By Mike Daugherty, Co-founder & CEO of Synter Resource Group
Your marketing team has done a great job generating inbound leads for you – but now what?
Do you –
- mass email the prospects with impersonal and forgettable emails – hoping a few bite – only to find out those few aren’t your ideal customers?
- split up the list amongst your highly paid sales executives and give them daily call/email quotas, only for them to waste time speaking with a bunch of companies that don’t meet your qualification criteria?
- Or – do you outsource to a firm who will do the grunt work for you for a fraction of the cost, and will only present you with the leads who meet your customer qualifications?
If the latter piques your interest, you’re not alone. It just doesn’t make sense to spend all of that money on generating those inbound leads when research reveals that a whopping 40% of them never receive a follow up from sales. That’s a ton of missed potential revenue!
Even the best companies could use an extension of their sales force, and studies have shown that more and more of them are choosing to use an outsourcer to help qualify their leads–resulting in an efficient and cost-effective method to increase lead-to-customer conversion.
Why Outsource?
- Cost – It’s too expensive to use your outside, door-knocking personnel to perform qualification functions. And, building an internal lead qualification team is costly when taking into account the costs of hiring, training, benefits, vacation/sick time, computer hardware/software, managing, etc. An outsourcing partner already has this infrastructure in place and is doing this for their other customers.
- Scalability – Outsourcers can allocate resources as necessary to handle the varying workloads across several projects. Your in-house crew could be caught scrambling to keep up during the busy times or finding things to do during the low.
- Expertise – A good outsourcing partner will ensure that they understand your industry and can “talk the talk” in addition to quickly providing hot leads to your sales team. The ROI is easily obtainable within the first 30-days.
- Pay for Performance – Utilizing an outsourcer best aligns with “paying for what you get.” For example, you assign 5,000 leads to an outsourcer, you only pay for 5,000 leads to be worked. You distribute those same 5,000 leads to your 50 outside sales folks, how do really manage or know the efficiency of their efforts? Centralizing with an outsourcer removes all unknowns and ensures task completion in the desired timeframe.
Consider outsourcing the lead qualification process; it will free up your sales executives to focus on the bottom of the sales funnel and their core competencies: putting together proposals, negotiating contracts, and closing the deals. And by doing so, you will grow revenue!
Mike Daugherty is a cofounder & CEO of Synter Resource Group, based in Charleston, South Carolina. Over the last 17 years, Synter has grown to become North America’s largest, dedicated provider of business process outsourcing solutions by enabling transportation and logistics companies to reduce operating costs, improve back-office processes, and enhance the customer experience. Mike may be contacted at 843-746-2206, or miked@synter.com.