There is more to teleprospecting and B2B cold calling than a lot of people might think. There is a method to the madness; you don’t just sit down at a desk one day, pick up a phone, and make some dials. There are multiple campaigns to work on simultaneously, and in order to stay organized, we have to use lead statuses.
As someone who uses Salesforce every single day of the work week, I am confident enough to say I have a solid grip on the basics. I believe that lead statuses are one of the most important fields to fill out on a prospect’s page. As your relationship with a client develops and you accumulate more lists for them and/or from them, you will inevitably end up qualifying more leads, but you need to organize those leads based upon which list they were originally hosted on. As a result, you could easily end up with thousands of contacts. Therefore, filling out the correct lead source detail is extremely important in order to keep campaigns separate; having the accurate lead status is important to show proper progress within lists and companies. There are reports you can run to show how lists are broken down by lead status in order to go over progress with your client. Having a majority of your contacts in “No Contact” is not a good sign, because it shows that you have not pulled in new contacts to your calling cycle.
Staying on top of your statuses can also help your relationship with your client. If you are running low on new contacts, this is an easy way to show them that you have exhausted your current list or campaign. If all of your contacts are categorized as “Prospecting” or “No Contact,” your client is not going to give you a new list, as you’re still working on a current one.
Even though we are teleprospecting contacts, everyone is not always left in the “Prospecting” pool. Once a quality conversation has occurred via phone or email, a contact is taken out of “Prospecting” and put into a different classification depending on the conversation. A few options are: “Not Appropriate Contact,” if they gave a referral to a better contact; “Contact Identified,” if they confirm their title and role within the organization; and “Not Interested,” if they give you some information pertaining to their current systems, budget or timeframe.
Another way someone can be taken out of the “Prospecting” status is if you have run through the entire call cycle and they have not responded to your inquiries. They can be put into an “Exhausted” bucket so they will not be phoned for the time being but may receive emails once in awhile. They are not necessarily the wrong contact and very well could still be working for the company, but you have spent enough time trying to get in touch with them and do not want to waste too much time over a single uncommunicative contact. Moving on to another contact within that company and changing this contact’s lead status is the best course of action.
There are hundreds of reasons why it is important to stay up-to-date with lead statuses, but most importantly, it keeps everyone on the same page. Without consistency, it can be difficult to move smoothly throughout each work day and accurately track progress for you and for your clients.
