sales and marketing

Sales Leads by Phone: Why Reaching People Is So Hard and What to Do About It

By Michael A. Brown | Partner Channel Magazine


“Reach” means live, human-to-human phone communication with your intended prospect or customer. “Reach” is not necessarily a full marketing or sales conversation yet, but is at least a real-time exchange of words. Merely reaching b-to-b prospects and customers is one of the greatest challenges in phone-based marketing and sales. To wit:

On what portion of outbound calls do your callers reach their intended contact live? Is anyone at or above 50%? 25%? Who is in single-figures? How many attempts does it typically take to reach? How much does a reach cost? How many of you actually know?

Nowadays, you can dial until your fingers turn blue to no avail. I know a company whose calls are well-crafted but whose reach-rate is 1.7% in three tries. You can leave voicemail messages until you are hoarse, and AT&T says 4% – at most – will return the calls. To be sure, reach-rate varies by industry, level of contact, and prospect versus customer. However, I have identified four across-the-board reasons for the “reach” challenge:


Intellectual triage

Some business people, especially executives, consciously budget their time, appointments, and calls. Interruptions are their nemeses, so the only unscheduled calls they accept are “critical” calls from known callers. To all others, they make themselves unavailable. Of course, that means the marketer or sales person must first earn a phone appointment! The two key methods for doing so:

• Communicate first in a medium other than phone to provoke an inbound inquiry.

• Influence the administrative assistant to schedule a call of exploration of a possible matchup with your firm based on a relevant event in the prospect’s business life.



Overload and\or Overwhelm

Many business contacts cannot keep up with their jobs. They “tread water” and\or “fire-fight” every day. They include the survivors of layoffs who must handle the work of two or three former colleagues as well as people at startups who almost always are stretched thin. Your unexpected call is one more thing to attend to, so when their Caller ID shows a number they do not recognize, they either ignore it or let the call go to voicemail, from which they delete most messages without listening.


E-mail is faster

Sight is faster than sound. Prospects and customers can read your sender name, address, and subject line in a millisecond, and then either continue or delete. But live or recorded voice messages require actually listening and synthesizing the words, which takes time. E-mail wins the race for attention.

Unfortunately, e-mail clutter largely negates the medium’s speed advantage. That is why we must send only directly relevant and timely e-mail, with powerful, compelling, custom subject lines, to increase the odds of being read and considered. Good e-mail can provoke subsequent good phone.

Marketers’ Malpractices

There is way too much bad phone. And bad phone provokes resistance to all subsequent phone. Here are examples of bad phone:

• Undifferentiated, out-of-the-blue calls.
• Calls placed by unprepared reps who know nothing of their prospect companies, contacts, account history, or their own products/services.
• Calls placed by discredited devices such as predictive dialers and robo-callers.
• Depositions not dialogue. All pitch, all the time.


If you want to reach people, don’t do these things!

There is no “silver bullet” for reach. And given the realities of the b-to-b world and the economy, do not expect an incremental improvement any time soon. However, you can and should take these positive steps to boost your “reach-rate” …

• Analyze your marketplace and the typical day-pattern of your three most frequent levels of contact. Look at the call records in your CRM system or contact manager to determine the times of day when your calls have been completed and not completed. Continue or change accordingly.

• Call early and late in the day, especially when calling high-level contacts. Also, call executives at 25 or 55 minutes after the hour. That is when they are most often at their desks.

• Ask gatekeepers and administrative assistants for their guidance about the best times to call Mr./Ms. Big as well as the times to avoid. Ask about typical meeting and travel schedules and plan your calls around them. Also clarify when to phone versus e-mail versus postal mail versus in-person.

• Actually rehearse your voicemail messages and listen to them yourself before sending them. How do they sound? Boring? Compelling? How would you, yourself, respond? DO NOT request a callback because you will not get one. Rather, make the case for visiting your Web site. Then state your intention to call again, learn their reaction, and go from there.

• Test your marketing media mix, contact timing, and frequency. Amend as warranted. Drive inbound response via non-phone media. Call second or later in the communication sequence.

• When you do reach them live, make 100% sure you deliver a powerful, compelling “reason for my call” based on them not you, followed by the Golden Rule: “Is this an okay time to speak?” Ask before telling and learn before selling. Give first, get second. Then issue a call to action!