Are Your Leads Holding You Back?
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Are Your Leads Holding You Back?
By Aaron Cecil
The proliferation of lead/data sources has caused the widespread belief that lead lists should be extremely cheap if not free. People subscribe to data services like Hoovers, Data.com, etc… expecting this to a sufficient source of leads for the sales team. After working on over 400 projects and having the capability to see what works, what doesn’t and why, we can say without a doubt that data/lead list quality is one of the most important factors for success or failure. Just look at our Data ROI Study, the cost of invalid data is approx. $20,000 per rep per year in wasted time.
Everyone thinks they can just had us or their sales team a list of leads and then the team can turn around meetings. If you’re one of those people, how’s that working out for you so far?
My new mantra regarding lead lists goes back to the old adage, “if you’re gonna buy cheap, you’re gonna get cheap”. This has become especially true within our space.
With a good lead list, we can do more with less.
So what is a good lead list?
A good lead list is recent. All of the contacts on the have been verified that they are still there within the last 1-3 months. The worst thing is calling someone who left the company 2 years ago.
A good lead list is accurate. On average, our lead lists are 98% accurate, which is to say that for everyone 100 leads, 2 are invalid. An invalid could be a lead that’s no longer with the company, or have bad data such as a bad email address.
A good lead list is relevant. There’s nothing worse than calling on irrelevant titles/leads that have nothing to do with the problem you solve.
To take my point a step further, we recently ran an A/B test with one of our clients to understand how data quality influenced results for them. The key result we looked at was appointments. We used the same rep, same scripts, and the same process. The only difference was the list of leads.
Our client purchased a large list of leads (approx. 20,000) from Hoovers/ZoomInfo. The client was very confident in the recency and validity of this list. They originally sent us a list of 3,000+ leads. We researched/cleansed over 800 leads for the pilot period. Our initial efforts for them lead to 10 appointments. Most of these turned into qualified opportunities.
Over the next 4 weeks we then took 145 leads from the original dataset, but did not spend time cleaning them. From those 145, 21 were invalid and for the ones that were valid a good portion of the data was bad (emails, phone numbers, etc…). In 4 weeks of calling, we scheduled 1 appointment. 1!
This was a huge eye opener for our client to the value and impact on results of good data. In short, if you want to run a successful outbound appointment setting program, use recent, accurate, and relevant leads. It will make the world of difference. Or in the case of this client, a 10x difference!
In addition to this client test, we also know from our Data ROI study I previously mentioned, that on average reps that have validated leads achieve 4x more qualified appointments.
Interested a larger, more predictable pipeline? Contact us to talk about outsourcing your lead generation efforts.
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The proliferation of lead/data sources has caused the widespread belief that lead lists should be extremely cheap if not free. People subscribe to data services like Hoovers, Data.com, etc… expecting this to a sufficient source of leads for the sales team. After working on over 400 projects and having the capability to see what works, what doesn’t and why, we can say without a doubt that data/lead list quality is one of the most important factors for success or failure. Just look at our Data ROI Study, the cost of invalid data is approx. $20,000 per rep per year in wasted time.
Everyone thinks they can just had us or their sales team a list of leads and then the team can turn around meetings. If you’re one of those people, how’s that working out for you so far?
My new mantra regarding lead lists goes back to the old adage, “if you’re gonna buy cheap, you’re gonna get cheap”. This has become especially true within our space.
With a good lead list, we can do more with less.
So what is a good lead list?
A good lead list is recent. All of the contacts on the have been verified that they are still there within the last 1-3 months. The worst thing is calling someone who left the company 2 years ago.
A good lead list is accurate. On average, our lead lists are 98% accurate, which is to say that for everyone 100 leads, 2 are invalid. An invalid could be a lead that’s no longer with the company, or have bad data such as a bad email address.
A good lead list is relevant. There’s nothing worse than calling on irrelevant titles/leads that have nothing to do with the problem you solve.
To take my point a step further, we recently ran an A/B test with one of our clients to understand how data quality influenced results for them. The key result we looked at was appointments. We used the same rep, same scripts, and the same process. The only difference was the list of leads.
Our client purchased a large list of leads (approx. 20,000) from Hoovers/ZoomInfo. The client was very confident in the recency and validity of this list. They originally sent us a list of 3,000+ leads. We researched/cleansed over 800 leads for the pilot period. Our initial efforts for them lead to 10 appointments. Most of these turned into qualified opportunities.
Over the next 4 weeks we then took 145 leads from the original dataset, but did not spend time cleaning them. From those 145, 21 were invalid and for the ones that were valid a good portion of the data was bad (emails, phone numbers, etc…). In 4 weeks of calling, we scheduled 1 appointment. 1!
This was a huge eye opener for our client to the value and impact on results of good data. In short, if you want to run a successful outbound appointment setting program, use recent, accurate, and relevant leads. It will make the world of difference. Or in the case of this client, a 10x difference!
In addition to this client test, we also know from our Data ROI study I previously mentioned, that on average reps that have validated leads achieve 4x more qualified appointments.
Interested a larger, more predictable pipeline? Contact us to talk about outsourcing your lead generation efforts.
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