Streamline Your Document Workflows with airSlate SignNow's Msp Sales Process for Life Sciences

How to create outlook signature

thanks amber can you hear me okay yeah I hear you fine all right well good morning good afternoon or good evening from wherever you're tuning in to watch this webinar from amber I already gave you a quick overview but if you've got a question or you want to chat with us there's a panel that you can enter that information into personally I prefer to share content and then take questions at the end so if you have something that you don't want to forget type it on in there and then amber will ask me the question at the end of the presentation so a little bit about myself for any of you who are not familiar with myself I manage sales pros we are a business development agency that works exclusively with technology manufacturers distributors and resellers we were voted the 25th fastest growing company in Canada last year which is something I'm pretty proud of and there's been a bunch of other stuff that we got awards for as well we've had a really good time growing our business in the channel about manage sales pros well we built a debt-free profitable three million dollar company in under four years we started our company with a laptop Visa Card with a $5,000 limit that didn't have a lot of space on it and a telephone and now as I said before we're the 25th fastest growing company in Canada and we use cold calling as our primary source of revenue generation and as much as I'd like to brag about the success of our company I tell you this primarily because our company closely reflects the sales process for a managed services firm so we a service based organization we rely heavily on client renewals to stay profitable our clients sign annual monthly recurring revenue agreements so we did try to create a process that was as close to the managed services sales process as possible so that we when we went out to sell to the managed services face we could help you closely relate to our sales process so that's why we chose the business model that we did we kind of fell into the manage services space we didn't wake up one day and think wow I think manage services is going to be wildly profitable let's start a business there we started a more generic cold-calling company identified managed services as a potential financial vertical that we could specialize in and then went entirely niche specific into that space so that's how we got started that's where we are today so today we want to talk about sales process and most of the time when I'm speaking about sales process I'm talking about sales prospecting because that's where our specialty is we don't close doors we open them so we're not closers or hunters and one of the biggest problems in the space right now is finding good people managing good people retaining good people and developing a process that people can follow so my main focus is going to be talking about how can you create implement and educate your team on a process that's going to make sense for them but before you can do that you need to have those people in your organization to focus on that's a big struggle the reason people come to us is they can't hire people they can't find good people they can't keep good people so I want to talk about that first why is it so hard to find good lead generators the next question we're usually asked is how come my lead generator isn't getting any appointments people want to know if their lead generator is a bad employee or just having a bad month should you keep a lead generator that isn't getting enough appointments how long should it take to see ROI on a lead generation spend and how can I better support my lead generator so they see more success and then lastly and obviously a question that I'm really invested in should I just abandon the whole idea of doing lead generation in-house and outsourced it so I hope to follow this agenda pretty tightly today answer all of those questions and let's start with why is it so hard to find good people I am sure that there is nobody on the call here today who woke up one day you know graduated from college and said gee I hope I get a telemarketing job today people don't dream of becoming telemarketers they settled for telemarketing jobs when they can't find anything else that's a challenge it's a challenge for the whole industry people really don't want to do this job and it's unfortunate because I love telemarketing I like problem-solving I like talking to people I like persuading people that my way is the right way I like everything about it I would much rather sit on the phone and grind out calls all day then drive all day to sales appointments and sit in front of people so lots of different types of personalities but for the most part people don't want to be telemarketers and the second problem is that lead generators aren't sales reps and most of the time when you're looking for a lead generator if you look in the if you looking in deed for example and look at the advertisements that people are placing trying to find telemarketers they're really trying to find what I would call sales rep light so you're profiling incorrectly you're profiling to hire a sales rep but a lead generator personality is not the same as a sales rep personality they aren't and scented by the same things they don't work in the same way they don't process information in the same way and you don't want them doing the same thing that you want your sales reps doing you want your sales reps closing business you want your lead generator showing their work so they're completely different roles another challenge in finding good telemarketers is that bigger and better companies and yours are scooping up college graduates immediately they've got better training programs than you they've got more money to recruit they've got better budgets they've got better benefits and they have a career path to offer lead generators that small businesses simply don't have so when you look at our company for example we're a 50-person company and you know almost 40 of those people are telemarketers there's not a lot of places for them to go we only have so many roles that aren't telemarketing roles so it's not exactly a career where you can sign on and go places you're gonna have to move companies to advance in your career after you become a lead generator and that's a consideration why would I go to form an MSP if I could go work for Oracle or Xerox or any of the companies that