The Big A-ha
Your Sellers suffer 14+ hours of waste every week in the prospecting process, which is negatively impacting your growth.
Why it Matters: The Negative Effects of Waste
This prospecting waste is leading to lost revenue opportunities, increased costs, lack of measurability, and burnout in your team.
“Do more with less” is the 2023 mantra for B2B sales leaders. This means smaller teams and budgets to meet only slightly smaller revenue goals than before. Eliminating waste and focusing on the highest-value activities is now the best strategy for sales leaders to hit their numbers.
In 2022, you could hire an army of SDRs to prospect every account and reach out to every contact in your TAM. Today, most SDR teams are a lot smaller, and many companies have gotten rid of them completely. Many AEs are now expected to prospect and generate their own pipeline. In this new reality, it’s critical that every minute of your Seller’s prospecting time is focused on the most impactful activities.
Unfortunately, there are many inefficiencies in the prospecting process that are leading to issues such as:
- Lost revenue opportunities: Wasting time and resources on low-quality prospects means less time pursuing opportunities more likely to generate revenue.
- Increased costs: All the wasted effort and spending in data acquisition, outreach, and research adds up quickly.
- Damaged credibility: Contacting too many unqualified prospects or failing to effectively engage and follow up can make high-quality prospects less responsive to future outreach.
- Lack of measurability: When the prospecting process lacks data, analytics, and consistent metrics, it becomes difficult to determine what’s working, what needs improvement, and how to optimize resources.
- Fatigue and burnout: Excessive administrative tasks, chasing poor-fit prospects, and random outreach with no clear strategy all contribute to lower motivation and productivity.
Strike a chord? We know this sucks. Unfortunately, this might be hurting you more than you realize.
Let’s look at the major drivers of waste and quantify just how much this might be costing you, your team, and your company.
By the Numbers: Measuring Prospecting Waste
A simplified version of the typical B2B prospecting process looks something like this:
Beware! There are gremlins lurking at each step of this process, especially if you just hand off these steps to your Sellers and expect them to figure it out. Some of these steps should be centralized so that the Sellers don’t have to waste any of their precious time doing them. For others, the involvement of the Sellers should be kept to a minimum. Let’s look at the 3 major drivers of waste in this process:
Identifying ICP Accounts to Target
In our experience, most companies are using ICPs that are dated, not data-driven, and relics of a bygone era. Let’s assume that you’re one of the few companies that have gotten this right and that you’ve given clear guidelines to your Sellers about the types of accounts that they should target.
In this case, your Sellers will need an average of 10 minutes to research and find the right account to work. 10-minutes may not seem like much, but if you’re expected to work 25 accounts a week, that’s more than 4 hours of work!
There’s also a risk here that your Sellers will get this account selection wrong. This is catastrophic because the mistakes made in this step multiply with each following prospecting step. If you start with the wrong accounts, no matter how well you execute the following steps, your efforts will be for naught.
Finding Relevant Contacts at ICP Accounts
The next step in the prospecting process is ensuring that each account that’s being worked has enough of the right contacts to reach out to.
You may have a clear picture of the right personas to target or you may leave a lot of that up to the Sellers. Unfortunately, you’ll only see one of two bad scenarios here. Sellers will either fall short and source only the top 1 to 2 contacts per account thereby missing out on key personas that you need to target. Or they might spend an inordinate amount of time sourcing contacts every week.
How much time? Let’s assume that your Sellers need to find 4 contacts for every account that they work on in a given week. In our experience, it takes about 3 minutes for a Seller to find a contact in a source like LinkedIn or ZoomInfo. Doing the Math, that’s 3 minutes each for 100 contacts across 25 accounts, which translates into another 5 hours of work every week!
Personalizing Messages
The next step in the prospecting process is to research the accounts and contacts you’re targeting to personalize your outreach. This is where you’ll see the widest variance in your team.
Sellers are typically spending about 5 minutes researching the account and an additional 2 minutes researching the contact that they’re reaching out to. If you do the math for reaching out to 75 contacts with personalized messages across 25 accounts every week, that’s another 4.5 hours of work.
There are two key challenges here. First, many of the Sellers spend no time personalizing because the research and writing are tedious and manually intensive. Second, even the Sellers that are spending time personalizing messages remain unsure of how effective they are or what research was most effective in getting a response.
If you add up these investments, you come to the shocking realization that your Sellers might be wasting almost 14 hours of time every week. $#@!!!
Thankfully, there’s a better way. In the next post, we’ll break down what you can do to reduce waste in each of the steps above.
Are you interested in learning more about developing your ICP and automatically sourcing relevant contacts?
Relevvo’s AI-powered platform tracks your buyer’s online activity for signs of pains, needs, and initiatives so you can target contacts at ICP companies that are the best fit for you right now. We’d love to chat, drop us a line here!