Not All Leads Are Born Equal: Effectively Prospect Using These Metrics

Mark Roberge
Posted by Mark Roberge on September 30, 2019
Metrics for Effectively Prospecting Leads

Metrics for Effectively Prospecting Leads

I just left a voicemail for a prospect. When should I try them again? How many times should I call a prospect before I give up? How many prospects should be in my call list at any given time?

As we grew the HubSpot sales team, I thought a lot about these questions. With 100+ salespeople and thousands of calls happening a day, the stakes were high. As a result, we spent quite a few cycles in the HubSpot Sales Lab studying these questions and optimizing our prospecting process accordingly.

Today, I will share some of the analysis, specifically around the second question: “How many times should I call a prospect before I give up?” Here are the three tactics we took:

1. Use science to guide your prospecting cadence

The data never lies. We started by analyzing the prospecting patterns and corresponding outcomes on 30,000 leads. The first time we did this analysis was in 2008 when we only had about a dozen salespeople. The results are shown below.

HubSpot_LTV_to_COCA_ratioThe X-axis on the chart shows the number of calls the salesperson made against the lead. Some of the leads, for whatever reason, were only called once. Others were called 12 times. Obviously, the more you call a lead, the higher the likelihood of connecting with them. However, the cost in doing so goes up.

The Y-axis illustrates the Lifetime-Value-to-Customer-Acquisition-Cost ratio, a profitability metric often utilized in SaaS businesses like HubSpot. The higher the score, the more profitable it is to follow that prospecting cadence. The yellow line shows the results for all leads analyzed. This line reaches its maximum profitability at 10 call attempts. Therefore, sales reps should try the leads 10 times before giving up.

We also studied whether the right answer varied by the type of lead we were calling. This particular analysis studied how the answer changed according to the size of the company we were prospecting to. 

For example, the blue line analyzes prospecting calls made to small businesses. This line reaches its maximum profitability at 6 call attempts. Therefore, the ideal number of times to call a small business in our funnel was 6. The result makes sense. Small businesses owners tend to pick up the phone sooner, make decisions faster, and spend less on software than larger companies. All of these factors result in a lower ideal call cadence.

Am I suggesting this is the ideal call cadence for you? No. It’s not even the right answer for us today. This was the ideal prospecting cadence for HubSpot given the market conditions and our product offering in 2008. We re-evaluate the analysis at least annually and adjust our call cadence accordingly. You should do the same.

2. Automate the call sequence into the CRM

Once we had these insights, we made it really easy for salespeople to follow the ideal cadence by automating prospecting into our CRM. I recall that the out-of-the-box process for prospecting in our CRM was not very user-friendly. It took something like 15 clicks just to note that you left a voicemail, sent an email, and to schedule a time to follow up. Imagine doing that 100 times a day!

We adopted the principles of sales automation — making it easier for salespeople to do more in less time — and customized our CRM so that process only took 3 clicks. It also allowed us to program in the ideal prospecting cadence for the salesperson. The lead disappears from the sales person’s prospecting queue and re-appears at the ideal time it should be called again.

Salespeople love this process. They don’t want to think about when they should call their lead again. They want to think about how they will break the ice if the person picks up the phone, how they can help the company with their problems, etc. The process maximizes prospecting efficiency. The process also maximizes CRM adoption because the streamlined process helps the salesperson do their job faster and more effectively.

3. Automate monitoring of the prospecting cadence

Finally, we created an “Overdue Dashboard” that was sent out every night to the entire team. The dashboard was simple. If your name appeared on the dashboard, you had a lead that was not prospected to according to the ideal cadence. Believe it or not, a lot of salespeople valued the dashboard. They feared that some of their leads were slipping through the cracks. The dashboard alerted them if this was, in fact, happening.

Of course, equipping your sales team with the automation tools they need to streamline the sales process and follow up on leads requires buy-in to your inbound strategy. How can you get sales and marketing on the same page? Create a Sales & Marketing Service Level Agreement to help build consensus around your inbound approach and identify ways technology can improve your efforts.

Hopefully, HubSpot’s process inspires ideas on how to increase prospecting efficiency. We’d love to hear how other people are thinking about enhancing prospecting efficiency, so connect with me on LinkedIn.

A Guided Tour of Marketing & Sales Service Level Agreements

Topics: Inbound Sales

click here to take the state of industrial sales and marketing survey