have these phenomenal training programs so you're fighting with enormous companies for the few people out there that actually want to do this job so to summarize you don't really get who you want you get who you can get and that's the biggest challenge facing companies when it comes to hiring lead generators there's a small pool of people to pull from and you've only got whoever's left over after the big name companies make their choices so the good news is you can make people into fantastic telemarketers if you hire the right person with the right personality even if they didn't really want to be a telemarketer even if that's not what they wanted to do with their lives you can actually get great results from them so we're gonna talk a little bit about that next so I'm throwing a poll out there and amber maybe if people can type this in because we didn't set it up as a poll how many appointments per week should one lead generator be able to set for a managed services company so there's five choices here and I'd really like to know what you believe is realistic and reasonable so if people want to just go ahead and type in their answers amber give it a couple of minutes or a minute and then just let me know what people are saying does that work for you yeah that works for me sorry I have myself up you so one two three four five more than five what's the most common answer looks like we're all over the board but most people are saying either two or three or more than five so there's really the ranges people are feeling in with this question okay and one more question that I'd like an answer to before I move on to the next slide on the webinar today how many of you are actually scheduling sales appointments and how many of you are business owners hiring people to schedule sales appointments because I'd love to know what the difference between the people who are actually grinding the phones think and the people who are hiring the people to grind the phones think so if you're a business owner are you in the one to two a week range or you in the more than five range anyway something to think about you don't have to answer it but I'll be interested in taking a look at those numbers after this so this is a serious question for all of you based on what you've just said which is I believe that a lead generator should be able to schedule at least X number of qualified sales opportunities for my team every week my question for you is this how can you possibly know how many viable qualified sales opportunities there are in your market at any given time take it one step further how do you know that your list has any of those opportunities even on them so you're expecting a sales lead generator in some cases to put more than five appointments on your board every week but you have no knowledge of what's going on in your industry or in your market in any given time so you've pulled that number out of the air essentially and now you're gonna hire someone and you're gonna set them up for failure with an expectation that you've just created out of nothing right you don't have any day to back up that I think you can get one I think you can get three I think you can get five maybe you have some historical information of what people have been at being able to achieve in your organization previous to hiring this person but a lot of the assumptions that I'm making on this webinar today is our people came here to figure out how do I do this properly and I'm assuming that a lot of you are going to be doing this for the first time so if I'm telling you stuff you already know well you can do the crossword well I finished this webinar but if you have not yet hired a lead generator and you have a preconceived notion of what your lead generator should be able to achieve the first thing I want you to think about is this how do you know what's going on in your market day one you bring that person you sit them down at your desk how do you know how many leads are available to them so the key word here is qualified right how many viable qualified sales opportunities are there in your market at any given time and on day one with your crappy list that you bought from dun & bradstreet or that you pulled out of the Chamber of Commerce list or you got from wherever you got it there is ZERO way for you to know how many people on that list are actually qualified sales opportunities now the good news is you actually can answer this question but it's going to take you about two years of data collection and aggregation to be able to confidently say here's how many opportunities are in our market and the reason we know that is that we have aggregated data over the course of the last two years and we know everything so one of the things that's made us competitive in our market is when we started working for manufacturers and distributors we started aggregating the data on every managed service provider in North America so I can confidently tell you I know exactly how many opportunities there are in the market for a company like data and I know who everybody is using so I can say hey X percent of the market isn't using data yet and X percent of the markets contracts renew on this date or at this time and that's something you need to build within your organization so that you could accurately predict what's going on in the market so let's look at what qualified looks like because before you can say hey I expect you to generate a certain number of qualified appointments everybody needs to have the same shared view of what qualified means so if qualified to your caller is they said they take a meeting and qualified to you is they've got a budget of at least $5,000 for managed services those are two very different descriptions and you guys are going to be knocking heads all the time because you don't have the same definition of qualified so in my mind qualified looks like this they have to have a minimum number of computers whatever that is for your company for manage sales pros we usually look at clients that want a minimum of 20 seats and most of the time we choose 20 because at 10 it's either gonna be the fastest sale in the world or you're gonna be banging your head against the wall forever because they haven't quite gotten to the point where they're experiencing pain and that's another qualifying factor are they experiencing any pain at all or is everything fine are they technology dependent enough to understand that there is going to be pain are they strategic enough to understand