Why You’re Not Hearing Back

It’s been two weeks and you haven’t heard from that high-value prospect. You’re left wondering was your timing off? Did you reach out too often? Was your pitch forgettable?

The truth is, it might be all of the above. But that’s not a reason to give up. These five quick follow-up tips will help you maintain prospecting momentum while keeping your outreach helpful, relevant, and well-received.

1. Choose the Right Channel for Each Prospect

Every prospect communicates differently, and your follow-up method should reflect that. Here are the most common channels and how to use them strategically:

• Email: The go-to for most outreach. Emails allow for clear messaging and documentation, but inbox competition is fierce. Use concise copy, strong subject lines, and visuals when appropriate to stand out.
• Phone: Phone calls create immediate, personal connection. Be ready to leave concise, valuable voicemails when prospects don’t answer. Review call recordings to sharpen your message.
• Social ������ý���߹ۿ�: Direct messaging on LinkedIn or Twitter can help build rapport before diving into business. Just keep in mind this route is slower and best used for long-term engagement.

Knowing when and where to follow up helps you avoid becoming a nuisance and instead positions you as a thoughtful, adaptable seller.

2. Deliver Value in Every Touchpoint

Effective follow-up isn’t about nagging it’s about helping. Make sure your follow-up offers real value. Instead of just asking if they’re ready to talk, share relevant insights or resources that solve their specific challenge.

For example, if your prospect works in healthcare and your company just released a guide on industry trends, mention a key takeaway and link to the guide in your message. Make your message about them, not your product.

3. Set Clear Next Steps After Each Interaction

Don’t end calls or emails with vague promises. Define what comes next:

• When is the next meeting?
• What is the action item?
• How do they prefer to be contacted?

Follow-ups work best when they build on a clear plan. Be organized and respectful of their time, and you’ll stand out from the flood of forgettable follow-ups.

4. Be Persistent, but Respectful

Most sales email chains end after just one unanswered message. That’s a massive missed opportunity.

Research shows that following up even once increases your reply rate by up to 40 percent. If your first message goes unanswered, follow up once or twice more. Vary your communication methods and messaging style but avoid spamming. Two to three total follow-ups is usually the sweet spot.

Be timely, provide value, and don’t give up too quickly.

5. Know When to Step Back But Leave the Door Open

If a prospect goes cold after multiple touchpoints, don’t burn the bridge. Send a final, friendly message that lets them know you’ll stop reaching out for now but are happy to reconnect when the timing is better.

For example:

“I haven’t heard back, so I’ll pause for now. If things change, I’d love to reconnect when it’s a better fit.”

You can also add a useful piece of content to keep delivering value even as you disengage. This leaves the relationship on a positive note and shows you’re here to help, not just close deals.

Final Thoughts

Following up with sales prospects is both art and science. These five tips tailoring your channels, delivering value, setting clear steps, being persistent, and knowing when to let go can transform your prospecting from annoying to effective.

In partnership between Foundry and SugarCRM, this white paper discusses the current state of selling, and how sales teams can leverage next-generation prospecting tools and tactics to compete in noisy, crowded markets.  

Download the white paper to learn how to: 

• Discover and engage active buying groups before your competition 
• Expand your deals and accounts with insights about what they’re ready to buy 
• De-risk your pipeline and territory with competitive signals 

What’s more, the number of decision-makers can increase for complex deals, and sales cycles are getting longer than ever. But what are we fundamentally doing to adapt? 
 
It’s more important than ever to engage more than just a primary point of contact, most marketing and sales teams aren’t making a concerted effort to multithread their deals.  

What is multithreading in sales?

Multithreading is the sales and marketing strategy of targeting each account from multiple angles. Multithreading is a powerful strategy for B2B sales specifically because B2B deals involve large buying committees. Sales and marketing organizations multithread by targeting diverse personas within each account with tailored advertising and outreach. 

Why aren’t more teams multithreading?

For starters, most teams are not incentivized to multithread deals when their primary KPIs are MQLs, MQAs, or opportunities. If you only get ‘credit’ for driving one lead within an account, you certainly wouldn’t be going out of your way to multithread. I have encountered instances where marketers believe that once an opportunity has been created, the account becomes ‘off limits’ for further marketing efforts. This narrow perspective often limits the opportunities that multithreading could offer. By the same token, if when a second lead within an account is passed to sales, marketing is met with responses like, “We already met with so-and-so from this account”, you’re not likely to practice multithreading. But you should! Here’s why: 

Here’s an example of how multithreading can decrease risk: Sales receives just one MQL from marketing within a target account with 28 people within its buying team. But is the MQL a key decision maker within the buying team? They might not be. They also might have colleagues within their buying group who are meeting with competitors. By ignoring the hidden buying group with single threaded tactics, sales opens themselves up to a lot of risk.  

Benefits of multithreading 

More likely to get buy-in and increase win rates

Multithreading increases win rates by allowing sellers to persuade hidden stakeholders who aren’t bought in. In fact, found that multithreading increased win rates from 5% for single threaded opportunities to 30% when multithreading occurred with 5 stakeholders- a 6X improvement. 

Faster sales cycle – increasing pipeline velocity

One of the biggest barriers to any deal is that the product being sold is not top priority for the buyers. When a product is not top priority, buyers may cancel or reschedule calls, delay moving forward, or wait to bring in other stakeholders. But when you multithread deals you can learn what’s priority for stakeholders across the account, position your product accordingly, and by connecting with different stakeholders, you can push along the account by the FOMO effect – if you meet with more people within the account – others won’t want to be left out and you’ll face less friction.  

Product stickiness and adoption 

We see this all the time in our ABM platform deals: prospects in exploratory calls often say that only one department is getting something out of a product they’re using. When just one department uses a product, the product is easily a risk in case of budget cuts. The goal is for your product to be un-cuttable, and the best way to do that is to get cross-departmental adoption early. By multi-threading deals, you can get a jumpstart on this even before the deal has closed.  

Lower risk of loss due to point of contact leaving 

Sellers have seen this countless times: your deal is progressing well, your POC seems keen to move forward and… they left their job? Now your deal for their previous company is generally dead in the water if you were single threading. But if you were multithreading, you can more easily set next steps with the rest of the buying group, determine who would make the most sense as a new primary point of contact, and see if the deal still has legs.  

