HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A SUCCESSFUL B2B SALES PROSPECTING CAMPAIGN.

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“One of the biggest misconceptions in modern, effective sales is that adding sales people and working them harder is

what grows revenue... Wrong! In high productivity sales organisations, salespeople do not cause customer acquisition

growth, they fulfil it. Lead generation causes new customer acquisition.”

The quote above is by Aaron Ross, author of Predictable Revenue and the principle reason I started Marketing Republic.

I wanted to help companies build predictable, sustainable revenue streams and I know from experience that this starts with a predictable source of leads.

When I first read Predictable Revenue, I thought the principles and tactics for Outbound Marketing could have a serious impact on my business.

I quickly realised that the process I was looking at had huge potential for both my own business, but more importantly for our clients as well.

I have been in the printing industry all my life, but developed my traditional printing business into an online business.

I made a decision some years ago that I needed to commit to learning more about sales and marketing both on and offline, and so relentlessly studied the latest techniques.

I strove to learn about techniques like internet marketing, content marketing, social media and direct response marketing, and combined this with my offline marketing, branding, sales and direct mail experience.

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What Would Your Business Look Like With a Strong Lead Flow?

The problem many businesses have is peaks and troughs in their sales.One month they are swamped, the next month the work dries up!

Trying to plan everything from staffing levels, recruitment, cash flow, stock levels and potentially any resource in your busi-ness is simply a nightmare if you don’t know how much work you are going to have!

What do you do?Go for it and gear up, only for orders to dip and your profits to get hit? Or play it safe financially and then be unable to fulfil an unexpected surge in work?

It’s not a great position to be in and a key factor in preventing sales growth for underachieving business.

On the other end of the spectrum, have you grown fast but want to maintain and improve the success you’ve already achieved?

In many cases, businesses can see a potential glass ceiling ahead of them as they have to make important decisions whilst growing.

It is the realisation that key sales person-nel spend their time in front of the right prospects focussing all their effort on closing deals, rather than trying to find the opportunities in the first place.

My dad always told me... the time to be selling is when you’re busy!Wise words from dad... but the problem so many salespeople have is when to make those sales calls and find more

prospects when they’re rushed off their feet writing proposals, presenting to clients and making sure that all impor-tant client signature is on the contract as quickly as possible.

In an ideal world we should make time.

If you run your own business, you probably do make the time, but realisti-cally does your sales team have as much drive and work ethic?

Of course some may well do, but not all salespeople are keen on making time to do a percieved low level task...

Hitting the phones and getting constant rejection is a task many salespeople are given when they start out.

But cold calling is NOT fun!Ok, you could say it’s a necessary evil, but do you want your people using valuable hours on a process that is often 98% worthless.

You will still have your best and worst sales performers (the 80/20 applies to everything), but you should be measuring salespeople’s effectiveness at converting pipeline, not creating the pipeline in the first place.

Much more effective is a dedicated out-bound prospecting team that will feed your sales team with qualified opportunities.

Salespeople soon find a reason to stop prospecting?All our clients have had the same reali-sation that has encouraged them to take action and engage an agency like Marketing Republic.

Stefan BoyleFounder & Chief Conversation Starter

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That realisation is that their sales team should be spending their time in front of prospects who fit their Ideal CustomerProfile. Not wasting their time on a low level task such as cold calling.

We help clients’ sales teams be more effective by starting conversations with more prospects who fit their ICP and starting the sales process, handing sales-people qualified opportunities... not cold leads.

We have run campaigns in over 20 coun-tries working with a wide range of clients who all sell high value propositions, Busi-ness to Business.

We have sent hundreds of thousands of targeted emails and have had thousands of conversations both via email and on the phone, qualifying all prospects to en-sure our clients’ salespeople are not wast-ing their time on worthless leads.

There are two vital elements to achieve the success we do for our clients.Firstly, we use a proven process we have developed called the OUTREACH Formula.

Secondly, collaboration is vital.

We are part of YOUR team... we are your business development partner and we are dedicated and committed to helping clients achieve success by filling their sales pipeline with opportunities.

We are damn good at it!

But we don’t work with everyone!As the need for collaboration is key and you are going to be working very closely with my team for months, it is crucially important that there is a good fit between our organisations.

The entrepreneurs and key executives we work with must be fully committed, forward thinking, ambitious and want to scale their business.

