The Challenge
This is Teleprospecting 101: if you are going to uncover a lead, you have to get your prospect on the phone first. The best salesman in the world would never make a sale if they did not have someone to sell to. As a teleprospecting company, we have focused much of our time researching the importance of establishing rapport with gatekeepers, 0’ing out for additional decision makers, email/call approaches, and countless other methods of reaching the desired target on the phone. But what about when even those best efforts leave something to be desired?
I recently faced this obstacle with a campaign targeting C-levels, Directors of Surgery, and Anesthesiologists. Previous blog posts detail our approaches for reaching C-level contacts, but the remaining contacts took some specialty focus. This leads me to my first step for thinking outside the box: know your prospects.
Knowing Your Prospects
What does your target audience do on a day-to-day basis? What are their typical work hours? Are they accessible by phone while on the job? Do they have several short breaks, a couple long breaks, or none at all? For the Directors of Surgery, we found that our traditional methods of reaching out were effective in most cases; however, the Anesthesia care givers proved more difficult. We determined that Anesthesiologists are available first thing in the morning, and rarely at any other time. Since the remaining contacts are more accessible later in the day, we were able to focus the morning hours on Anesthesia contacts, increasing our number of conversations across the campaign. Now that we understood our target audience, the next step was to take advantage of time zones.
Taking Advantage of Time Zones
This is the benefit of teleprospecting in a multi-time zone demographic. Specifically for TeleNet Marketing Solutions, this is also the benefit of operating from the Eastern Time Zone. We have 4 hours of the day when it is between 8 and 9am somewhere. However, 8-9am might be considered mid-morning to an Anesthesia care giver, who often arrives at the hospital earlier than the standard 8am workforce. Thus, where we would usually begin calling the central time zone at 9, we focused our efforts towards Anesthesiologists in the central time zone beginning at 8:30 or even 8:00am, making it 7:00am for our target audience. Following this method throughout the day, we were able to reach out to all central, mountain, and pacific time zone anesthesiologists between 7 and 7:30 their time, making it significantly more convenient for them to talk about a solution in which many of them were highly interested.
Conclusion
All in all, sometimes even the most proven methods will not suffice for a specific target audience. When this is the case, dig a little deeper to understand your audience, what their availability might look like, and if there is a theme, determine ways to target them at those times. A teleprospecting campaign is only as effective as its completed conversations, but if you can understand your prospects and cater your approach appropriately, you’re on your way to success!