Limitations of multithreading 

We don’t report on this well 

Like I mentioned early on, in a world of MQAs and opportunities where the usual expectation is ‘there’s only one of these per account’, marketing and sales teams aren’t incentivized to multithread their deals. If their performance metrics look better to have 3 single threaded deals rather than 1 multithreaded deals, that can be a problem, especially if you reference the stats from – a 6X higher win rate with multithreading, a multithreaded deal should be weighted significantly more heavily than a single threaded deal.  

Requires more persona work 

If you’re going to multi-thread your deals, you can’t expect to use the same talk track with marketers as with sales, as with finance, etc. You have to develop personas and pain points for each, and approach them as the distinct personas that they are. You might even need to determine different channels and tactics that are more effective for each persona such as relying more on cold calls for sales, or advertising for executives, for example.  

Requires more bandwidth   

If you’re going to try to reach 5X more people within each account, you’ll be using more bandwidth. This could mean more marketing support with resources and tactics to reach stakeholders, as well as more sales bandwidth- drafting cadences for more personas within each account, more cold calling, and more social selling touch points.  

Could require more spend 

If you’ll be running additional advertising in your multithreading plays, that could very quickly increase your spend per account. Because of this and requiring additional bandwidth, it’s a good idea to start multithreading with a small target account list of high fit accounts.  
 
Now that we’ve covered the pros and cons of multithreading, let’s jump into some actual multithreading tactics you can deploy in your go-to-market strategy. 

3 Multithreading plays to deploy in your GTM strategy 

Air cover to hidden stakeholders 

When you look at all the contacts associated with a deal after it’s closed-won vs. when it was first created, you’ll likely see more contacts across the account, some of them likely higher level executives who were brought into the deal only once the deal got to a certain point of maturity and they had been sold internally on the importance of purchasing your product or service. 

But there are many reasons why you might never get to closed-won in deals with many stakeholders.You might find that C-suite stakeholders haven’t heard of your business, that a competitor is deeply entrenched, or that they still need to be convinced of the business case for your product.  

If your primary point of contact isn’t absolutely championing your product internally (we love to see it, but that doesn’t make it guaranteed of course), then reasons for deals stalling like the above can be addressed with marketing and sales touches.  

First, let’s start with advertising air cover. Start with your top accounts in pipeline. Identify personas that can make or break your deals but that aren’t the primary points of contact. Now go through your CRM or your sales intelligence to analyze your most common loss reasons that would likely relate to these hidden personas. For example, CFOs not wanting to fund your product, executives having low awareness of your brand, competitors winning more with certain departments, etc. Then based off that information, create ads to target those personas with messaging that addresses the fear, uncertainty, or doubt they might have.  
 
To measure whether your advertising air cover to hidden stakeholders is working, you can run an A/B test comparing the win rate of half of a list of your top accounts pipeline who were exposed to this advertising, vs. half who were not. This way you can decide whether this tactic is worth continuing and expanding for your organization.  

Looping in other team members 

Have you ever received a cold email that mentioned your colleague by name? If you did, you might’ve noticed that it jumped out at you far more than the countless cold emails you receive that contain your own name. By reaching out to multiple members of a team, sellers can increase their response and meeting rates, and people are more likely to reply when there are a couple of them. It goes back to a sort of fear of missing out or fear that they might seem like they’re dropping the ball. This tactic can work well, but you should be careful with it, since it’s much more effective the more personalized it is.  
 
For example, an email mentioning you colleague by name and then referencing a conversation you had with them would be far more likely to receive a response than a spray and pray “Hi {first name}, are you the right person to talk to or is {colleague-first name}?” 
 
However, if you use this tactic dishonestly, your approach may have the opposite effect. For example, don’t say you “talked to their colleague Jane Doe” if you didn’t.  

Cross-team recon 

If you sell to sales and marketing organizations, or if you simply don’t live under a rock, you know that sales and marketing teams are often at odds with each other. This can be due to needing to seemingly argue for credit for revenue,  or whether leads are or are not qualified, difference in opinion over which go-to-market tactics are most effective for their market, or a myriad of other reasons. So when sales and marketing teams both get on board with a product, that’s big. It means your product will be much more likely to be onboarded and adopted across teams and become uncuttable.  

This leads me to a tactic the Foundry ABM team uses to get more information on top accounts and multithread: cross-team recon. Cross team recon is when an SDR cold calls sales team members of an account, as opposed to going straight to marketing, the more typical primary point of contact within their accounts, and asks them exploratory questions about the account. This works because firstly, sales team members are significantly more likely to answer their phone than marketers are. Secondly, because of the idea that sales and marketing are at odds with each other, they may be more willing to share candid information about their pain points around go-to-market tools. And lastly, because the call is from a sales person to another sales person there’s a sense of congeniality, making the sales people being called are more likely to relate to the SDR calling them and want to help them out with information.  

Final thoughts

Now more than ever, multithreading just makes sense for B2B. With ballooning buying groups and dragging sales cycles, multithreading is a key strategy that can improve your revenue generation.  

Now that we’ve discussed what multithreading is, why it’s worth your while, and some plays you could try, give some thought to how your reporting is set up, what tactics are incentivized, and how you can approach your metrics in a way that encourages your team to get the most revenue possible.

For me, productivity doesn’t hit until I’ve had my morning cup of coffee. In comparison, I like to think about ABM as a cup of coffee for sales. Using an ABM strategy will provide your sales team with the fuel they need to get the needle moving on pipeline, and here’s how.

1. ABM creates a shortened sales cycle

One way ABM acts as a shot of espresso is by shortening your sales cycle. Harvard University found that at least 25% of B2B sales cycles take a minimum of 7 months to close. Long B2B sales cycles create frustration for sales representatives and leave ample room for lost opportunities. 

By identifying high-intent accounts early in the buyer’s journey, ABM shortens the sales cycle, earning you more MQA to SQA conversions and new business. Identifying accounts early in the buyer’s journey enables your sales outreach to be personalized with catered messaging and content even before a prospect fills out a form. Starting with a targeted list of accounts allows you to provide prospects a unique personalized experience from the get-go, helping eliminate time wasted prospecting unfit accounts. A  found that individual stakeholders who perceived supplier content to be tailored to their specific needs were 40% more willing to buy from that supplier than stakeholders who didn’t. Getting  in front of the right buyers at the right time will significantly reduce the time it takes for your sales team to win deals. 