Lastly, if you are trying to sell something nobody wants... we probably can’t help!

If you have a proven track record of success but want to scale and grow quick-er... we can help!

Keep reading to find out more about how my team and I can help you by using our OUTREACH Formula to scale your business and ensure you achieve your goals and objectives!

Ongoing

Ongoing

Opportunity

Understand

Test

Research

EmailHandover

Call Acquire

Ongoing

Ongoing Ongoing

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Campaign Set-up

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Case Studies

We have created three case-studies for you to help illustrate how our process benefits our clients and even more importantly the results you can expect from your campaign.

We will show you the results we get for our clients, and then we will kick on to breaking down each element of our OUTREACH Formula in detail.

All three of the client stories have benefited from a long-term relationship with Marketing Republic. We always explain to our clients that we are not looking for a quick win.

We are always looking for ideal clients for ourselves as we do for our clients. We need to make sure there is a fit between our two organisations and that we foster the best relationships and most importantly results.

Each campaign that we run is unique to the individual client.

Our process remains similar from campaign to campaign, which has been created and updated over the past five years.

Check out the three case studies, and then you’ll see in more detail how our process could work for your business…

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CASE STUDY - Boost Capital

Set-up & Background

The Marketing Republic team initially met with Boost Capital in May 2017 to discuss the services of Boost, scope of the project and the next steps prior to campaign kick-off.

Our brief was to provide qualified sales opportunities for their growing team of funding specialists. Unlike almost all our other campaigns, Boost Capital provided us with data for our campaigns.

Initially these were prospective clients who had received a ‘HTML newsletter’ style email and had clicked through to a landing page but had not applied for funding.

The turnaround between our first meeting and first email sequence was just one week, which included setting up systems such as a dedicated CRM, a custom email sequence written for Boost Capital, an email account and telephone ‘script’.

The Campaign

The Marketing Republic team started testing the email sequences on a smaller scale in May, and began building a pipeline of responses to work. In the first few weeks, the email team created ‘reply’ templates based on the email replies they were receiving.

We also worked with data that was considered ‘warmer’, so we shortened our email sequence from 5 emails to 3 emails. The 3-email sequence was written in a more informal style, with less information in the email copy. The purpose of this sequence was to simply re-engage prospects with a view to discussing a potential application.

Results

Client Feedback

“We have been working closely with the team at Marketing Republic for a few months now and what we have

found so far has been hugely encouraging and we feel this is developing into a potentially hugely successful working relationship. They have very quickly understood

our business, our proposition and the potential clients we are targeting. I have found their approach to be both refreshing, straight forward and direct, but most importantly, the conversion

rates are higher than others we have tried it with.

Both our team and our key contacts at Marketing Republic are working closely together to continually improve the process, the communication between our businesses and

ultimately, the increasing success we are achieving together.

If you are looking to grow your sales pipeline and win more business, I couldn’t recommend partnering with Marketing Republic

highly enough!”

Average Monthly Revenue

£57,583.33Total Revenue

£345,500Monthly average

43 leadsTotal leads

256

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CASE STUDY - International Trade Finance Company

Set-up & Background

Our brief was to provide qualified sales opportunities for their growing team of global Business Development Directors. To begin with, the most important element of the campaign was to fully understand who we were targeting and the data we needed to research.

The Campaign

Initially, we built target lists of Apparel and Retail companies in the UK and US. We mapped the organisations, and researched up to 5 job titles that would be most relevant and could benefit from our clients offering, or refer us to the correct decision maker.

Within the first few months, we secured appointments for our client with global companies including PepsiCo, Reckitt Benckiser and Target Corporation.

Over the course of our campaign to date, we have continued to book appointments across the globe and expanded our research and target industries include Netherlands, Hong Kong and Sweden.

Examples of Qualified Leads & Client Feedback

Email from Prospect, having been sent our email by their CEO:

“Hello,

I understand you have contacted our CEO to promote your services.

I suggest we organize a quick call this week to discuss more in details about your services.

Are you available tomorrow at 10am San Diego time i.e. 6pm London Time? “

Group Treasurer

“Great call!!!!

These guys are doing $80m in sales. He sent me the financials, they look beautiful. They are very interested in the program.... Time frame will be next

month. submitting the deal to Risk today and issuing a proposal in the meantime. “

“Had a quick phone call with the prospect this morning, we talked about our

services and advantages etc.

