Deciding Who Deserves Outreach

It’s a fact that not all buyers are created equal, yet many salespeople spend a lot of time pursuing prospects that either can’t or won’t do business with them.

When we sat down with Dale Roznowski, an engineer-turned-sales-leader, we asked him how he advised his salespeople to prioritize their time and decide which prospects actually deserved attention.

Like many industries, Dale’s company sells to buyers who have ‘buying windows’: times of the year when budget becomes available. If Dale’s salespeople and company are not top of mind when those buying windows open across their prospects, their competitors will likely get the business.

Here’s the system Dale uses to ensure his salespeople prioritize their prospecting activity across accounts. Because we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.

T – Trigger: To prioritize prospecting during buying windows, Dale advises to segment prospects by business vertical or industry depending on when budgets will become available. This could mean time of year relative to these prospects’ buying cycle or fiscal year, or by the industry their prospects are in if the industry as a whole tends to have budget at certain times of the year.

R – Repeatable: When we scale timed outreach across prospects, it becomes impossible to remember when each account’s buying window will come available. That means setting a launch task for outreach that coincides with that prospects/the prospect’s industry’s buying window is open.

That launch task can live within a CRM as a dated task, and we can also tag accounts with their respective industry so we can pull a report on all prospects that have that tag in order to see all of those accounts at one time.

I – Improvable: To improve a system like this, Dale said it’s important to look at historical data on each account and determine if all the decision makers are still with that account or if new decision makers have joined the prospect’s company. If those folks have transferred companies or business units that you’re already tracking, then transferring notes about best way to contact them/buying behaviors become invaluable pieces of intelligence.

M – Measurable: Dale mentioned there’s one objective criteria across all sales: How much did profitability increase? To do that, Dale advises to run year-over-year reports on each of the business verticals that salespeople are pursuing to see if sales have grown as the result of this system or not, and where the prospect engaged the most (phone conversations, social media campaigns, direct mail response, etc.).