2. ABM prioritizes quality leads over quantity

It shouldn’t be about counting the number of leads you have, but rather assessing their value to pipeline – ABM prioritizes quality over quantity. No matter how many MQAs are identified, it doesn’t matter if they don’t close or become SQAs. Rather than being in the dark, ABM lights up the funnel, providing a targeted list of prospects for warm outreach.

Using , ABM can help to answer the burning question of who should sales reach out to right now? Hot or not?

In a  centering on the topic of intent, the evolution of buyer behavior in the past decade and its impact on the modern purchase journey is discussed. “Buyers are now waiting longer to raise their hands and show interest, beginning the purchase journey anonymously,” says Yee. In order to know what accounts (known or unknown) are showing intent, ABM paired with intent data can identify and influence buyers early enough to address pain points throughout the purchase journey. With more visibility into real-time buyer interests and behaviors, both marketing and sales teams are more equipped to engage key stakeholders and win over target accounts. Leveraging both ABM and 1st-party and 3rd-party intent will grow pipeline and make a real impact on revenue.

3. ABM aligns your marketing and sales teams

Marketing and sales both want the same thing, more revenue. So what’s with the disconnect? , only 8% of B2B companies have sales and marketing departments that are tightly aligned. Lack of unity and lead quality between sales and marketing has become a significant hindrance to revenue teams in the ever-evolving B2B landscape. 

ABM provides visibility into key account insights to align marketing and sales with data-driven campaigns. Sales can be more productive because their TAM (total addressable market) is being prioritized with data, which means marketers focus their efforts on warming up accounts before activating sales plays.

In turn, marketers provide salespeople the confidence that they’re reaching out with the correct messaging, to the right people. Serving as the , ABM allows both to work together to plan messaging tracks, agree on intent-based campaign triggers, and reference the same reporting. A study done by  found B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations grew their revenues 24% faster in a three-year period compared to those whose teams work separately.

These aligned and focused efforts between marketing and sales will help skyrocket productivity and pipeline growth through a data-driven market approach.

Marketing & sales alignment .

“One big differentiator for us when it comes to account visibility has been the ability to layer real-time intent data into our audiences,”

Flexera’s Manager of Global Demand Generation. 

 armed with visibility into account insights was able to generate over . With a real-time intent integration, Flexera manages dynamic audiences and scales personalized campaigns for high-fit, high-intent accounts.

Simply put, the ultimate goal of any marketing and sales team is to increase sales conversions and revenue, and ABM makes that possible. See how ABM can be the productivity boost you’ve been searching for.

Welcome to the third installment of our ABM Crash Course series. In part one we covered launching successful display ad campaigns, and in part two we discussed . In this post, we’re going to dive deeper into ABM campaign success and discuss sales activation. Let’s get right into the conversation and learn how to equip sales and marketing teams with the tools, techniques, and insights to move the needle on pipeline.

What is sales activation?

Sales activation is the who, what, and why insights that sales reps use for a more effective and automated approach to reaching conversions. Think of sales activation as the missing link between seamless sales and marketing alignment, that boosts communication and impacts pipeline. True sales activation is more than just an alert, it’s a comprehensive view of everything you need to know about an account and how to act upon those insights.

Why sales activation?

Sales teams don’t always have the bandwidth to pursue a large total addressable market. Large account lists make it difficult to prioritize which accounts are ready to buy, oftentimes leaving active buyers hidden in the funnel. Missing these opportunities leaves a lot of money on the table that otherwise could have been nurtured into a conversion.

With sales activation, you are equipping the sales team with the information and tools necessary to generate more revenue. These valuable insights create a more cohesive sales and marketing strategy that amplifies conversions and unifies goals and reporting.

‍Consider this when looking for a sales activation tool… find one that allows both sales and marketing teams to work together to plan messaging tracks, agree on intent-based campaign triggers, and reference the same reporting.‍

Step 1: Unify goals and reporting

The first step to sales activation is establishing clear common goals within your sales and marketing teams, in addition to the KPIs you want to report on. Sales and marketing alignment is common ABM jargon, however, its importance is no overstatement when it comes to sales activation. When sales and marketing teams have the same field of view, same goals, and are reporting on the same metrics, execution on sales and marketing initiatives becomes seamless.

‍Create custom CRM dashboards

‍Using an ABM platform, you can set up a dynamic dashboard within your CRM. With Salesforce and Salesloft integrations, you can roll out your ABM analytics module with real-time account insights. This provides a more cohesive strategy by keeping everyone on the same page, even on different platforms.

Step 2: Prioritize and segment your total addressable market (TAM)

What is your TAM?

‍Your total addressable market is all of the accounts you can reach and engage within your pipeline.

‍Account organization

‍You know what your TAM is, but now you need to break down those accounts and segment them into their respective groupings. This sounds like a lot of work, and you’d be right if we did this manually, but with an ABM platform, you can easily parse through and segment accounts automatically. This saves valuable time and gives sales and marketing the same field of view so more time can be spent engaging with the highest-fit accounts in pipeline.

Step 3: Have the rights tools

Sales activation platform

‍With the right ABM platform, sales activation is so much more than just an alert notifying sales about a hot account. It’s the ability to make informative decisions and automatically reach surging accounts with your marketing automation software. By providing your sales team with the tools to properly prioritize accounts and relevant content for outreach, you will create a more efficient and effective sales process.

‍Equip your sales team with

• Intent-based marketing campaigns and sales plays
• 1:1 assets for each account
• Automated Lead-to-Account Matching

Sales activation gets your team ahead of the competition and allows them to reach in-demand buyers with the right messaging at the right time. When leveraged correctly and with a unified approach your sales activation strategy will keep your organization one step ahead of the competition.

Step 4: Activate sales plays

Intent-based sales plays

• Orchestrating account prioritization for sales outbound

If your company has a large total addressable market you may benefit by implementing the FIRE data strategy to boost your SDR team’s efficiency. FIRE stands for Fit, Intent, Recency, and Engagement. With this strategy, you’ll sharpen your focus beyond your ICP and target in-demand accounts throughout the funnel.