Will meet in person at their Hong Kong office next Monday for presentation and discussion,

will keep you posted.“

Feedback from our Client’s Salesteam, after the call:

Feedback from Client on another call booked:

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CASE STUDY - EXUS

Set-up & Background

We started working with EXUS in March 2016, as they had no new leads in their sales pipeline from Q1 in 2016.

Our brief was to provide qualified sales opportunities for their growing Business Development team.

The Campaign

Our biggest challenge for this campaign was the research and targeting. As EXUS help banks and financial institutions, we have researched banks in over 20 countries to find personal email addresses. We researched countries that are incredibly diverse including Kenya, UAE and Spain. In addition, to the challenging research, we have had to adapt to different cultures and language barriers to find English speakers and our client only presents in English.

To date, we have consistently provided qualified sales leads for EXUS over a period of a year and continue to do so to this very day.

Results

To date, EXUS have closed at least £800,000 worth of deals through our process and leads passed over to their sales team.

Their investment has been £48,000 (only £3,997 per month) over a year.

This represents a 1566.67% Return on Investment to date.

There’s more to come too, as EXUS sales pipeline is now in excess of £5m.

Client Feedback“We have been working with

Marketing Republic since April 2016.

Starting out, the onboarding process was quick and efficient. We were positively impressed by how quickly the Marketing Republic team were able to

understand out business and product given that it is quite specialised.

Once we started the campaigns, they managed to go through the learning curve significantly quicker than we expected. What is particularly good about the way they operate is how proactive they

are in continuously revising their strategies when things do not seem to be delivering results as expected.

Thus we have been able to see consistent improvement every month, and importantly so when we consider the fact that we have run campaigns in multiple countries and targeted potential customers.

Finally, regarding interaction, the Marketing Republic team is consistently on-time, they are very responsive to our requests and provide very good reporting and very good rapport.

They are a good and trusted partner for us and we look forward to working with them to produce even better results.”

Michael Melachrinidis, Deputy CEO, Marketing & Business Development EXUS

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Campaign Set-up

Every campaign starts off with a kick off call with your Campaign Team. We begin with initial introductions so we all get to know each other quickly and understand who is responsible for what! It’s where we get the basics in place and assign the key tasks that need to be completed so we get up and running as quickly as possible.

As soon as the necessary paper work and contracts are finalised, you will be contacted by your Campaign Manager via email to set-up the time for an initial call.

Once this is done, we will go away and set-up all the relevant software sysems that we use for every campaign so we are ready to go. We also will need to set-up email addresses to use for your campaign, so that can either be done by you or our team... it’s your call.

Once we are live with a campaign, we need to make sure we have open communication so we can cover any questions from prospects or, if we qualify an opportunity, we have a process in place with you to manage diaries so you and the relevant people in your team are aware and accept calendar invites of sales appointments.

We would also love to get a clear understanding of the reasons for engaging us - including what your business objectives are - so we can ensure we collaborate to achieve them!

Lastly, we have proven processes and systems which includes a number of software platforms. We build and run our own systems for you and your campaign. We don’t use a licence of your CRM as almost everyone uses these systems differently and this can lead to problems. Our clients want us to spend time finding opportunities... not spending ages trying to get CRM systems working and sychronised!

We do not give you access but we do build reports of all activity and intelligence that you can use or plugin to your own systems.

Let’s keep this simple, effective and focus on prospecting!

Key Points:• Meet the Team• Sotware Set-up• IT & Systems• Key points of contact (client side)• What are your growth plans/objectives?• What happens next?

Step One - Opportunity

In the first step of the OUTREACH Formula, we need to establish the answer to a crucial question...

Why do people do business with you?

In essence, we are not delving into great detail... yet!

This is more about understanding your top level value proposition defined in a nutshell!

Don’t worry... we will go into much more depth shortly but at this stage it’s a bird’s-eye-view of your business, what differentiates you from your competition and why your products and services should be the primary choice of your potential customer.

When it comes to benefits and case studies, we are looking for some detail.

For example, when we started working with a software client who had almost no sales pipeline, we transformed their sales potential and built a sales pipeline of over £10.8 million in 8 weeks.