the security is going to be a problem or is everything truly just fine there they need to be spending an appropriate amount on tech support already so to be a qualified lead if I have a guy that I know that comes into my office once a week fixes everything and charges me a hundred bucks in a case of beer there's absolutely no way that I'm gonna get that lead into a managed services contract in any timely fashion that is not a qualified opportunity yeah they've got 20 computers but my buddy from college supports my computer network for a case of beer so how is that a qualified opportunity they also need to be at a point in the sales cycle we're considering a new service provider makes sense so if they just signed a 3-year agreement with your biggest competitor they are not a qualified opportunity right there isn't any point you driving across town spending an hour with them they're not qualified they're a good opportunity but they're not a qualified sales lead so a takeaway here that I want to leave you with is reasonable business don't make snap decisions to change IT providers because they got a good sales call from a lead generator the clients that you want are honoring the commitments that they're making to their current vendors they're not snapping and changing just because they got a sales call that made sense to them they're making informed decisions to change vendors they are deciding once and for all that you are exactly the right fit for the kind of IT support provider they want to work with and then they change IT providers at a time that's minimally disruptive to their business so there's some planning and there's some budgeting and there's some back-and-forth thing and probably collecting some other quotes the type of business that you want is the type of business that you have to work for an earn not the kind of person that's slaty and changes providers every year there's a lot involved in on-boarding and off-boarding clients and you don't want to do it over and over again you want to make sure that the type of business that you're landing is the type of business that's going to stay with you otherwise you've just got a hole with a but sorry a bucket with a hole in the bottom you're going to work super hard and you're never going to move the needle on your monthly recurring revenue so going back to why isn't my lead generator getting enough appointments what are the odds that your lead generator whether they're brand new or whether they've been with you a year is gonna randomly stumble into a perfect managed services opportunity so if we go back to the slide before talking about what qualified means how many one call qualified opportunities do you think there are out there at any given time you know I've got 30 people on the phone making managed services calls every day and the odds on us getting a one call closed which would be an appointment that was qualified the first time we reached out to them we might have that happen once a week across all of our clients it doesn't happen very often you have to work for them so having realistic goals for your appointment center is going to be the first thing you'll need to do to get yourself on the path to success because if you're expecting five or more qualified appointments in a market where you know nothing about any of the businesses in that market you're gonna be really disappointed you're gonna end up firing that person they may be a phenomenal appointment setter and you're real and your expectations are out of whack so you've arrived at this arbitrary I think my lead generators should be able to see to create this many appointments how is it genuinely possible to meet a quota for qualified appointments when you don't know anything about your market so if you buy a list from dun & bradstreet you've got a list of 5000 companies on there you have no knowledge of what's going on in the market no understanding of who these people are working with how big they are what they want who they're already working with any of that so you want your lead generator to produce these miracle results but you're not really giving them the tools that they need to succeed and your expectations for what they should be able to do are out of whack so I want to talk a little bit right now but something called good hearts law so when you're putting together a process for sales prospecting everyone wants to talk about quotas no we expect you to do this we we expect a minimum of five appointments every week we expect you to make a minimum of $100 every day I expect you to call for six hours every day good hearts law was named after Charles Goodhart an economist and it talks about how you reward measured behavior so one of the things that things that makes our company different from other companies is we do not incentivize our callers to schedule appointments there is no commission for getting an appointment that's just the job and the reason for that is that any time a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure and that's that's good hearts law so if for example your target is a set number of dials every day you have to make $80 a day let's assume that 50 of those dials are going to be good and the other 30 are just going to be junk so that your caller can hit the arbitrary number that you've set for them so anytime you measure something it ceases being a good thing to measure if your target is a set number of appointments you're going to start getting garbage appointments so that your color can hit that appointment and make their bonus so anytime you begin to measure something your callers are gonna figure out how to game the system in a way that's going to be most advantageous to them and unfortunately that becomes least advantageous to you so if you're gonna measure number of dials I don't want to set an arbitrary number of dials I know how many calls my callers should be able to make using the technology that they're using but if they're having long conversations for example they're gonna have a whole lot fewer dials every day the better your caller is doing the fewer dials they're making and people don't consider that so if you've got a you have to make a hundred calls a day quota and your caller spent now five 10-minute phone calls that day or five 20-minute phone calls that day on really good calls there's no way they're gonna hit that hundred number but if they don't hit it they know that they're gonna get in trouble so they just dump through twenty calls and now you don't get the