Cold calling, appointment setting and lead generation is unpleasant and difficult.

It takes a tough soul to call 100 people per day (100 people who know nothing about you) with a canned sales pitch while expecting a return call, appointment or a sale.

It’s no wonder so many people want to outsource lead generation. But, before you even think about outsourcing this business critical process, there are several cautions and considerations to keep top of mind.

The voice on the phone is your brand

Make sure you personally speak to everyone that will be making calls on your behalf. The person on the phone represents your brand and partnering with the lowest bidder can be a recipe for disaster.

Keep it clean

The data, that is. The call list is a valuable asset. As an asset, make sure your call list is fresh and up-to-date. To start, evaluate your existing data: How much of it is accurate? How much can be discarded? There are many statistics out there but the United State Postal Service states that 35% of all bulk mail mailed every year ends up in the garbage due to inaccurate addressing.

Gartner, Inc., estimates that over the next two years, more than 25 percent of critical data in Fortune 1000 companies will continue to be flawed, that is, the information will be inaccurate, incomplete or duplicated (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=501733). Another Gartner report cited major reasons CRM projects fail. At the top of the list: “Data is ignored.”

Who is going to oversee the updating and maintenance of the data? Will your lead generation partner update or delete outdated records? Will they take the time to research outdated leads? Or clean email addresses? Is the firm committed to updating the system, and how will that be accomplished?

Before you or anyone else can think about picking up a phone, you need answers to these questions.

Appoint a CRM administrator

The easiest way to keep your database clean and up-to-date is by appointing a CRM administrator. This person should possess excellent technical and research skills and understand your unique selling process. The administrator must be able to set up campaigns, import leads, purge leads, develop lead assignment rules and manage all unworkable addresses and contacts. The administrator should be compensated in a way that rewards data accuracy.

Keep it together

Avoid data silos. Some lead generation vendors steer customers toward proprietary CRM systems. Avoid this at all costs. What you need is a single database that contains a complete record of every interaction your company has with a prospect.

If you use Salesforce.com (or any other CRM system), set-up your outsourced partner as a remote user in your system. When everyone uses the same system, from a security and a measurement standpoint, you have an audit trail of all activities performed. You can assign the outsourced vendor specific accounts and restrict access to other accounts. You have oversight and real time reporting. Plus, you have the assurance of knowing your vendor is cleaning and scrubbing your data for your sales people.

Put some marketing in your telemarketing

Once you have CRM under control, you can begin to map out the marketing support for your telemarketing campaign. When we say marketing, we’re not talking about expensive SuperBowl advertising, we’re talking about sales letters, coordinated direct mail, email templates and PDFs that can be sent to interested prospects.

Crafting a personalized sales letters to prospects that are accompanied by emails, PDFs and phone calls reinforce your brand identity in the mind of the prospect. Utilizing these tools in coordinated waves increases the likelihood of success. A voice mail, followed by an email followed by a mailed letter has a far greater chance of a return phone call than just a voice mail. Combining tactics also increases the likelihood that your message and/or pitch will get through to the prospect. Multi-pronged campaigns yield the best results simply because they up the odds.

Get automated

What happens after the call? Do you give up on the prospect or do you find way to cultivate that prospect over time with automated follow-up routines? A good CRM tool can automate many of the follow-up tasks and put prospects into a regular series of follow-up activities By thinking about the prospect long-term, you will find yourself communicating with clients more and also specifically targeting messages for those communications. You will find that your marketing improves. Considering your outsourced lead generation vendor as part of a larger communications and marketing strategy will be a step in the right direction.

Almost ready to start dialing…

Ask if your vendor equips their call center employees with online research tools such as JigSaw, Hoovers, Plaxo and LinkedIn. These tools are invaluable for researching companies, understanding the buyer’s sphere of influence and adding new prospects to the database.

Have something interesting to say and offer

The biggest challenge for any VP of Sales is giving his or her lead generation team access to the right information sources so they never go in cold. And, the challenge for any VP of Marketing is to make sure that appointment setters have something new and interesting to put in front of prospects every 30 days.

If you are cold calling, you are already at a disadvantage. Cold calling is difficult and inefficient. Invest in the research to find out who you should be talking to. Define a sphere of influence within your target companies. Determine which positions you want to target and build a list. Names and addresses are easy to purchase from sources such as Hoovers and Jigsaw. Emails can pose a bit more of a challenge, but dedicating the effort to researching and populating your list will pay off in spades.