If I told you they said we were nice people, although it’s a great compliment, it’s not a compelling reason for you to choose to partner with us. Unless, of course, you are look-ing to just improve your contact list and social life. So, if you have specific case studies, testimonials and comparison to your competitors this is what we are looking for here.

We want to be able to look at your business, products and services from the perspective of a new prospect.

If we cannot understand your proposition, how can they?!

Initially, they may not be looking into deep comparisons, so we need to be able to quickly and decisively prove the value your business can ad to them.

USP is the concept that most closely resembles this.

It’s often considered synonymous with value proposition... But it only focuses on what makes your product better than competing options and that’s just part of a strong value proposition.

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The importance of a strong value proposition

When we work with you to understand your value proposition it will help us and you in several ways:

It makes us focus on aspects of your business and initiatives that make the biggest difference. It helps avoid wasting time, money, and energy by contacting customers who won’t buy from you anyway.

We don’t want to target prospects that don’t create results.

It helps us develop the most persuasive email copy as we don’t have to guess whether you’re focusing your marketing correctly or not. We will need a simple, clear list of the few things that really make a difference, and we can focus our prospecting by communicating those facts.

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Key Points:• What’s your elevator pitch/headline summary?• USP’s, why do your clients choose you over competitors?• Benefits - be specific!• How do your competitors compare?• Best client case studies

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Step Two - Understand

One of the ways salespeople waste time and limit their earning potential and results is by spending time with prospects that aren’t right for their product or service.

Having a clear, defined image of your ideal prospect will help us determine the best prospects to pursue to maxmise your return on investment. We are not focusing just on a number of leads of sales appoint-ments.

The only important result is the end result... closed deals with ideal clients!

So we need you to be as specific as possible.

We want to understand your prospects: looking at problems from your prospect’s perspective.

This is key to identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This is all about digging deep into why a client buys from you and using that knowledge and infor-mation to tailor messages to new prospects.

Define your Ideal Customer Profile.It is so important for you to be able to clearly define your ICP, how to describe them and what their core challenges are.

As part of an OUTREACH campaign, we may need to revise it several times to make sure we get the right results. Potentially, you could have more than one ICP if you have different prpositions such as a lower cost product and service or a high-end product or service.

Ideally, the ICP should fit into a one page document... We will provide you with a step-by-step questionnaire that will help you define your ICP and build on those profiles as we start a campaign and evolve dependent on results.

Refer to the next page for an example of an Ideal Customer Profile for Marketing Republic.

Key Points:• Biggest Problems You Solve• Map Your ICP/Qualification• Industries/Verticles• Current Sales Process• Typical Objections• On-Boarding Conversation

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Example of an Ideal Customer Profile:

Criteria We Want: Why:

Industries: The industries we are most successful in are media, fin-tech, software technology, consultancy and business ser-vices. 10-250 employees.

Sales Model: They have a direct sales organisation with at least 2+ sales reps in place and a sales director.

Marketing>£100k: The business development function is vital to them and they can afford us.

Financial Status: Growing or profitable businesses have been our best long-term cutomers. Struggling customers usually end up as problematic customers.

No Agency In Place: If they have an marketing agency, they can’t work with us unless they are looking to replace their agency.

Demographics: We deal with smart, honest, responsible, collaborative and respectful people. We see long-term customers as friends who are able to motivate us to help achieve their objectives.

No In-house Person: If there is a person in the company whose sole responsi-bility is business development they see us as unnecessary.

Current System: They should have some sort of lead generation system in place, optimally it would be social media, inbound or telemarketing that is not working effectively enough.

Revenue: £2.5 Million +

Geographic Scope: Global

Decision-making: Senior Directors, VP Sales

Additional Notes: • Red Flags and Deal Breakers - What signals can we look for as early in the sales

process as possible to warn us that working together would be a waste of every-one’s time.

• Ideal Contacts - e.g. Our ‘Ideal Contact’ is a VP Sales who is new to their role (90 days or less) who is looking to make things happen. They are process orientated, report to the CEO or division president, and love data and reports. Their challeng-es include not being able to give accurate reports to their CEO because of problems with their sales system or data in it.

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Step Three - TestOne of the fundamentals of the OUTREACH Formula is we do NOT make cold calls!

We have been there and done it in the past… but with all the gatekeepers, voicemail systems and methods to ensure senior executives are protected from cold callers… it’s simply not an effective methodology.