information that you need on those twenty calls because they just randomly piled through them so that they can hit that arbitrary number that you've set for them same thing with meanings if you put a you have to get five meetings quota on the table they're gonna get those five meetings but you're not gonna like any of them oops wrong button so people want to be able to measure success you have to have key performance indicators if you're not measuring you can't improve what are the kinds of things that you can measure to identify whether or not the color that you've hired is achieving success and the things that we're looking at our data integrity compliance the trained process task closure rates and anything that a color has control over so for example a collar can set a fantastic meeting but that collar has no control over whether or not that person goes to that meeting the color has no control over whether or not you can close that meeting so if you're incentivizing your lead generator on your ability to close that's really penalizing them for whether or not you're good at their your job they could be a great lead generator and you're a terrible closer they're not making any money your lose them so what can't your caller control that's a really good thing to take a look at when you're starting to develop things like incentive packages and trying to figure out whether or not you've hired a great caller who's having a bad month or whether you've hired a bad caller who's taking advantage of the fact that you don't understand how to manage your metrics so your color cannot control the quality of the list that you provide them with which is one of the things that makes it really difficult to get to that arbitrary you should have this many leads in your pipeline every week great if your list is garbage most of your callers day is gonna be spent digging out from underneath a pile of garbage you can't control the buying cycle of the companies that they're calling so your color could hit on the perfect opportunity but if that opportunity isn't going to be ready for another year or six months your color can't control that your color can't control when they're gonna buy something they can't control the number of people who actually answer their phone every day and that's a big one now so let's say you want a hundred dials every day maybe out of those hundred dials two people pick up the actual phone one day and the next people seventy people pick up the phone there's zero way for your caller to control whether or not someone answers their phone so I want you guys to all think about your businesses for a minute and all we do all day here is call managed service providers either to offer them our businesses sorry either to offer them the opportunity to work with us or on behalf of a dozen or more vendors and I'm going to tell you without hesitation that 90% of you are not answering your phones and not only are you not answering your phones you're not even setting up your systems in a way that would make it easy for a prospect or a client to communicate with you so people just aren't answering their phones and you can't really penalize a lead generator for the fact that nobody picked up the phone that day your caller can't control the number of truly qualified leads in your market they can't control the effectiveness of the process that you created for them so you hired a lead generator you brought them into your company and you taught them how to do their job if you did a terrible job of doing that that's on you that's not on them they can't control the messaging that you're asking them to deliver to the market so once again you've created the program and the process that this lead generator is going to follow all right they've come into your company you've given them the tools that you've created for them to be successful if you gave them garbage they're gonna produce garbage so you're penalizing somebody for something that you've done they can't control the quality of your marketing initiatives so it's the only thing you're doing is dialing dialing dialing and you don't have an email marketing campaign going and you're not running any SEO you're not going to networking events you're not doing anything else for your marketing and you're not getting any leads the caller can't control the fact that you're not supporting them with anything else and they definitely can't control the reputation that your company had in the market before they began dialing so if everybody already hates you your callers not gonna do very well so those are the things that callers absolutely cannot control and that's one of the things that makes it so difficult for you to set an arbitrary you must get this many meetings every week sort of guideline so what can they control well they can control their work ethic what are they doing all day every day are they coming in every day on time are they doing the job the way that you've outlined you wanted it done when you're pulling your reports can you definitely see that this person is doing exactly what they're being paid to do right I pay my colors to work I know what their time between dials should look like I know who's slacking off and I know who's getting it done work ethic is something that's completely within the realm of what your caller can control adherence the processes that you've created so if you've created a process that you want them to follow your caller can control whether or not they're adhering to it that includes things like filling out user-defined fields and scheduling follow-up tasks and sending emails and following your sales Cadence's if they're adhering to process they're doing their job if they're doing their job and you've created the right process meetings will come meetings with a natural outcome of a lead generation lead generation campaign done well they can control their level of enthusiasm they can control whether or not they've got good follow up and follow through and the things that they say they're going to do either for you or for the prospects that they're trying to engage with they can control their punctuality and they can control their absenteeism and we bonus out on all of these things so when I'm trying to create an incentive package for an outbound lead generator I'm looking at things that they can control not the things that I'm controlling for them and not the things that the market controls so if we go back a couple of slides we talked about what you can measure and one of the