The next step is to determine what to say to these prospects. Spend time researching the companies you want to touch. Show that you’ve been paying attention and offer something useful based on their needs, not on your looming sales quota. No one wants to read an email blast that isn’t relevant to their business. A unique letter that includes something that is of direct interest to the prospect will be more warmly received.

It is okay to leave a voice mail

Even a simple voice mail can be a branding opportunity. A voicemail, properly researched, can do more than a canned conversation to increase your credibility and differentiate you from what others are saying. The beauty of the voicemail is that you’re not attempting to make a sale straight off the bat. Rather, your goal is to really get through to someone and convince them to pick up the phone and call you. It’s a warm-up technique.

With a scripted voicemail, you have complete control over how you want to portray your company and your services without having to worry about questions, challenges or ‘no’s. Take the opportunity. Design a message that grabs the prospects and leaves them curious for more information. Keep it short and simple.

Gain some real-world guidance in how to give your trade show efforts better focus and better results from start to finish. You’ll be able to better create realistic expectations and objectives and crystallize your desired attendee response.

Download the PDF of our new report-The Trade Show Turning Point
Questions this Perspective Addresses:
• How do I know what trade shows to exhibit at?
• Why do I always feel let down after a trade show?
• How do I get more return from every trade show?

“A good sales script is essential. It should contain four elements. Start with who you are (first and last name) and where you are from (your company). Then explain what you are selling. Continue with two compelling features of what it is you are selling/offering—this is your offer. Finish with a request for commitment by asking: Is this something you want?”

The Bully with the Juice is the company’s equivalent of emperor Caesar. Only he can give his thumb up or down on the life-or-death decision to spend the company’s money. So even though you have won the evaluation and the CIO assured that a purchase will be made, you are actually now in the most critical part of the sales process. You must win the approval of the Bully with the Juice.

The only measurement that matters is measurement that truly shows how effective you are at reaching your customers.

Traditional B2B marketing measurement is especially tough because anything you do impacts everything else you do. How does your PR impact your PPC? How does your PPC impact your SEO? How does your SEO impact your website? How does your website impact your direct mail? And vice versa, and so on.

In looking at various measurement methodologies, it seems few actually demonstrate a measureable connection between the multiple activities that define true multi-channel B2B marketing and the sales pipeline.

Finally, as a last insult to simplicity, the measurement methods you use for your company will have little bearing on the measurement someone else uses for their company. In B2B marketing and sales, benchmarks and best practices are hard to find. Everyone measures and values certain tactics differently. My media mix and your media mix are not the same. Your sales approach and my sales approach are not the same.

So what to do?

First, don’t sweat it.

No matter how trivial or important the tactic, assign it a key performance indicator (a KPI).

A KPI is a quantifiable measurement, agreed to beforehand, that reflects the critical success factors of a certain tactic. The KPI for your website’s performance may be the unique visitors or the number of inquiries or any other metric that is important to you. The KPI for your media relations activities might be press mentions or advertising equivalency. Whatever the KPI, it should be binary. This means, at the end of each month, you should know if you achieved or did not achieve your KPI. If your KPI for your website is 1000 unique visitors per month, then you know with certainty at the end of the month whether or not you achieved your web KPI. Likewise, if your monthly public relations KPI is 4 or more mentions about your company every 30 day period, you know with certainty whether or not you achieved your KPI.

Next, if you have 10 tactics and 10 KPIs, force rank every KPI on a 1 to 10 score with 10 being most important and 1 being least important. If you have 104 tactics and 104 KPIs, force rank every KPI on a 1 to 104 score with 104 being most important. This ranking forces you to think about the importance of each of your tactics as part of your total media mix. If your SEO is a the most important tactic in your arsenal of 10 tactics, SEO gets a weight of 10. If PR is the next most important tactic, PR gets a weight of 9. And so on.

For every 30 day period, honestly evaluate whether or not you achieved the goal for each KPI. If you achieved the goal, give yourself a score of 1. If you did not achieve your goal, give yourself a score of 0. There is no negotiation. You either achieved the KPI or you didn’t.

