The Challenge
Teleprospecting 101: if you are going to uncover a qualified lead, you have to get a 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 spend a lot of time researching contacts, establishing rapport with gatekeepers, asking for referrals to additional decision makers, utilizing email/call approaches, as well as deploying countless other methods in order to reach the desired target on the phone. But what happens when even those best efforts leave something to be desired?
Know Your Prospects!
First, you must know 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?
By knowing your prospect’s schedules, you can deploy a more effective call strategy. For instance, on behalf of our Healthcare IT clients, we target a variety of hospital decision-makers and have determined that anesthesiologists tend to be available first thing in the morning, and rarely at any other time. Since many other titles/positions are more accessible later in the day, we are able to focus the morning hours on anesthesia contacts, increasing our number of conversations.
Take Advantage of Time Zones
This is the benefit of teleprospecting in a multi-time zone demographic. Specifically for TeleNet Marketing, this is also the benefit of operating from the Eastern Time Zone, across the U.S. 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 anesthesiologist, who often arrives at the hospital earlier than the standard 8am workforce. Thus, where we would usually begin calling the central time zone at 9:00 am ET, we focused our efforts towards anesthesiologists in the central time zone beginning at 8:00am ET, making it 7:00am for our target audience. Following this method throughout the day, we are able to reach out to all central, mountain, and pacific time zone anesthesiologists between 7:00 and 8:00 their time, making it significantly more convenient for them to talk about a solution in which many of them are 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, and what their availability looks like. If there is a common theme, adjust your contact strategy to maximize it. A teleprospecting campaign is only as effective as its conversations, but if you can understand your prospects and cater your approach appropriately, you’re on your way to success!