first points was data integrity data integrity is super important and I want you to care about it because data integrity is the thing that's gonna make you rich in two years data integrity is filling in the blanks all of the blanks right your long-term sales pipeline is going to be created by data the more data you have the more successful you're gonna be your revenue forecasting is going to be dependent on data and your ability to pitch effectively against your competitors is going to be created by data and your ability to accelerate your sales cycle close deals faster that's gonna be made possible by data as well so when you're thinking about the role of the lead generator within your organization your first thought should be I want someone who's going to show their work and fill in the blanks so the most important data points that you want to look at collecting when you're building out your lead generation prospecting process are these first and foremost contract end date the more times you can figure out when they're going to be done with the person that they're working with now the easier it's going to be for you to build a marketing program that works backwards from that date obviously if somebody's contract for news in three years you're not gonna call them every day in year one and two you might touch base with them once a quarter in YouTube in year two but in year three you're gonna change how you prospect into that account because you know it's coming up for renewal you're going to nurture it differently you're going to engage with them differently you're going to get involved differently contract end day is gonna be the thing that wins you business number of end-users anybody that isn't big enough to be on your prospecting list get out of your prospecting list so if you can't find out how many computers they have this is kind of a dead lead for you so remember that you can qualify at the receptionist level and not at the executive level you don't have to talk to the CEO to find out how many computers a company has so make sure you're taking advantage of any person who'll have a conversation with you at any company that you're calling into because lots of these things can be learned without you ever having a conversation with anyone in the C Suites how many computers do they have who are they currently working on what are the buying triggers so for example if you identify that a company is moving within a year well that's a perfect time to change mended service providers right or a perfect time to quote on it anyway that's a buying trigger you should be tracking those budgets if you find out that they're working with a BCIT and you know how much a BCIT costs you know that they have the budget to work with you as well you're perfect prospects are the prospects that are already buying from your competitors not the people who made the decision not to buy managed services they already thought about it and said yeah that's not for me maybe you can talk them into it at some time in the future but your best opportunities are people who've already seen value in it you don't have to educate them on it all you have to do is convince them that you're a little bit better than the company they're currently working with you want to identify who the decision-makers are and you want to make sure that data stored somewhere you want to find out what their priorities are so what are they talking about if all they want to talk about is backup the only thing you talk about is backup when you get the opportunity to go in there and sell manage services then you're going to talk about all the great wonderful things you can do you'll start talking about security you'll start talking about everything else but if the only thing they want to talk about backup that's the only thing you do at that point in time so what are their priorities and how can you hone in on those to make it sound like you are the exact right choice for their company now outcome we called this position here and that's a call center term a disposition is an outcome and it position is just the way that you mark the end of the call so I finished the call and I disposition it in a certain way so a disposition might be voicemail voicemail to voicemail 3:8 keeper block send email however that call ended whatever the outcome of that call was that's the disposition you want those tracked and you want them tracked every time you touch a lead even if it's the exact same disposition so sometimes you're gonna call a company 17 or 20 times you're gonna have the exact same outcome all 17 or 20 times but the more data you have the more effective you can get at either avoiding those 20 dial calls like for example in our database there are MSPs in our database that we've called thousands of times who have never picked up the phone they get called blasts now we don't call them first we call the companies that answer their phones we call the companies that we know take appointments why would we waste our dials on companies that we know aren't picking up the phone these are things that you can take into your organization so if you know that they never pick up the phone it's time to stop calling them and try to reach them another way outcome is important and then next steps what do you need to do next to win this business these are the pieces that you want to be tracking in your CRM or your PSA and you want to set up your process so that your lead generator can acquire this data for you and start aggregating it so that you have a powerful pipeline within the next couple of years month one it's going to look like crap and months two it's gonna look like crap and months three it's gonna look like crap and month four things are about to happen once five things are gonna start to turn over and then the more data you have and the more garbage you can drop out the more targeted you could be on the 600 or 700 leads that you have left in your database this is going to be probably the most controversial saying thing that I say on this webinar and you can you can buy into it or not buy into it but good process is more important than good people if your process is set up effectively for prospecting you can accomplish more with fewer people you can hire less expensive talent and less skilled talent to do the same job because all they have to do is follow a step-by-step process you could protect your company from the negative effects of employee churn so we are a call center and we churn at a rate of probably 