to engage prospects.
From a team organization standpoint, it should be mentioned that specialization is key to ensuring all prospects have received an adequate number of touches. Your teams should be organized in manner wherein there are separate teams for those who are focused on lead generation and those are focused on closing. Quota bearing sales reps should not spend time ensuring that each prospect has been called 10 times. This activity should be owned by someone who is solely responsible for optimizing outreach attempts to prospects.
With the rise of consumer IT in the workplace, freemium software models and democratization of decisions in the enterprise, engaging influencers is difficult. Given these dynamics it is more important than ever to support those on the front lines to successfully fill the funnel. By using right tools, encouraging best practices and organizing teams efficiently you can get the most out of both inbound and outbound prospect data.