• Activating relevant sales conversations with intent signals

If you want to take advantage of intent signals deeper in the funnel, you can monitor intent topics related to your competitors. From there, flag interest in competitors and prepare appropriate sales plays. This empowers your sales teams to reach in-demand buyers with counter-claims and more appealing offers than the competition.

‍1:1 assets

‍Let’s take a look at some sales plays that your sales rep can reach accounts with following a surging account alert.

• 1:1 Landing Page
• Email
• Social
• Direct Mail
• Phone Call

Sales activation orchestration

‍With lead scoring, sales reps can get notified on surging accounts in your CRM. This gives the sales the information needed to engage with accounts on multiple channels, or pick which channel makes the most sense to engage with the account based on its position in the purchase journey.

Conclusion

Aligning your marketing and sales teams helps streamline sales and sets your ABM program up for successful sales activation. Remember sales activation doesn’t work without equipping sales with the right tools. Once your sales team has the right tools, they’re provided with the insights and content to engage with hot accounts and move the needle on the pipeline. Stay tuned for our next ABM Campaign Crash Course as we dive into the intent data that supercharges successful ABM programs.

Ready to learn more about how ABM equips sales teams with the tools and knowledge for seamless sales activation?

Marketers know the struggle of trying to do it all on a shoestring budget, especially post-pandemic. If you’re a marketer keen on ABM for your company, here are some tips for how to convince your executive team that it’s worth the investment. 

1. Have a clear plan – know how ABM will fit into your overarching strategy 

One of the most important ways to prepare to sell your executive team on ABM is to have a clear plan. You should be able to speak with confidence on how ABM will fit into your overarching marketing strategy, and how it can benefit the existing martech programs already in use. There’s nothing more embarrassing than selling your team on a solution only to backtrack later when it doesn’t work out as you had hoped.

2. Tailor your pitch to the people you’re talking to

Your message should be different based on who you’re talking to. Ask yourself:

• What’s their level of ABM knowledge?
• What’s their key concern / goal?
• What’s their communication style?

Don’t assume one has existing knowledge on ABM. Start with a brief overview to keep everyone along for the ride while you give your pitch. As you plan your pitch, speak to your audience’s concerns, and how ABM aligns with their goals. Stay mindful of your audience’s communication style, incorporating media such as ebooks, case studies, videos, or blogs when you think they’ll engage with it and find the information valuable. 

3. Anticipate roadblocks

You likely can guess what roadblocks may crop up along your path. Perhaps there are often many stakeholders and projects get passed back and forth until they’re dead in the water; maybe your budget is tight, maybe your team is short-staffed and it just doesn’t seem like the right time. Ask yourself how to bypass these roadblocks. If there are many stakeholders, whose buy-in should you go after first? If the budget is tight, can you promise a specified ROI? If your team is short staffed, can ABM implementation help your team become more efficient? Think these things through ahead of time and you’ll shine when it comes time to get down to brass tacks.

4. Get cross-departmental buy-in. 

ABM is as much for sales as it is for marketing, so securing buy-in from your sales department thought leaders sets you up for success when  selling to your executive team. 

As we know, sales development is complex, requiring an experienced team, dedicated sales development tools, and the right management to take Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and turn them into Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) through lead nurturing and personalized engagement.

The importance of sales development isn’t in question, but what is hotly debated is whether an organization should have an in-house, outsourced, or blend of both sales development teams.

Throughout 2022, we saw some interesting findings, revealing which way the wind is blowing.

In our of 399 large companies (average of 10,400 employees) from all over the world, we found that a whopping 73% of respondent organizations now use a blend of both approach to sales development, seeking to benefit from the advantages of in-house and outsourced sales development, while minimizing the disadvantages.

Compared to our 2021 survey, where only 53% of respondents were using a blend of both sales development approach, we see powerful signals to suggest that blend of both is fast becoming the method of choice for sales development.

Read the full report here for more sales development insights:

In this article, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each type of sales development method, and provide insight into why the blend of both sales development teams is becoming more popular.

Pros and cons of full in-house sales development

First off, let’s start with in-house sales development advantages and disadvantages.

Foremost, the major advantages of an in-house sales development team are control and visibility. Similar to an in-house sales or in-house marketing team, all aspects of strategy, management, technology, structure and personnel is managed by stakeholders within the organization.

As you might expect, an in-house sales development team will have a naturally close working relationship with marketing and sales. This can make the interaction between each department transparent, helped by close knit bonds. For example, in-house sales development representatives may have an easier time engaging with sales colleagues to hand over hot leads, or discuss successes and challenges during the lead nurturing process.

Related:

In addition, in-house Sales Development Representatives (SDR) can rapidly share insights with marketing colleagues, and vice versa, regarding the lead qualification process to highlight areas of improvement.

What are the advantages of in-house sales development?

There are many advantages to in-house sales development, which largely fall into the following categories:

• In-house sales development offers open communication: In house SDRs can easily broadcast important information to other departments regarding leads and strategy
  
• In-house sales development ensures full team control and training: In-house SDRs ensure the ability to hire and shape the team as the organization sees fit, and shape a team to have certain skills and experience.
  
• In-house sales development will ensure staff are more invested in the company and culture: In-house SDRs will have greater ability to represent the organization and champion company values when engaging leads.

In-house sales development enables full control of strategy: Your organization will have full control over SDR strategy, from technology, to lead nurturing tactics, objectives and more.

What are the disadvantages of in-house sales development?

While there are several advantages to in-house sales development, there are an equal number of disadvantages that are making organizations think twice about this approach.

For the most part, in-house sales development control can be a double-edged sword. With an in-house team, you must consider factors such as the costs of hiring and training a full team, dedicating resources to manage the team, the costs of purchasing sales development technologies, reducing workforce churn, office space, data management and more.

In our annual survey, respondents consistently picked out 2 challenge areas in running an in-house sales development team. 83% of respondents stated:

• “We do not have the flexibility we need in terms or resource and expertise”
• “We do not have the management expertise to run the team effectively as their in-house sales development challenges”

The survey also revealed that some challenges were more apparent depending on job titles.