50% on a bad month sometimes higher sometimes we do ok for a few months we looked at this problem in two different ways we could look at it from how can we hire people that aren't going to churn or how can we create a process that is so bulletproof that it doesn't hurt us when people churn anybody in my company can sit down at anybody elses chair pick up from exactly where they left off and be just as effective because the process that we've created is bulletproof it's the exact same thing over and over and over again which means you could hire somebody as long as they can follow a process so they don't have to have sales skills they don't have to have telemarketing skills they don't have to have any skills they have to be able to pick up the phone and follow a process and ideally type well you can create more efficient campaigns because you're not wasting dials once your process is ironed down you waste a lot less time and you get a lot more done and it's also going to allow you to segment your prospects which is important when you're creating more niche specific marketing campaigns so again looking at our company if we were a call center that worked with anybody the types of marketing campaigns that we run would have to be super generic but now we can segment everyone so I can target managed service providers that have one sales rep in a completely different way than a managed service provider that has a 20 sales rep team startup msps I'll target differently from operationally mature oml five campaigns right we're gonna target people differently based on what we learn about them so if your process is iron-clad and your data is getting put in the way that it's supposed to everything in your process improves and having people churn or having less skilled people isn't going to hurt you the way that it would if your process is sloppy and messy or non-existent right if you just hire somebody throw them in the corner and give them a list and say get to it well how are they going to be successful you haven't given them any tools to be successful good process we'll help you build a pipeline that's going to predict your revenue for years instead of quarters and that goes back to all the big data that we were talking about previously all those data points once you have all those data points filled in all of a sudden your pipeline starts to look really interesting because you know that these 20 contracts are up for renewal in June of 2020 and you're going to target them a completely different way then you're going to target the contracts that are up in May of 2019 you're gonna target your competitors business completely differently based on what you know they're good at and what you know they fall down at and if you're gathering and aggregating data you're gonna have all that information at your fingertips so how do you create a process that works that's a probably a whole long other webinar and a lot of consulting but here are some things that you can think about immediately automate anything that doesn't require personalization or customization so for example our callers don't send any emails at all they push a button and a templated email is sent to the prospect that requests the information most of the time and email requests is to blow off any way they just don't want to talk to you so why are you wasting time composing beautifully written emails for people who actually aren't going to read them so we've automated anything that doesn't require a personal touch you want a process that requires less thinking and more doing if you haven't already integrate a dialing system into your CRM or your PSA PSAs are notoriously difficult to prospect in and if you're still using a desk phone and a PSA you can maybe make eight dials an hour whereas my team can make twenty-two you want to regularly monitor and audit the people that you're hiring so it's not enough to just hire them and look at reports you gotta listen to them you got to coach them you have to see if they're saying the right things doing the right things asking the right kinds of questions if you're colors are always asking closed-ended questions and failing you'll pick up on that monitoring three phone calls you can fix things really quickly when you're paying attention you're a busy person you're trying to run a business you don't have time to babysit your telemarketer but if nobody's babysitting your telemarketer your telemarketers never going to improve create user-defined fields that allow for pick lists and not freeform data entry the faster you can get in and out of a record the easier it is for you to move on to the next call so if one of the so for us for example for MSP is one of our pick lists is what rmm do they use every rmm is listed spelled correctly so I don't have auto task is auto slash task auto space tasks Auto Trask went back when we did freeform we had like a hundred different rms in there because everybody was spelling things incorrectly you want things standardized you want your terms standardized you want your abbreviation standardized so if one person's version of an abbreviation for left message is LM and the other person's is VM you're never going to be able to find the data that you're looking for you want everybody taking their notes consistently and any shortcuts that you can create also have to be standardized because if you don't do that you've got four lead generators sitting in your office all of them creating little workarounds so they don't have to follow the process the way that you've laid it out they want to find a faster way to do it or they don't want to actually do what you've told them to do so everyone's looking for workarounds and make sure they can't do that and most importantly break your standard operating procedures down into the smallest steps possible the same as you would for your service desk first you do this then you do this then you do this create your standing or operating procedure look at it and think okay can we break this down even further how do we make this completely dummy proof so that nobody has to come to you and say what do I do in this situation it's already clearly outlined in your standard operating procedures and that keeps everything super simple Oh how do you know if you've got a good caller who's just having a bad month well if they're doing the work the benefits will come so don't be surprised if your brand-new lead generator doesn't get any appointments for the first couple of months they got a lot of work to do