Key Things to Consider in a Lead Generation Campaign

1. Define Your Strategy and Goals

Before you start a lead campaign, the most important item to consider is what exactly you want to achieve. This might seem simple or obvious, but many businesses overlook it.

For example, is the goal to generate Sales Qualified Leads, Marketing Qualified Leads, or both? Will you focus on upselling to existing customers, or reaching new prospects already in your CRM?

Defining the desired outcomes, expected performance, and sales results gives you a clear starting point for your campaign and a way to measure its success. Whether you exceed or fall short of your original targets, you can always adjust once you gain insights about your market and campaign effectiveness.

2.  Decide What a ‘Good’ Lead Looks Like

If you’re generating Sales Qualified Leads, clearly define what makes a good lead and what doesn’t. Consider factors like company size, potential sales value, the right decision-maker, and barriers to purchase. For instance, a prospect under a current contract or who recently bought a competitor’s product may not be ready to switch, so contract duration and solution tenure should be part of your qualification criteria.

3. Forecast Your ROI: Will the Campaign Be Profitable?

This crucial step is often overlooked: create a campaign budget and ROI forecast. At Forrest Marketing Group, we provide a 2-year ROI Cashflow Forecast outlining expected costs, revenue, and the time needed to generate sales. Consider running costs, calls per hour, hours to generate a Sales Qualified Lead, conversion rates, average sale value, and your typical sales cycle to get a clear picture of campaign profitability.

4. Campaign Duration: How Long Will It Run?

Campaign duration depends largely on your sales cycle. Even if leads start coming in during week 1, actual sales may take months to close. For example, a 6-month sales cycle requires at least 6 months to assess results. Running campaigns for 12 months or more maximises impact, while tracking weekly and monthly metrics against your forecast helps monitor progress from day one.

5.  Who Will Manage the Campaign?

If internal staff will manage your campaign, they will need to have time to be able to interview, hire and train the people making the calls for you. Then they need to have time to manage, motivate and be on hand to answer questions every day. They will also need to own the reporting process and feedback results to you.
If you are using an external provider, you still need to assign someone to own the project and ensure it is a success – you can’t simply expect success without some involvement from your side. But you won’t have to spend a lot of time managing the campaign yourselves. Your involvement, time and workload relating to the campaign will be minimal compared to managing your own internal team.

6.  Who Will Make the Calls?

At first glance, using internal staff for lead generation may appear more cost-effective, but it often requires significant time and effort from you or your team. Managing the campaign, training staff, and ensuring consistent daily calls can become a hidden cost, and hiring the wrong telemarketer can jeopardise an otherwise promising campaign.

If you opt for internal staff, select someone with the skills to reach decision-makers effectively, not just someone with “spare time.” Consistency is key—one of the main reasons in-house lead generation fails is that calls are skipped or delayed, causing the campaign to lose momentum.

If you are worried about the costs of using an external provider when you include all the hidden costs of running your own lead generation campaign, using an external provider is actually not that much more expensive than running it in-house. This article on the REAL costs of each option provides more insight.

7.  Can Your CRM Handle It?

You may need to set up new call outcomes, sales steps, email templates, and workflows in your CRM to track campaign metrics effectively. Ensure your CRM can monitor calls made, contacts reached, and call outcomes, especially if lead volumes are lower than expected.

If multiple telemarketers are making calls, set up a system to avoid duplicate contacts. Also, ensure calls, follow-ups, and tasks can be reassigned if someone leaves, so workflows run smoothly from day one.

8.  What Metrics Should You Track?

However you choose to define and measure success, it’s important to be realistic. The key campaign metrics to measure are:

• Calls per hour: expect 15-20 calls/hour in a B2B context, in most cases.
• The number of presentations made to decision makers per hour: you can expect 3-6 decision-maker conversations per hour, typically.
• The number of hours spent calling each week: in most cases we recommend at least 20 hours be spent on lead generation/week.

At Forrest Contact, we define a “call” as just that: a call – the number of “dials” that a lead generator makes, regardless of the outcome. A “conversation”, on the other hand, is a conversation with the correct decision-maker in the company – not with the receptionist, EA or PA or someone else who is not the decision-maker.

Other key metrics include the hours spent to generate a lead and the conversion of leads into sales. The time to generate a lead depends on how qualified a prospect must be. If leads only need to agree to a casual meeting, you’ll get many quickly but with lower quality. If leads must be ready to switch from a current contract soon, you’ll get fewer but higher-quality prospects. Typically, expect a 3–8% conversion from conversation (not call) to lead, though this can vary.

Cold call leads are earlier in the sales cycle than referral or online leads, so conversion takes time and depends on the salesperson’s skill and lead qualification. Typically, cold call conversions range from 5% to 22%, and you should account for your normal sales cycle plus potential delays of 2–3 weeks before the first meeting.

9.   Tracking and Reporting Performance

What gets measured, gets done. By tracking, monitoring and reporting on the numbers above, you will be able to assess campaign performance quickly. Initially, we suggest you review the numbers hourly and daily, then weekly as the gremlins are worked out of the system. If you choose an external provider, they should be able to track and report daily and weekly activity and outcomes metrics.

Making It Work in Practice

Successful lead generation is not easy. Often it’s simple, but it’s rarely easy and if you’re not careful, you can waste a lot of time and money figuring out how to get it right. However, don’t be too hard on the team if it doesn’t go 100% according to plan initially. Good lead generation campaigns adjust and adapt, using the results achieved to improve performance across the sales cycle. It’s likely that getting your lead generation right will require some adjusting in the early months, but this is normal. Don’t be put off if it’s not working quite right to start with, but tweak and adjust the approach until you do get it right.

Some practical points to consider:

• Do you have your call lists in order? You want your telemarketer to be calling the right companies and not wasting time calling companies who could never use or buy your products/services. You also need to be clear on who the decision-maker is likely to be (by job title) in each business.

• Do you know how to write an effective lead generation “script”? Knowing what to say to get past the gatekeeper, or what to say when you get through to the right decision-maker in each organization is vital for success. Your script doesn’t have to cover all scenarios and shouldn’t be designed to be read verbatim to the prospect. An outline script that allows for an engaging, enquiring and ongoing conversation is far better.

• Do you know how much time should be spent each day or week on calling? As mentioned earlier, consistency is the key. For most products/services, we’d recommend starting with at least 20 hours of calling per week, ideally in 4-hour blocks. You can always reduce or increase this once you start to see tangible results. Your telemarketer may only speak to 2 or 3 decision-makers each hour, so if 1 in 20 of these decision-makers becomes a qualified prospect, it will take them 7-10 hours of calling to generate each qualified lead.
  Combine our inbound support with Lead Generation Services to capture and nurture more qualified leads, learn more.

To discuss how we could run a lead generation or appointment setting campaign for you, please get in touch by calling 1300 396 888 or drop us an email to enquiries@forrestcontact.com.au.  For more information on anything covered in this blog, please download Richard Forrest’s book: The Ultimate Guide to B2B Sales Prospecting.