There is a great deal of planning that goes into executing a successful telemarketing campaign. From the beginning, significant research must be conducted in order to define your target market. When the customer base has been established you can then explore multiple lead sources, which takes time. However, investing this time will guarantee a higher return on investment from your leads. The additional groundwork that must be completed includes adopting call center software, hiring and training agents, and developing scripts. By the time these steps are completed and your company has purchased the perfect list of leads, you have invested a substantial amount of time and resources. Before your agents are given the green light, remain strategic and properly organize your priceless leads. Although this step requires extra time, it will maximize the success rate of your leads and ultimately increase overall profitability from the entire call center.

Our recommended way to organize and manage leads includes these seven best practices.

  1. Organize your lead files.
  • Use a naming convention that makes the most sense when sorting similar leads. Leads from multiple sources should be named with the source name in front. For example, ABC Lead Company would start with ABC in the file name.
  • When buying multiple types of leads from a source, name them with the source. Use OL for online, TV for TV leads, RAD for radio leads.
  • Name them with the date you received them so it is easy for you to sort them by age.
  1. Bucket them by hotness.
  • First bucket should include your primary standard leads.
  • Second bucket should include your hot leads that can be regulated based on how quickly you want to go through them.
  • Third bucket should include your filler leads that get lower priority. These are leads to keep your agents busy if they run out of everything else.
  1. Prioritize your leads based on skill set.
  • Your best leads should always go to your best agents to maximize their conversion rate.
  • Set the skill set high on the leads and high on your best performing reps.
  • Put the proportionate amount of calling on the hot bucket based on your percentage of high performing reps. For example, if you have 10 out of 100 reps that are top performers and set to high skill set, set 10% of your calling on the hot bucket.
  1. Contact rate makes a difference.
  • Bucket your leads by historical contact rate. Some leads contact much higher than others, especially if they are callbacks, call verified or responders from offline media.
  • Do not mix leads with significantly different contact rates together because the dialer will abandon calls from the file with higher contact rates.
  • Remember to call through all of one bucket type before you roll over to the next and don’t mix the dialing pattern percentages.
  1. Determine the calling priority that works for your campaign.
  • There might be some cases where leads expire and you want to call your oldest leads first, or times when all of the leads are basically the same and you want to call your lowest attempts first. Regardless of the priority you choose, be sure to make adjustments accordingly.
  1. Remember to be mindful of your dialing frequency.
  • Now that your leads are properly organized the agents can begin dialing more effectively.   You want to try to aggressively reach your leads, without upsetting people and creating noise.
  • Three times per day is the recommended maximum.
  • Set the calling time far enough apart that you are dialing them at different times of the day (morning, afternoon, evening).
  1. Adopt local touch.
  • Implementing this one feature alone will generate an approximate 10% lift in your contact rate.
  • Local touch displays a local number on the customer’s caller ID that still rings back to you.

CallShaper can help with managing your leads and organizing them to maximize profitability. If you’d like to learn more, request a demo and experience the difference of using a web-based dialer.