especially if you didn't give them anything to succeed with to begin with so all if all you did was give them a cold list that you bought online somewhere they've got a lot of work ahead of them so be patient and look at things like are they doing the work do they come in on time every day do they stay until the end of the day are they asking for help are they filling in the data fields like you've asked them to are they sticking to their follow-up schedules and closing out their tasks are they following the process that you've laid out for them do they ask for help when they need it again are you monitoring and auditing it's hard for you to say that you've got a bad collar if you've never listened to a call that that caller has made sometimes there just aren't meetings period and I can't say that enough sometimes there just aren't meetings unless you want to go on garbage meetings a bad month is better than a dozen crappy meetings understand the value of opportunity cost your time is really valuable so for example I know what I build my time out at for consulting so if I've got to spend an hour in the car two hours on-site having a meeting and our rating notes afterwards and another hour driving back to my office a good meeting takes about six hours of my life and that's six hours of my life that I could be putting into doing other things if that meeting is garbage I don't want it and neither do you there are some big warning signs however that'll tip you off quickly as to whether or not you've hired someone who's just taking advantage of the fact that you're not sure whether or not you should fire them so if you have a large number of unfinished or open tasks in your CRM so if your caller is constantly leaving their tasks open instead of closing them there's a problem they're not doing the work the way that they're supposed to they're not following up so here's a scenario I want to outline for you with lots of open tasks let's say they talk to a prospect the prospect is interested the prospect is qualified and the prospect says call me back in three months your callers that three-month callback and doesn't bother making the follow-up call and at that month three month mark one of your competitors calls in scoops a business right out from under you and closes it because they were in the right place at the right time the whole point of having follow-ups is so that you're in the right place at the right time all the time if your caller isn't closing off tasks if they're cherry-picking through the things that they want to do that day if they're not following the process as outlined that is an immediate problem that needs to be rectified you need to plan to that large gaps of unaccounted time between dials is always a problem so if it's taking them seven minutes to dial the phone that's a problem all right we've got like a if you had to do nothing on that call except push a button to disposition it you should be on to the next call if you got an appointment it should take you about seven minutes to create to finish all the work involved in scheduling an appointment we know all of these things calling disposition ratios that are inconsistent week to week so calling is pretty mundane it's the same job over and over again it's like Groundhog Day your disposition ratios should not be drastically changing from week to week especially at the beginning of a program now one thing you'll see with disposition ratio changes is as you get to know more in your market your dispositions change from you know no answer no answer no answer no answer to follow up follow up follow up follow up so instead of having cold dials you've got warm follow up dials to make but your days should still be pretty consistent so if you're noticing all of a sudden that the dispositions are all over the board and if you've normally got 10% of this 10% of this 40% of that 5% of that and those numbers aren't consistent anymore there's a problem and you need to dig into it empty user-defined fields after multiple call attempts so if your caller is just calling in over and over again and not attempting to learn anything new on calls that's a problem cherry picking just means going through lists and deciding not to call companies like I'm not going to call them they're too big I'm not gonna call them they're not the right fit they don't know that so if they're skipping over the things that you're asking them to do that's a problem if your caller is spending their entire day researching on LinkedIn you have a bad collar and it's time to get rid of them there's zero reason for them to be spending their time building elaborate lead lists you can pop on the LinkedIn while you're dialing the phone and see if you're making the right phone call but a five minute talk with anybody who picks up the phone it's going to tell you way more than anything will on LinkedIn so if your color is always coming back to you saying well I spent today researching that's not working that's working without working and a disproportionate number of emails sent to calls being made means your caller isn't doing their job right if you're going to default to the easiest method to try and contact someone which is just send them a quick email if nobody's responding to those emails that's wasted time you can automate that there's no reason for people to be composing emails when you can automate templates and send them with the click of a button and the immediate red flags so here are the things that I hire and fire to when we bring on new callers if they are late by even five minutes on any day in their first two weeks they are fired this is the best they're ever gonna be this is the most punctual your employee is ever gonna be if they are not showing up for work on time week one week two they are going to be an HR nightmare and you want them out immediately if they're absent for any reason that wasn't previously discussed in the interview process in the first month they're fired they're just gonna get worse the only way that you can have a good lead generation program is with a lead generator that comes to the office every day and does their job so if you're depending on a lead generator who's gonna be reliable who's going to make their calls every day and who's gonna build their your business for you they actually have to be at their desk absenteeism and punctuality are the two biggest indicators that this person is going to be terrible one of the other things that we do immediately here is check people on the