Planning to Build an In-house Lead Gen Team? Reduce Your Risk With This Strategy

We’re talking with a company about doing an outbound program to generate leads from a very specific group of prospect companies. Obviously, their management understands that if they’re going to win business from target companies they’ll have to do some outbound and personal selling to get them. We haven’t asked but are assuming that the executives they want to land have no time to complete online forms.

In addition to talking with us they’re evaluating the option of building their own inside lead generation team. And it’s wise to consider the options. Having their own inside lead generation team would certainly be advantageous.

Having lead gen folks in their office will allow them to keep callers nearby so that they can manage them closely. As opposed to typical sales training, only cold call training and subject matter classes will be needed. Turnover shouldn’t be an issue since most people want to cold call and finding talented, proven, stable cold callers is a piece of cake. Fortunately, no special equipment is required beyond software licenses, a computer, phone and other sundries.

Once the hiring, training, equipping and monitoring is set only management is left. Well, that’s unless there is turnover. But once the team is up-to-speed and humming (only a few short months away) the pipeline will certainly grow from the increase in outbound activity.

This client is taking a less traveled but wise road by running an outsourced appointment setting campaign while building their internal program. They will be able to test lists, approaches, scripting and even the types of callers that will work best. Metrics can be established and benchmarks set that will help drive early success. And the return on the new department should be fairly easy to compute based on success levels during their outsourced program.

While there is always risk with a new initiative, outsourcing the function before and during setup can provide best practices and metrics that will provide for significantly reducing risk and projecting profits accurately. You can also bet that if the effort is not successful, leads will still be coming and the sales curve will be preserved.