For instance:

• Executives, VPs, and senior VPs said that the inability to hire and retain staff is the biggest challenge (42%), followed by a lack of management expertise to run in-house sales (40%)

• At the director + level, the highest percentage of respondents’ views managing costs effectively (42%) as the biggest challenge

• At the manager+ level, the biggest concern was the lack of flexibility when with resource allocation and in-house sales development expertise (71%)

Pros and cons of fully outsourced sales development

Nurturing leads to take them from MQLs to SALs is a resource intensive and time-consuming activity. Leads need more nurturing than ever before to feel they are ready to make a purchasing decision. Because of this, the sales process has become longer and more complex. SDRs need to have their finger on the pulse of your target market to understand customer challenges, so they can offer viable solutions to those challenges and foster relationships.

Related: Overcoming challenges to hiring strong sales development representatives

Because of this complexity, there is a strong case for organizations to outsource sales development to gain quick access to sales development expertise in one cost package. In our , most respondents expect that a higher percentage of their sales development will be outsourced over the next year (66%).

In comparison, when we asked in 2021, most respondents stated that the level of outsourcing will not change (48%). This represents a significant increase in respondents aiming to outsource more of the SDR function to ensure the sales pipeline keeps flowing.

What are the advantages of outsourced sales development?

• Outsourcing saves time and money: By outsourcing sales development, you sidestep the major costs and time needed to develop and successfully manage a full functioning sales development team. You can get immediate access to the knowledge, technology, and know-how of an organization that follows sales development best practice daily.
  
  In addition, an outsourced sales development team will work with your organization to make the sales process smooth and seamless, leaving your sales team to focus on converting high quality leads and not sales development tasks.
  
• Outsourcing ensures sales development is focused on the task, not company politics: Without strong organization-wide buy-in, and a driven management team, an in-house sales development team may be overlooked in favor of sales and marketing regarding resource allocation. In addition, sales development may get drawn into marketing or sales activities during busy periods, which is a misuse of SDR resources.
   
• Outsourcing frees up resources to further develop marketing and sales: Rather than diverting a vast sum of funds to develop an in-house sales development team from scratch, you can use those funds to further develop your marketing or sales teams. Whether that entails increasing the headcount, buying new technologies, or running more events, outsourcing offers the opportunity to use to resource existing departments.

• Outsourcing is the fastest way to gain sales development capabilities and local skills (such as language): It can’t be stressed enough, but developing an in-house sales development team takes time. And even when you have a team in place, the high demand for experienced SDRs will ensure that your team will consistently experience churn.

By outsourcing sales development, you leave the hiring and coaching in the capable hands of an experienced organization that lives and breathes sales development, and has the methodologies and skills in place to retain highly skilled SDRs. In-fact, there are many skills that an outsourced team can actively bring to the table to help you navigate new waters and markets.

For instance, the highest relative percentage of respondents in our annual survey selected “gaining access to language skills” as the biggest reason to outsource sales development.

What are the disadvantages of outsourced sales development?

While outsourcing sales development has several advantages, there are several disadvantages to consider.

• Outsourcing sales development can involve trial and error to find the right partner: Sometimes, the organization you outsource with may not be suitable for your organization. The outsourced SDR team may be unfamiliar with your product types and markets. As you might expect, this can be resolved by ensuring you thoroughly research the company you intend to work with, and even trial their services.

• Outsourcing sales development leads to less control: A common concern when outsourcing is the potential loss of control and lack of oversight regarding the lead nurturing process. Likewise, there are also concerns that you might lose lead data and information. It is vital that you outline the working relationship you would prefer when considering your outsourcing options..

• Outsourcing sales development results in inefficient communication: In our survey, the highest relative percentage of respondents see communication as the most important characteristic of a successful SDR team (13%).

Organic communication and connections that are built in house can be incredibly valuable to promote company culture and close working relationships.

Respondents in our annual survey shared a similar story when asked what the biggest challenges are to outsourcing sales development. The highest percentage of respondents picked data protection and compliance rules as the primary roadblock (48%), followed by pricing (48%), and last, the desire to keep sales development knowledge in-house (45%).

The solution: Blend of both sales development

A hybrid sales development approach is fast becoming the most desirable method of gaining sales development capabilities, quickly and inexpensively.

Three out of four organizations from our annual survey use the blend of both resourcing models for their sales development function. Meanwhile, the number of respondents from our 2022 survey that stated they will move towards “in-house only” has reduced substantially compared to 2021 results, by 55%.

How does a blend of both sales development function work?

A hybrid sales development team combines your in-house sales development team, and combines it with the technology, know-how and resources of an outsourced sales development team. The outsourced sales development team will help you develop sales development strategies and keep you on the front foot with market changes, local knowledge and lead insight.

Related: Why blending in-house and outsourced sales development works

Let’s explore why organizations are moving away from in-house only, towards a blend of outsourcing and in-house sales development.

What are the advantages of blend of both sales development?

• Blend of both sales development enables organizations to swiftly respond to the market: A hybrid approach offers broad flexibility to leverage expertise and technology that would typically require huge resource and time investment.
  
  This is where hybrid shines. An outsourced sales development team will enhance your in-house team with access to the latest sales development technologies and strategies, and will help you better engage with leads.

• Blend of both sales development will help your organization scale: A transition towards hybrid is often viewed as a sign of maturity. When organizations get larger, they typically have an in-house team and an outsourced team, and sometimes multiple outsourced vendors to help with different tasks and target markets. This way, your in-house teams can tackle segments they are familiar with. Meanwhile, outsourced teams can target new markets.

• Blend of both sales development improves market understanding: A blend of both enables a more involved lead nurturing process. If you have an outsourced sales development team working alongside an in-house team, you significantly improve your ability to understand how effective your lead nurturing strategies and SDR engagement is.

An outside SDR team, with a fresh perspective, can work wonders on your market learnings. A good outsourced SDR team will record every engagement, conversation, and every piece of feedback they get from leads, as well as their own feedback. With this valuable information, your in-house and outsourced teams can work together to gain a better understanding of success and challenges and promote improvement.