How often do you take cold calls?So, the primary tool for our team to get in front of your Ideal Prospects always starts by email.

As with any sales and marketing cam-paign, before you scale up, it’s really important to test. We always say to cli-ents, that instead of spending ages build-ing a database of prospects and then start reaching out to them… only to find the ICP needs refining… we start small and test.

Once we have proven the ICP is correct and your USP resonates with those people, we can then scale.

So initially, we are looking to target a small number of prospects. This varies with every single client as you may have a potential target market of millions of businesses or on the other end of the scale, just hundreds.

To give you an indication, the number isprobably between 50 and 250 initially.We will create an initial email sequence (more about this in Step 5), and test themessaging.

From the responses we get to the emails, we will look for trends and start to tem-plate how we respond to those people.

We always individually respond but to ensure we are consistent and effective, we build a number of templated responses that accelerate the next steps in moving each prospect closer to a call where we can qualify - just as importantly - disqualify!

We want to clarify how we handle ques-tions and objections so we are prepared. This process often involves working closely with you as, in some instances, prospects highlight issues that haven’t been covered in any of the on-boarding process which in-turn enables you to learn more about your marketplace.

After completing this initial research, we are ready to start the scaling up process!

Key Points:• Create email sequence• Build initial list• Response templates• Objection handling• Feedback conference call

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Step Four - ResearchHere’s a simple but absolutely vital concept for you to consider.

BAD DATA = BAD RESULTS

It’s the primary reason we are somewhat relucatant when a client asks us if we can use their own database of prospects. If this is old or poor quality data, the results we can attain are inevitably limited.

It’s obvious that data is fresh today and old tomorrow as people are continually transient and also potentially have responsibilities that change and evolve.

If we are talking to the wrong people or organisations, it doesn’t matter how strong your proposition is… it could land on deaf ears.

Equally, our Campaign Managers worst nightmare is high bounce rates when data is poor and email addresses and contacts no longer exist at those target companies!

We work closely with you to map your target clients so we understand the sales process and the decision making process when approaching the people you want us to talk to.

We manually research data… we don’t just go out and buy a list from a list broker that has been sold to countless other marketers!

Let’s say for example you target Finance Directors.

We don’t just build a list of those people, we also build a list of their peers who are alongside or above them in their authority. We are looking for every route in to your potential clients and to start engagement and build relationships.

We are constantly building, evolving and refreshing data whilst the campaign progresses.

Key Points:• Manual list building• Map path to decision makers• Identify internal champions• Data - new today - old tomorrow

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Step Five - EmailThe psychology behind our emails is to get a response and to start a conversation.It’s as simple as that!

The majority of opportunities we find for clients happen once we have initiated a call orperhaps a number of calls.

But, it’s far more effective to begin the relationship with a prospect via email so we arealready building engagement before we even talk to them on the telephone.

Here’s an overview of what we do:• First, we use email to generate internal referrals to the right person(s).• Then we follow up on the responses and referrals with both emails and phone calls.• As a guide, our Campaign team send between 10 and 100 targeted mails per day

with a goal of having a 10% response rate (Not open rate!). This of course varies from as low as 1% up to around 30+%.

• Guidelines for writing emails to cold prospects: – Emails should look like they have been written personally to the recipient (the

email domain should be associated with your business). – They should be text based, no fancy HTML. – State simply and clearly why we are reaching out. – Make the email easy to read and respond to on a smartphone or tablet. – Offer credibility e.g. examples of customers (we need this from you). – Ask just one simple-to-answer question (e.g. ask for a referral).

Key Points:• Objective - Responses!• Why referrals?• Starting Conversations• Email Copy: Pain, Benefits, Success Achieved• Typical Responses - Examples

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Sending Campaigns• We start by sending up to 250 outbound emails per week.• We may send the message at different times such as either before 9am or after 5pm,

and we will avoid Mondays and Fridays (even Sundays are OK and we often test weekends to see responses).

• We expect a small bounce rate – and these will be excluded from response rate calcultions.

• We will clear out any bounces.• We have learnt to love “out of office” replies – these emails have the names and

contact information for more people to target, such as an executive assistant, whose job it is to help route us to the right person in the company!

