Setting List Tuning Expectation

We’ve all been there.

“Call all these names and find someone that wants us. Quickly.”

In offices from Manhattan to Mars, pages of printouts, incessantly scrolling spreadsheets and duplicate-deluged databases get handed to (often but not always) those starting out in the profession to pan for nuggets.

So I helped someone with their latest suspect search.

Aiming to sculpt their prospecting plans.

First-run list split in half, I had 24 phone numbers. Thirteen mobiles, eleven landlines. From a messy ‘membership’ style roll where some kind of interest would likely be expressed.

This turned out to be utterly false.

Starting with the end. One “lead” emerged. 1 in 24. Not a great return. Tearfully, this matches many a worldwide experience.

The next layer of selling note; five of the actual named people I reached in person. 5:24.

Proper, genuine conversations on the subject matter equalled three.

Also the number of people rude to me.

Both one in eights.

Database duds totalled eight.

Perhaps most frustrating, were the three who no longer worked at the firms phoned. One who hadn’t been there for three years, another two years, and the final one “left a couple of months ago”.

A true indication into the list. And a shocker. Which reveals plenty about whoever “created” or deemed it worthy pursuit.

I did my share in three mini batches. Split with two breaks, one enforced, one by design. The longest section being the closest to what I’d consider optimum call regimen. Eleven dials taking fifty minutes.

To the crux.

The average per listing ‘find-dial-speak-update’ process took 3 minutes 20 seconds.

From this you can extract the likely prospecting targets.

At 1-in-24, that’s 80 minutes per lead. Factor in breaks and you set expectation. If you take the fact that due to the usual downtimes (from distraction to internal meetings to snacking) some managers plan for half their complete working week to be outbound, then you’d double this. Meaning one lead every 160 minutes. Which I’d say is not sustainable.

I’m solely dealing initial numbers here. Long-term the challenge is to improve the dialogue to shorten lead discovery.

Knowing (then bettering) such numbers are the basis of any proactive lead gen effort. Crack them and you’re bound to make progress.