• Blend of both sales development helps you target new markets and lead segments:

With the expertise of an outsourced sales development team, you can break into new and uncharted markets to boost your revenue. Diving headfirst into a new market is often difficult, and it can take a substantial amount of time to make headway if your in-house team has to reinvent the wheel if the target market requires substantially different engagement strategies.

This is where an outsourced team can help you benefit from the experience and history of the outsourced team that may have a track record in the territory your organization is aiming to target, which will help you tackle the challenges that come with it, such as language barriers. Outsourced teams operate all over the world, and can be your representatives and introduce your solutions to foreign regions.

Want to enhance your sales development capabilities with a blend of both approach to sales development?

Organizations returned to the blend of both strategy during 2022, with 73% of respondents in our now combining in-house and outsourced sales development. This is the highest level of adoption we’ve seen during the three year period in which we’ve been running this survey, and as we have discussed throughout this article, it is easy to see why the wind is blowing in this direction.

Has your organization struggled with full outsourcing or full in-house sales development? If you are aiming to move away from in-house sales development, want to try outsourcing, or a best of both approach, get in touch. Foundry SDS is a leading Sales Development Service who provides specialist, high quality outsourced business development teams for technology vendors to improve their lead nurturing strategies.

We have experience helping organizations all over the world enhance their in-house sales development team with the expertise and experience of our outsourced teams. Outsourcing is a great utility for organizations that have finite funds resources for staffing and training an in-house sales development team. Outsourcing provides access to skills, people, technology, and expertise in a comparatively small cost package when compared to an in-house team.

Our services help clients manage costs, improve conversion rates, and reach peak performance, without changing their in-house infrastructure.

What does our service look like?

• Multi-touch and multi-channel: customizable to your requirements
• Scalable: available for national, regional, or global campaigns in 40+ languages
• Transparent, honest, and data-driven: a structured schedule of meetings to discuss progress and optimization, with metrics available on request
• Experienced: built on a deep knowledge of the IT industry, languages, and lead nurturing techniques
• Underpinned by: robust infrastructure, quick integration with leading clients, and high-caliber business development teams based in Dublin, Ireland

Want to fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads that match your ideal buyer? See how Foundry SDS can help.

What’s next?

Before lead nurturing can take place, it is important to qualify leads to ensure that sales development time and resources are being allocated efficiently.

Nothing is more frustrating for sales development than to have mountains of leads that are unlikely to convert. Not only does this waste time and resources, it clogs up your sales pipeline with dead ends.

Lead scoring will help you remove that first barrier by highlighting strong leads that show intent and willingness to learn more about your organization.

With lead scoring in place, your sales development team will not only know what leads to focus on, but they will also have a clear picture of who the lead is in fine detail – from demographic information, to how they have interacted with your organization, and what their greatest business fears are.

This is fuel for your sales development to use in their lead nurturing efforts to engage with leads on a personal level, which is a must.

found that companies using lead scoring systems, increase their ROI for lead nurturing activities by 77%. Another study they conducted found that 68% of high performing marketers attribute their success to lead scoring processes.

In this article, we explain lead scoring, and discuss top strategies to ensure your lead scoring system helps you separate the wheat from the chaff to find the leads that your sales development team will enjoy pursuing.

Learn more about lead qualification here.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is a tried-and-true strategy to identify what leads have the most potential value for your organization. In practice, lead scoring is assigning a value to a lead to determine its worthiness.

The scoring system and measurements used will differ from organization to organization and depend on who your ideal buyer is, and the effectiveness of marketing materials. However, all lead scoring systems will assign value to leads based on their attributes and actions towards your organization. For example, demographic information, such as job title, industry, and location. And also behavioral information such as email opens, web page visits and registrations.

These actions and attributes will provide a positive or negative score, which will help you determine if the lead should be pursued for lead nurturing. 

Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all method for scoring your leads. However, to make it a success, every lead scoring model you create should be consistent with the characteristics of the ideal buyer persona you have created. Attributes and actions that are consistent with your ideal persona will generate more points for the lead.

A buyer persona will help you determine what criteria has to be met for your lead to become a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL). This is a research-based profile of what you consider to be your ideal buyer, down to what kind of business challenges they face, how much money they will spend, their job title and more.

Read more: Tips to nurture marketing qualified leads to sales accepted leads

For example, if you find that webinar attendees have high conversion rates, this may demand a high score compared to a lead that simply opens a lot of emails.

You no doubt have many touchpoints that will each have its own score, and this may get overwhelming quickly. Start with the data points that provide the highest score and work your way down in increments. That way, your scoring will be consistent and predictable.

We will come back to buyer personas later in the article.

Learn more about .

Why is lead scoring important?

Generating leads is a good first step, but wouldn’t you want to know if they are showing the telltale signs of becoming a buyer? For example, the difference between a lead that is looking for educational content, versus a decision maker that is serious about buying a product. With a lead scoring system, you will know immediately which one you should pursue.

In addition, lead scoring will provide valuable information for lead nurturing. Remember, every interaction and touchpoint reveals information about the lead and what their intentions might be. A lead which reads content and attends webinars on a specific subject may have a singular business challenge that you can help them solve.

Lead scoring removes the guesswork and ensures that your sales funnel is packed with leads that are more likely to convert. Sales development can use this information to kickstart lead nurturing efforts based on the levels of interest the lead shows in your products and services.

How lead scoring improves sales and marketing relationships

Collaboration and a shared strategy are key. Sales and marketing should understand what leads they are after and why to develop a coordinated strategy. Lead scoring effectively does this, knocking out two birds with one stone.

Marketing and sales need to agree on an ideal buyer persona and the scoring system used in the lead qualification strategy. By clearly defining where the lead is in the buyer’s journey, it will provide all teams with the information to decide if sales should pursue them or not. Conversely, if the lead is valuable, but is not ready for a sales call, it can be further nurtured by the sales development team.

This will reduce the likelihood of friction that is caused by sales complaining about being given poor leads, and marketing complaints about not having the right information to target suitable leads.

Are your teams set up for success? 5 key elements for a successful business development team: Is your organization set up for success?

How lead scoring supports strong marketing campaigns

Good marketers should run a fine-tooth comb over their marketing efforts to see what is performing and what isn’t. We all know iterative improvement over time is the key to success, and lead scoring facilitates this in spades. In fact, it serves as a tool to check the health of marketing efforts.