Responses• We log every response into a sales system (e.g. Salesforce).• The goal of every mass email is to establish and close a prospect on a next step.• That next step should be either one of two things – but NOT both:

– Who is the best point of contact for…? (to get a referral). – When is the best day/time for a quick discussion around….? (to set up a

conversation with the prospect).• This next step will usually depend on size of companies targeted – for larger

companies it tends to be better to ask for the referral.

Goal 1 – Getting a referral• Objective to confirm the best point of contact for a first conversation and get

referred to them.• Then email new contact – directly mentioning or cc’ing the individual who referred.• Internal referrals create the highest likelihood of getting a response.Goal 2 – Setting up a call• The objective is to set up a quick time to see if there’s a high level fit between our

Client’s company and the prospect’s company.• Call will be entirely focussed on their business not the Client’s business.• We talk < 30% of time on the call and find out about their business.• If we get a ‘NO’, we need to find out why – we make sure no misunderstanding

about what our Client does.

Contacts Who Didn’t Respond• We track which contacts opened our email and how many times.• Rather than having to randomly call prospects, we have a priorities list of people to

follow-up.• We review reports every few hours.• If someone opens the email multiple times and / or clicks on a link, we call them.

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Step Six - AcquireThe goal of the previous steps of an OUREACH Campaign is to get people who fit your Ideal Customer Profile to engage with us.

It could be people identifying themselves as the key contact through emailing and telephone conversations or it could be people who have been referred to us by a senior colleague.

Our Campaign Team and Sales Development Reps (SDR’s) work closely together deciding when to email and when to call, once a prospect has responded.

We are experienced in this judgement… after all we do it every single working day!

One aspect at this stage to point out is we are 100% aware we are representing your company.

We email and call as part of your team so our actions reflect your business and your brand.So simple ethics are important to us.

We are polite, respectful and always show manners to each and every prospect.

In the extremely rare instance a pros-pect is unhappy about us reaching out to them, we ensure this is handled with utmost professionalism. Every now and then, someone has a bad day and doesn’t like the fact that we (and you) are a com-mercial organisation, looking to do busi-ness and add value to clients and poten-tial clients. Every sales person has this at some stage of their career.

We deal with it in the right way!If someone says please stop contacting me, we respect the request.

OK, so the negative aspects are dealt with, and on the positive front, we have the vast majority of prospects quickly see that we are working our campaigns in the right way, by asking qualifying questions so we don’t waste their time, we are not just pitching and doing the “hard sell”. We believe in consultative sales and this involves more listening than talking!

We are to the point, direct and don’t waffle!We certainly don’t want to go on about how amazing we (i.e. you) are and how long we’ve been in business yada yada yada!!

But once we’ve qualified an opportunity we endeavour to find out every piece of information we can to enable your sales team to accelerate the opportunity into a sale!

Key Points:• Responses - What Now?• Email & Call Collaboration Within

Our Team• When to Call, When to Email• When to Stop• No Pitch Emails• Short & Sweet• No HTML, No Pictures

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Step Seven - CallAs you know by now, the call is the crucial part. Email is great at starting the conversation, but people are usually far more open when we have a telephone conversa-tion with them and ask key questions.

Objectives• Help the prospect create a vision of a dream solution that will solve their problems.• To connect our Client’s product/service to their key business issues and dream

solution.• In conversation with a prospect, qualify if they are a good fit.• Challenge them as well – How serious are they about solving their challenges?

– There’s interest but are they ready to take action? – Are they connected to the people with power or influence? – Is there real interest in the next step?

• The goal is to pass fewer, better, highly qualified opportunities to the your Sales Executives.

• We track everything in a CRM system.• We ask open ended questions about the persons business first – how it’s organised,

for example.• We do this before moving on to ask about challenges.

Example first Cold Call• Example Discovery Call questions – we just ask 3-4 on the first conversation:

– How is XYZ function organised? – What approaches do you use at XYZ and who is responsible for this? – How long have you been using this approach? How effective is it? – What are your challenges now? After each answer, we keep asking “What else?” – Have you looked at alternative ways to XYZ? – What worked, what didn’t? Why? – What would an ideal solution look like to you? – What options would you consider to implement the solution? – How will your decision making process work? – Why did you buy the previous xyz product / service? Who made the decision to

purchase it? – What is the probability that you would consider an XYZ service this year or in

the next six months? – Why do it now? Or why wait until later?