Multiply each of your KPI scores by your force ranked weight. In the SEO example above, if you achieved your SEO KPI, multiply the tactic’s weighted score of 10 by 1. If you did not achieve your PR score, multiply the weighted score of 9 by 0. Work your way through all your tactics and determine whether or not you achieved your KPI. Add all these sums together. See the table below for an example:

If you have 10 tactics, you have a total possible score of 55 (10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1=55)

When you add all the scores in the table above and divide them by the potential score, you have a grade of 60%. Next month, try to improve your grade.

Is this an exact science? No. Far from it.

But the exercise of measuring forces you to define the things that you value. It also forces your team to reach an understanding of the metrics that are expected from each piece of creative or from each tactic you produce.

If the measurement is not working or if you are measuring things you don’t value, you quickly recognize it. You adapt. Wash. Rinse. Refine. Repeat. And so on until you settle on a definition of the things that matter most.

Finally, your measurement lets you compare your marketing performance to your sales pipeline. This is where your measurement really matters. What happens to the sales pipeline if you adjust certain tactics? What happens when you start measuring things differently? The sales pipeline is the true indicator of marketing success. If you measure a marketing tactic and it provides no insight into the overall health of the sales pipeline, does it matter? Absolutely not.

Is all this extra effort worth it? Absolutely.

NOTE: If you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet referenced above, email me at bbradley @ bradleywiltjer . com

http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article.asp?item_id=410

Sue Stenbo, talent acquisiton manager at Fellowes will do most of the speaking. I’ll chime in when called.

The topic is employer branding.

Employer branding is about attracting the right talent that can make a meaningful difference to your business. People who are great and also reflect the culture of your business. Employer Branding takes the qualities which make people want to work for an organization, ensures they are established throughout the organization, and uses them as a marketable point of difference. What is the strategy which drives the purpose for Branding? What are the tactics and how do you measure the success? How does Employer Branding add value? How do you define your target market and execute your proposition? Learn how to develop Employer Branding that leads top talent to you, and keeps them there. We’ll explain how to develop the strategy and tactics to deliver the right talent every time.

http://www.mynhrc.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=25

RESTON, Virginia – February 25, 2008 - In celebration of the SharePoint portal ‘revolution’, Bamboo Solutions is offering a contest to submit the most useful Web Part idea for enhancing SharePoint environments. Starting today and running until 5:00 p.m. EST, March 14th anyone can submit an idea via the Bamboo website (store.bamboosolutions.com/revolution2008.aspx). A winner will be chosen and announced on the Bamboo website in late March.

Bamboo will develop the software based on the winning entry, and the grand prize winner will receive a fully-paid license for the resulting Bamboo product. The new product can also be used by either the winner or the winner’s company.

Bamboo Solutions is a Gold Sponsor at the SharePoint Conference 2008 in Seattle, at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center, March 3-6 at booth 706. The SOLD OUT show will bring together over 3,000 SharePoint professionals and over 60 SharePoint vendors to the Seattle area and features a keynote by Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates.

Bamboo Solutions takes an innovative approach to enhancing and extending Microsoft SharePoint solutions. Bamboo provides a suite of Web Parts, Solution Accelerators and customized products for project management, social networking, business intelligence, portal administration and content management. One of the largest SharePoint development organizations in the world, Bamboo is an advocate and practicing constituent of community driven software development. This methodology allows Bamboo to develop and deliver approximately 3 new products and 6 minor releases each month. In the past two years, over 3,000 customers across 38 countries have benefited from Bamboo’s software development agility, implementing their SharePoint portals in record time.

SharePoint is the fastest selling Microsoft product of all time. Bamboo is a leader in the SharePoint market and employs a revolutionary development methodology for rapidly delivering new products. Bamboo’s SharePoint and customer deployment experience, combined with its Development Community, significantly minimizes development time, resources and the cost of deploying collaborative SharePoint applications. Customers can easily try, test and buy from the online store and gain access to additional resources through Bamboo’s partner network. Bamboo Solutions is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, USA, with offices in Gothenburg, Sweden and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. For more information, visit: www.bamboosolutions.com.

With this in mind, we’d like to hear your thoughts on how to scale this program. How is this different from the manufacturer’s rep model? Do you know anyone that is doing this? Please send your comments to bbradley @ bradleywiltjer . com.

We launched our business in 1996 with the goal of always doing what we said we would do.

The no stupid deal concept and qualifying process has been refined over the years to help us design a solution that is appropriate and has a high success rate.

I took the advice in the email and fired a client today. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made because I really like the client and the vision he has for his business.