The Economics Of Cold Calling - The List Is The Strategy (Part 1)

Whenever I see people talk about the phone "not working" as a viable outbound channel or whining that their reps aren't productive, it's often because of a lack of understanding on what proper enablement looks like.

It's my belief that if you talk about enabling your sales reps, you better be able to point to exactly HOW your efforts bridged a before/after state. Anything else is just hot air.

In an effort to do this, I keep a repository of all our phone data to track our data enrichment efforts.

First, some definitions:

Verbs

Scoring = Making an attempt on a record to categorize which of the below buckets your contact data fits into.

Enrichment = Leveraging additional resources to research additional contact data for your prospects.

Nouns

P1 = Pick-up Verified.

Ex: You call my number, and I pick up the phone and say “Hello, this is Charles Needham” - these are the people you want to call first every time.

P2 = Non-Pick up Verified.

Ex: You call me, nobody answers but a recorded voicemail says “Hello, you’ve reached Charles Needham. I can’t come to the phone right now so please leave a message” - you’ve got

P3 = Unverified.

Ex: You call me, nobody answers and a generic voicemail message says “The mailbox for the party you’ve reached is full. Please try again another time”

NA = Needs Attention. Bad data

Ex: You call and get an out of service tone, or you reach a number dedicated to a company voicemail box with no way of reaching your prospect.

Now, onto the data itself:

List A - Single source, single number contact information. Run through one pass of scoring.

List B - Waterfall enriched, up to 5 numbers per contact. Run through one pass of scoring

Implications:

- Even a single pass of data scoring has profound implications on the productivity of your reps. Were the average SDR making 50 dials a day/250 dials a week to call List A blindly, they would spend 1.5 days a week (30% of a 5 day work week) dialing verified bad data that has no hope of ever reaching a prospect. That's 75 days a month/ 3.75 months a year. Over an ENTIRE BUSINESS QUARTER of work time dedicated to calling bad numbers.

- If that didn't sound bad enough, let's break down the organizational economics: A W2 BDR with a gross income of $65,000 costs an organization roughly $85,000 a year (including benefits/taxes etc.) That's approximately $40.75 an hour, $489 a week, $1956 a month, or $24,450 a YEAR calling numbers with zero chance of ever yielding outcomes.

- With just one pass of scoring, reps can now avoid this bucket for good, a net efficiency gain that I promise will exceed the annual seat charge for that fancy AI tool that promises to tell you what your prospect had for breakfast this morning or whatever

- By running waterfall enrichment (shout out Phone Ready Leads® for ALWAYS bringing the goods) on the data set, roughly 60% of that bad data turns good (P1) or reachable (P2). That same rep is now experiencing a 20-30% connect rate on 10% of their data, a 3-5% connect rate on 33% of their data, and a 2-3% connect rate on the remaining 45% (if they even get that deep into the list over the course of their day).

All this is to say that when you enable your reps, it should be very easy to point to exactly what their world would look like sans-enablement and quantify the impact of your intervention.

If you can't do that, then you're not enabling. You're hoping. And your reps deserve better than that.