phones you know get your list of crappy leads that you don't care about and get them calling get them calling immediately you don't want to spend two months training somebody only to find out that they are afraid of making phone calls right you want to throw them in the deep end immediately and see what happens yeah it's gonna be terrible they're gonna suck and it's going to be awkward but you need to know that they can pick up the phone and most importantly train to the process and then train again to the if your agent always has an excuse for why they aren't following your process you got to plan the mode immediately because they're never gonna follow your process and you're never going to be successful because you're not gonna get the information that you need so now if you've got zero process how do you start building it well you change one thing at a time so if you've already got colors in place but you don't really have a process that they're following and you want to bring one in you're gonna have to do it slowly and methodically or you're gonna overwhelm them change one thing at a time document the steps break those steps down into their smallest parts train your collar to them review them daily then weekly and then monthly make sure that they're following them and then you get to change the next thing test things to make sure that they're working so if you've never picked up the phone before for your MSP if you've never made a cold call or tried to sell to a new client you should be out there on the floor seeing if the things that you're training your people to are actually working I still spend a couple hours on the floor every day with my team making sure the things I'm telling them to do are still effective things change and then spot check you know make sure that people are complying with the processes that you're implementing or you're just wasting a whole lot of time the biggest question and I'm almost done here guys is when am I gonna see an ROI on prospecting and I wish that I can answer that question for you effectively but the truth of the matter is it's dependent on so many variables that it's impossible to give you an answer on it if you're a great closer you're gonna see ROI really quickly you don't know how to close or if you're going into cold appointments the same way that you would go into a referral appointment and treating that appointment the same euro ROI is gonna take a whole lot longer to produce so our clients have reported over a thousand percent ROI on their programs that have lasted two years or more and I am also including in that number people who worked with us for a period of time and then continued to prospect using the data that we handed them so if we work for them for a year handed them a document and that document went into a file and they never looked at it again they didn't get a thousand percent ROI if we handed them a file they uploaded it into Salesforce and they started working it they did see a thousand percent ROI but most people aren't going to see ROI in year one especially if they're starting from zero so prospecting is super effective but it is not a magic bullet and it's not gonna win you business in four days if you continually stop start stop start you're never going to see that thousand percent ROI so you hire us for three months you don't like what you see you fire us you do nothing for three months then you hire one of our competitors and you work with them for three months and you don't like it you fire them and you wait another three months then you try it in-house yourself for three months and then you stop again you're never gonna get the consistent return the prospecting gives you consistency is the only thing that leads to ROI and prospecting and most of the people that I talk to you aren't prospecting consistently their prospecting sporadically which brings you to the hey should I just outsource this whole thing well if you can afford it sure you can if your pipeline is dry right now you've got nothing in it it's gonna be two quarters before you've got any good opportunity in it and the longer you wait the worse it gets a quarter of no pipeline leads to a year of no new business and I want you to think about that number carefully the activities that you're doing in one quarter lead to all the follow-up activities all the sales appointments and everything that you're going to do for a year so every quarter that you ignore it is a year that you're not signing business from it so the longer you wait the emptier your pipeline gets the worse it's gonna get however your own in-house lead generation agent makes far more sense economically so if you can create the process that they're gonna follow and if you can train them to do the job and if you can support them properly bringing it in-house is going to be the most economical way to prospect it'll give you the opportunity to hire multiple prospectors instead of just one of ours right so if you look at what we charge was just six thousand dollars a month and I don't mind sharing that number with you how many lead generators could you put in your office for that same amount of money the problem is if you can't train and support them that's money you're just throwing against the wall so the best-case scenario for those of you who are wondering what you're going to do next would be to outsource while you build out an in-house process and train your in-house team then phase out your outsource team and phase in your in-house team that's an expensive proposition because not only do you have to carry the overhead of your outsourced firm but you've got to carry the overhead of the person that's building the process and the overhead of your caller in-house but that's the promised land you're going to have to super expensive years then you drop your outsourced company and you manage it in-house for the foreseeable future so if you're interested in talking about training we offer training we have on-demand online training that you could sign yourself up or a collar up for if you're interested in that you can go visit our website happy to offer a discount to anybody who visited this webinar today I take down a handful of consulting projects annually I don't have a lot of time for more than a handful so if you've got a requirement you want us to build it for you give me an email and if you're interested in outsourcing you can email Kirk at manage sales pros calm happy to give you a discount Kirk's a great guy you'll love talking to him