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More Calling Tips• Main objective in the first call is to get the Client’s prospect talking about their

business and to listen!• We sometimes call low before a C-Level conversation: e.g. call individual sales reps

to get the inside scoop.• We are blunt but respectful – if the pain is not obvious we ask right out “where do

you have the pain today? What’s not working as well as it should?”• We keep digging until there is nothing left to uncover.• We ask for referrals – who else should you talk to in other divisions / teams?• We always work to schedule a next step there and then when on the phone...• We experiment, test, tweak questions – understand what works as we know this will

lead to repeatable results.

Building Champions• If the prospect is interested but not ready – or they need to convince other people –

then we turn our focus on developing them into a champion – who can do the selling for us in the account.

• We focus on what will make that person successful – not what will make our Client successful.

• We ask how we can support them.• We give them what they need –including time.• We build trust, we are respectful but persistent.• Once the seed is planted, we keep watering and practicing patience with them.

Key Points:• Consultative Selling - No Pitching• No Scripts - Questions (Qualifying)• Mapping - Understand Prospect’s Process• Scoping - Pain Points, Buying Criteria• Qualifying - If There Is A Need/Fit Between

Your Organisation & Each Prospect

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Step Eight - Handover

Once we have defined a prospect as an opportunity or a Sales Qualified Lead, thenext step is to ensure this is passed over to you with ease and all the relevant intel.

Apart from the qualification criteria, the calibre of sales opportunities we find for youmust have no fundamental “red flags” or deal-breakers!

When does an SDR pass to a Client sales representative?• Fundamentally, when the SDR feels it is worth your Sales Executive’s time and the

your Sales Executive would want to engage the deal.• Guidelines:

– Does the company fit your Ideal Customer Profile? – Are we speaking with someone with influence or power? – Is there a clear interest in the next step? – ( e.g. discovery or scoping call with

your Sale Exec?)

Transferring the Opportunity SmoothlyWe ideally want to have access to an online calendar where we can scheduleappointments for you or your sales people.

That way we can ensure availability of you at the prospects agreed time.We will provide an email report giving all the relevant intelligence about the prospect,what information qualifies them as an opportunity.

A next step appointment could be a number of things which is determined by 2 factors:your sales process and what the prospect wants to do. We do not go down the road of forcing face to face meetings if the prospect does not have the appetite to meet at an early stage. So the next steps can be a telephone appointment, conference call, webinar or indeed a face to face meeting.

We continually work closely with both you and your sales team as well as yourprospects to ensure sales conversations progress to meet the needs of both you andyour clients.

Key Points:• Define Next Steps With You The Client• Preparation Of Opportunity• Book The Appointment: Call, Conference Call,

Webinar, Face-to-Face etc.

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Reviews & Reporting

One of the primary factors in ongoing campaign success is collaboration and feedback.

We need to know what happens after we hand over opportunities to you.

If opportunities are progressing and prospects are becoming Ideal Clients, then we want to ensure we do more of the same!

Alternatively, the opposite scenario applies!

A key benefit of an OUTREACH Campaign is the intelligence we build about your business, products, and services and most importantly, what your market place actually say!

We build a sales playbook throughout a lifetime of a campaign that will be hugely valuable to your ongoing sales and marketing strategy and messaging.

Clients use the feedback to develop new marketing ideas and help mould how they communicate their key messages via their website and marketing collateral.

Key Points:• Feeback On Opportunities Passed To Client• Management Of Cold Opportunities• On-Going Strategy Review• Market Feedback/Intelligence• Sales Playbook - Whole Process Documented

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Let’s Go... Some Other Things You Need to Know Before Campaign Kick-Off!What is a lead? – Many marketers and salespeople have VERY different views as to what a lead actually is. To us, a lead is defined as a potential sales opportunity that shows an interest in your service, and is willing to have a more in-depth conversation, demo or face-to-face meeting. Each lead we handover to our clients will provide background of all our correspondence with that prospect, and their contact details and job title.

Don’t shoot the messenger – We have completed many campaigns across a number of industries and we quickly find out how hungry the market is for our client’s service. If we do not get instant results, and come across constant objections from prospects, do not blame us for not delivering. You must be confident enough that your product sells and that your offering is proven. If you are new to the market and suddenly find that there is not the demand for your product you thought there was, do not shoot themessenger.