By analyzing and applying scores to your various touchpoints, you gain knowledge of how they perform and contribute to the goal of helping a lead learn more about your organization.

For example, after analysis, you may find that a series of webinars you host and dedicate a lot of resources to results in very few conversions, and has a low score attached to it when it is attended by a prospect. 

However, the monthly report you publish, which requires fewer resources and leads to more conversions down the line, has a high score and signifies a stronger intent for a lead to become a buyer. This helps your marketing team narrow in on what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to be improved.

How lead scoring boosts your ROI

A lead scoring system can be a tremendous boost for your ROI. If scores are applied logically and consistently, you will see improved conversion rates and sales development and marketing productivity. Remember, lead scoring does not increase the volume of leads, it highlights high quality leads. And regardless of the size of your organization, focusing on lead quality over lead quantity will yield more conversions.

It is a data driven framework that respects the valuable time of your sales development team to ensure they only spend time nurturing leads that have an obvious need for your solution. It will improve ROI by:

• Helping you see which touchpoints, content, tactics and strategies help improve your relationships with leads
• It ensures your sales development team focuses their efforts on high-value leads
• It provides data to help you improve your marketing efforts to generate personalized content
• It provides a mechanism to segment leads and develop strategies for each of your buyer personas
• It provides structure to give you control over your future marketing efforts

Do you have a sales development team? Many organizations do not have a sales development team and rely on marketing for lead nurturing. If you don’t have a dedicated sales development team, see how we can help you here.

Related:

Tip 1: Create strong buyer personas

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal buyer. Why is this important? Because you have to know exactly who you are trying to market to. The more detailed your buyer personas are, the better you will engage with them.

Today’s customers are aware of the options on the market, and they know how to do the research. So you have to make sure that you understand their unique business challenges, so you can present your company as a solution.

Buyer personas comprise demographic data, as well as qualitative information from interviews and surveys.

Demographic information

• Company size
• Company spending ability
• Job title
• Age
• Location
• Industry
• Decision-making ability

Once you put this information together, you can analyze it to determine trends that give you insight into your most valuable customers and customer segments. Identify what attributes paint the best portrait of your ideal buyer that has an obvious need for your solutions.

Interviews and Surveys

Engage customers, as well as your own employees, for the best insights into your ideal buyers. After all, who can provide better information about the people you are trying to target than the leads that have become a buyer and the employees that engage with them every day.

Customers interviews and surveys

Your existing customers are likely the best representation of your ideal buyer. Your sales development team should engage them through surveys, or phone interviews, to find out why they chose your solution, and what led them to that decision. Engage with a wide range of customers, not just customers spending the most money, or customers that are the happiest with your service. This way, you can build a more detailed picture of your ideal buyer derived from an array of unique experiences.

Surveys and interviews have the added benefit of providing customers with a platform to voice their experiences. It is always good for an organization to seek feedback, and customers welcome the invitation to help shape the future of the service.

To help improve your response rates, you can offer incentives for customers such as discounts, trials, or gift cards.

Here are some questions you can ask existing buyers to help build your buyer personas:

• How is success measured in your role?
• What are you responsible for?
• Have you had experience with this kind of product before?
• What are your biggest challenges and pain points?
• How do you use our product to help solve those pain points?
• Will your challenges be the same one year from now?
• What were you hoping to achieve through the product and are you seeing results?
• What spurred you on to make a purchasing decision?
• Did you have any major concerns before making a purchasing decision?
• Did you have to get stakeholder buy-in to purchase the product?
• How do your peers feel about the effectiveness of the product?

Remember, the goal of these questions is to understand your customers on a deeper level. Chiefly, their goals, challenges and what motivates them.

Employee interviews and surveys

Besides your customers, speak with your sales development and sales teams. They are in contact with leads and customers daily, and are best placed to mine their experiences and share unique details about customer profiles.

This is especially true for team members that have been in the job for a long time, and will no doubt have recognised common threads that high-value leads and customers share.

Here are some questions you can ask your employees:

• What job titles are you eager to see in your pipeline?
• What are the most common challenge areas you uncover?
• What fears do leads have about using our solution?
• What competitors are leads considering?
• Have they had prior experience with similar products?
• What decision-making capability do specific leads have?
• Do our products and services meet their expectations?
• What are the high-value touchpoints that leads enjoy?
• What interactions are the most valuable?

Segment your buyer personas

After you have compiled your research, it is time to create buyer personas. The goal here is to paint a colorful picture and narrative of who you want to target. Creativity is key, and the more personalized the profile is, the better your marketing, sales development and sales teams will internalize it.

A buyer persona should have:

• A personalized description and name (i.e. Technology Savvy Sam)
• Job title
• Age
• Industry
• Role and responsibilities
• Who they report to
• Goals
• Challenges
• KPIs
• Their biggest fear
• What they need to do their job successfully
• Preferred method of communication

Once you have created a few buyer personas and have a clear idea of what makes them tick, and what keeps them up at night, you can create messaging, lead nurturing and sales strategies around these behaviors. Not only will this ensure all of your teams agree with whom you are trying to target, you will also be able to engage with customers on a deeper and more meaningful level.

Tip 2: Assign positive and negative attributes for customer actions

Once you have your buyer personas ready, and your marketing team has generated the leads, it is up to your sales development team to nurture them. This process involves scoring the lead positively or negatively, depending on how they interact with various touchpoints.

It’s tricky to decide on what scoring system you use to rank your leads. As a benchmark, find out your sales conversion rate. This is the proportion of qualified leads that resulted in a sale, divided by the number of qualified leads.

From this benchmark, you can use the data you got from your surveys, interviews and buyer personas to determine which attributes are more common for leads that convert.

From these attributes, you can assign a positive score or a negative score.

Positive score

The lead receives a positive score when their behavior shows they are moving towards a purchase. For example:

• Opening an email
• Visiting a pricing page
• Requesting a demo
• Attending a webinar
• Requested a sales call
• Engaged on social media
• Downloaded a report

As you might expect, the weighting of the points you assign will be different for every touchpoint based on your prior research. For example, if you found that there is no clear correlation between a lead who downloads a specific report and a lead who becomes a buyer, downloading the report will attribute a low score.

