As planning for the upcoming year begins, one question that may arise is whether working with a lead development partner is the best choice for you. If one or more of the below criteria describe your 2023 situation, working with a partner that utilizes a dedicated model in which Lead Development Representatives (LDRs) become an extension of your sales & marketing team may be worth investigating.
- Complex solutions, services, or new product
- Lengthy sales cycle
- Value nurturing of long-term prospects
- Want the flexibility to run multiple campaigns on-demand
- View alignment and appointment setting as critical
- Boast a high-quality data set or high market demand
- Plan to integrate external partners with your systems
- Desire to focus on strategic outreach throughout the customer journey, from awareness to advocacy
Read on to learn the difference a dedicated lead development team will make in reaching your 2023 marketing and sales goals.
Flexible Strategic Outreach Campaigns
A dedicated LDR model provides built-in flexibility to optimize and adjust, such as loosening or tightening lead criteria, making messaging or target audience updates, and adding new campaigns. In addition, stronger-than-expected production is financially advantageous with a dedicated model.
Compare this with a cost-per-lead (CPL) model, which often tethers you to specific MQL criteria or locks you into specific per-MQL rates. A CPL model can be a challenge if you have a very high-quality data set, want to make campaign modifications, or need the flexibility to adjust the lead criteria based on your sales team’s feedback. A pay-per-lead model requires rigidity. In contrast, a dedicated LDR model promotes flexibility to modify while proactively incorporating valuable input from the sales team.
Valuable Data and Market Intelligence
Data generated from a tele-outreach campaign is data gold! Each record has been attempted and often edited, and new contacts in decision-making roles have been discovered and appended while old and unusable data have been weeded out. Then, add in the wealth of information garnered from the phone conversations: install base details, common pain points, competitor details, buying cycles, additional points of contact, and nurture ready prospects to mine.
This valuable data should be leveraged for strategic outreach throughout the customer journey, boosting your investment. With a dedicated team, the focus is on maximizing the entire data set versus cherry-picking to meet a specific number of leads so that you can be confident in its value.
Relationship-Building through Nurturing
A lengthy sales cycle and a complex solution benefit from a human-to-human nurturing strategy. By capturing information about your prospect’s business situation and future needs and then building a relationship over time, you are positioned to be front of mind and a trusted advisor. Dedicated lead development representatives are crucial to implementing this type of human-touch nurturing methodology, which increases MQL output over time.
Integration: Systems, Teams, & New Campaigns
Leveraging a dedicated lead development team has built-in benefits when working within your internal systems, aligning LDRs to your sales structure (i.e., specific territories or segments), particularly when utilizing appointment setting. The dedicated nature of this model facilitates a quicker ramp-up, a more seamless integration, and lowers errors.
Additionally, integrating specialized campaigns is pain-free. When you add in messaging around upcoming events and new solution information, you are building onto the existing knowledge base of your team.
If you want to drive improvements in the new year, now is the time to start the conversation! Contact us to learn more about our dedicated agent model today.
In addition to implementing a dedicated lead development model, there are three additional guidelines for a successful pilot. Read about them here: Four Guidelines that Ensure a Successful B2B Tele Pilot.