Proven propositions – As mentioned in the last point, we tend to find clients that have proven propositions benefit more from our service. They have found their niche, know how to sell to their Ideal Customer Profile and want their sales team spending more time closing deals than prospecting. We can help you identify your ICP, but these campaigns tend to take longer to ramp up and test, whereas proven propositions tend to hit the ground running.

Tried & Tested System – We have been adapting and testing each part of our process for the last five years. Having developed a proven, predictable system, we know how to scale campaigns and what is required from each member of our team to deliver results for our clients. Each element of the OUTREACH Formula has been documented across our business, and is the lynchpin for all campaigns, enabling us to set-up campaigns quickly and efficiently.

Biz Dev Expertise – When partnering withMarketing Republic, not only are you getting our proven process but our team’s extensive business development experience. You get up to four members of our team working on your campaign, with each member having expertise in their chosen field. Our telemarketers speak to C-Suite Level contacts every day, our campaign managers are crafting email copy that generates response and our researchers have a wide variety of experience of building lists of our clients’ prospects.

Your part to play – We always express this up front. This is not a one way relationship. When you work with us, you are entering a partnership and must be committed to the campaign as we are. We are in regular communication with our clients and when an opportunity is secured, we need clients who are on the ball and ready to react fast to leads and enquiries. We need to be able to ask you questions that may arise, and likewise any questions you have we will answer as quickly as we can.

Manners – Simple one I know but still important to mention. I am confident that all members of staff at Marketing Republic will act with integrity and professionalism. I will not hesitate to cease work with any client if I feel that simple manners are not present.

Exclusion lists – We understand that within every company there are processes when it comes to territory and the split of prospects and customers among sales people. That’s why we ask our client’s to provide an exclusion list or to check over each list for our campaigns to ensure we do not contact current clients or prospects that are at proposal stage.

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Monthly catch-up – At least once a month, we jump on a call with our clients to discuss results, upcoming pipeline and the strategy for the following month. We provide our clients with a report prior to the call to illustrate how our activity has progressed in that month and the leads for that period. This also gives us a chance to refine our approach and share ideas with clients.

Why us – At Marketing Republic, we’re all about the results. We’ve tested and adapted our unique approach to provide our clients with the best service possible that generates conversations with their perfect customer. We have run campaigns in 25 countries and created many millions in sales pipeline for clients both UK based and internationally. We are confident that our systems can be implemented to work hand in hand with your business’s sales team to provide them with qualified sales leads, in addition to an insight into your market through speaking to prospects that fit into your Ideal Customer Profile.

Should you prospect in-house? - You presumably hired your sales team because they were great at selling and closing deals. So why would you get your most expensive resource (cost per hour) doing your lowest level (cost per hour) task? The truth is, most sales people hate prospecting and will try anything they can to get out of it. They will drop prospecting as soon as they have other deals to work on.

Benefits of outsourcing – The key benefit ofoutsourcing this part of your business is that it frees up your sales people to do what they do best, actually selling and closing deals. Your business then benefits from our expertise.

What is an SQL? – A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a prospective customer that has been researched and vetted in this case by us at Marketing Republic and is deemed ready for the next stage in the sales process for our client’s sales team to progress.

Where do we work? – We predominantly work within the UK for most clients, but we also have run successful campaigns in an additional 24 countries. Our team is well versed in cross-country campaigns, so if you have any countries in mind, don’t hesitate to ask. The one thing to look out for is legislation against outbound sales in those countries such as CANSPAM laws.

Is your data any good? – Regardless of whether you have data and lists of prospects or not, we always suggest to our clients that our campaigns should be a mix of their data and lists that we research. The reason for this is because we look to add as much value to you as possible through our research team and data that you have could be outdated as this is quite common in our experience.

Short, Mid + Long term pipeline – It’s important to note, that with all outbound marketing, you are interrupting your prospects. As such, not all prospects, will be prepared to engage or purchase right now, but this gives us an opportunity to build up call-backs and leads that we can nurture. Leads that you can work on closing now will always be our primary goal, but as part of our campaigns, we build intelligence to create tasks for us and your team in 3, 6, 9 and 12 months’ time.

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2 Caxton Way,Watford Business Park,Watford, Herts, WD18 8UA

Tel: 0845 862 5550E: priority@marketing-for-business.comW: marketing-for-business.com