Conversely, if you find that leads who attend a webinar have an increased likelihood of becoming a buyer, it will demand a higher score.

It’s tricky to get a mathematically sound scoring system right on the first go, and it may feel arbitrary. To improve the logic of your scoring system, you can calculate the percentage of close rates of individual attributes, compared to the percentage of your overall close rates. For example, if your baseline conversion rate is 1% and leads that ask about pricing information have a close rate of 15%, you could award this attribute 15 points.

Negative score

It is also important to factor negative scores into your system. This will help your sales development team recognize when leads are failing to engage and if they aren’t ready to progress down the sales funnel. Assign negative scores for actions, such as:

• Email unsubscribes
• Email bounce backs
• Limited or no response to phone calls and emails
• Wrong job title or industry
• Not a decision maker
• Declined invitations to calls and events

Tip 3: Automate your lead nurturing strategy

Once you have your leads mapped and your scoring system in place, you can introduce automation into your lead nurturing strategy.

Ultimately, automation will ensure that each lead is automatically nurtured on autopilot according to rules you set.

The core benefit is removing manual and repetitive tasks, and letting automation do the job for you. Through automation, you can send as many personalized lead nurturing emails and set up as many workflows as your company requires – all without resource constraints.

Personalisation is key here. Depending on what stage of the funnel the lead is in, different lead nurturing strategies will be required. You will gain full control of your engagement strategies, including the ability to automate scheduling, determine the number of engagements pushed out, and set triggers based on the actions of the lead.

Here are some common automated lead nurturing workflows you can try:

Online event workflow

Online and physical events are key to engaging your target audience and are one of the most effective methods of generating leads. Whether you host or take part in events, creating a lead nurturing workflow that prompts your leads for registrations is vital.

As this workflow is all about times and dates, you need to set up email triggers before the event (ideally one month), another email trigger just before the event begins, and finally one afterward to wrap up the event.

Key lead workflow

Your key lead workflow is based on your ideal buyer personal. When leads reach a high enough lead qualification score, you can trigger a chain of emails to boost the chance of your sales team converting them.

Set up triggers to send them content that spotlights free trials, demos and walkthroughs. The more personalized you make the email, the better – show that you understand what their challenges are by outlining them in the email, while offering an array of solutions.

New service or product launch workflow

This workflow will help generate buzz around your new service or product. Similar to the event email workflow, you can trigger a series of emails to send to your segments before, on the day of, and a week after the launch.

Instead of sending a single email to market your new product, you can highlight a unique feature within a series of emails. Going one step further, it is also a good idea to send different emails depending on the lead segment and what their challenges are – by highlighting distinct elements of the product and how it will help resolve those challenges.

Learn more about lead nurturing automation here.

Tip 5: Factor point decay into your lead scoring

Point decay occurs when the lead doesn’t become a buyer and stops engaging with your marketing and lead nurturing. At this stage, it can be very hard for leads to proceed through your funnel.

This can cause issues. An abundance of point decaying leads will clog up your sales funnel and misdirect the time and resources of marketing and sales development teams – time and resources that can be better spent on leads that show interest in your solutions.

What can you do about it? Determine the point at which you reduce contact with a lead that shows point decay.

We would recommend setting out X days and X reduced points for 3 different types. For example:

• If no interaction after 10 days, reduce 10 points
• In no interaction after 30 days, reduce 30 points
• If no interactions after 60 days, reduce 50 points

This will help you gain greater perspective over the genuine interest a lead is showing in your organization, and ensure leads are categorized by recent positive activity, not positive history.

For example, a lead that registers for an event but then doesn’t engage with any touchpoints for two months will have a lower lead score than a fresh lead that signed up to the same event. Point decay will clearly illustrate that the latter lead is a higher value.

Tip 6: Lead nurturing technologies

Lead nurturing is multifaceted and requires technology to do the heavy lifting. A lot of organizations focus on CRMs to manage leads, but these often have the best lead scoring capabilities.

There are many tools with dedicated lead nurturing and lead scoring solutions on the market. Here are some of the best solutions available to help you automate the lead scoring process.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a marketing tool with an array of built-in CRM functions, such as email marketing, nurturing tools, and awareness and intent tools. Through AI-powered insights, ActiveCampaign will help you identify leads that are ready for nurturing and show strong compatibility with your organization.

Some of its lead scoring features include the ability to auto-start nurturing campaigns when leads reach a score threshold, alert team members when a lead’s score changes based on your parameters, and also score leads based on the value of the sale.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

An all-in-on marketing automation platform, HubSpot features an array of lead scoring tools besides its automation and advanced marketing features. One of the main attractions of HubSpot’s offering is its predictive lead scoring capabilities, which removes the manual elements of lead scoring. You can take advantage of bots which will pass through thousands of data points to find the right leads for your organization.

Freshsales

Freshsales is an automation solution aimed towards sales teams. Through AI-powered insights, it can help foster relationships with leads, and organize customer information and help create personalized email campaigns. In terms of its lead scoring capabilities, Freshsales utilizes predictive scoring, as well as scoring leads based on historical data. It is a great tool for identifying which leads need attention, as well as giving you a heads up on what a lead will do next.

Working with Foundry Sales Development Services

Lead scoring is key to empowering your sales development team to convert leads. However, it requires a lot of dedicated time and resources to implement effectively.

Depending on the size of your company and how granular you want your campaigns, you might need an entire team dedicated to sales development that sits in between marketing and sales.

It is important to remember that lead scoring and lead nurturing isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy, which is why having experts look at your organization with fresh eyes is hugely beneficial.

If you outsource sales development, you don’t have to worry about:

• Setting up lead nurturing workflows
• Qualifying and segmenting leads
• Salaries
• Technology and licensing
• Office Space
• Recruiting
• Training
• Onboarding

Foundry SDS are lead nurturing experts. We will create a bespoke lead nurturing program to deliver high-quality leads that fit the buyer persona of your business development strategy.

Outsourcing lead nurturing and sales development will take care of all the lead nurturing challenges and costs with a single package. And you gain the expertise and speed of the company that specializes in sales development. Learn more about our services here. What’s next? Surviving and thriving: