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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
If, unfortunately, you weren’t able to connect the first time you called that inbound lead back, all is not lost. Just as with your pure outbound efforts, even inbound appointment setting takes persistence. In fact, the second thing that people screw up about inbound leads is giving up on them too soon. Again, our friends at InsideSales.com and MIT Sloan figured out that each incremental attempt you make to reach out to an inbound lead adds another 15% chance of contacting them, falling off substantially after the sixth attempt. But after six attempts, you should have had roughly an aggregate 90% chance of making contact. So don’t give up! Remember, they asked for it, so you have nothing to fear.
While you’re trying to make contact, definitely make sure to leave voice mails and use your inbound lead response-email template to let the prospect know that you’re doing your best to reach him. But while persistence is good, you do need to move on after a half-dozen attempts or so. There are plenty of fish in the sea, and we need you spending your time fishing. Along the way, just make sure to log your activity in your CRM (or, if you’re still in that Google Sheet, the new row you created for this inbound lead) to keep track of who’s in process, and how many times you’ve attempted to contact them.
Lastly, not every inbound lead needs a call. If an inbound lead comes in, and the information that is provided makes it pretty darn clear it’s unlikely to be qualified, a better approach can be to send what’s known as a “hard qualifier” email. This would include who the product is intended for, and why you think it might not be relevant for that lead, plus an ask to clarify if your thinking is wrong.
exampleHi there!
Thanks for your interest in HIRABL! I had an opportunity to check company name out, and it looks like your recruiting team primarily does temp staffing, as opposed to contingency permanent placement. Is that right?
The reason I ask is because HIRABL is used by staffing agencies to monitor candidate submissions to avoid what are known as backdoor hires—when a client hires one of your submittals but doesn’t let you know, so you potentially miss out on a fee. We find that 1 in 300 permanent placement submits ends up being a backdoor hire. So it’s potentially tens of thousands of dollars in missed fees. Yikes! More here in this little video: https://youtu.be/QihH8WuJj0c.
If I’m mistaken and this sounds like it would be relevant to company name, then by all means let’s get a demo scheduled for you.
Please let me know what you think!
Best,
Pete
This way, if you have a hunch that an account might not be qualified, you can send information over to help them disqualify themselves (while providing some nice marketing messaging in case they want to share it with their buddy who is qualified), saving you both time. Or, if your hunch was wrong, they’ll reply letting you know as much, and you can get on your way to scheduling the meeting.
While scaled inbound marketing should likely not be a focus for you this early in your go-to-market, there are some basics that will help make sure you are capitalizing on the inbound interest generated by your outbound activity. Moreover, as you start getting early word of mouth from prospects you’ve given a demo to, you’ll already have a handy system for turning that inbound interest into appointments on the calendar, waiting to be pitched—which we’re going to talk about next!