When you outsource a calling campaign, you’re trusting a third party to handle one of your company’s most significant and mission-critical activities: lead generation. To evaluate the company you’ve hired, you need to monitor specific performance benchmarks. Three of those include:
- The number of qualified leads generated
- Your cost per qualified lead
- Return on investment from the campaign
Let’s look closer at these critical metrics to better understand their impact on the success of your calling campaign.
1. Number of qualified leads
Imagine you’re evaluating two different lead generation firms. Both generate more leads than your internal team would generate on its own, but one firm generates twice as many leads as the other one. Has the company that generated the most leads won all of your business for future campaigns?
When it comes to lead volume, quantity should never come before quality. You need to pay close attention to the number of qualified leads that each firm generates. Returning to our example of the two firms, ask yourself the following questions about the leads each firm is generating:
- Do these leads meet the qualification specifications you have outlined for company size, budget, etc?
- Do the leads have an accurate and realistic understanding of your solutions?
- Have you gathered insights into the prospect’s buying process?
The company that generates the most leads might not be the one that generates the best leads, especially when salespeople are spinning their wheels talking to leads that don’t represent genuine revenue opportunities.
2. Cost per qualified lead
After determining how many qualified leads a firm is generating, it’s time to calculate how much those leads cost you. Knowing your cost per qualified lead is powerful because lowering it can help you meet sales goals faster. Here’s how to do it:
- Determine how much you spent on a campaign.
- Count the number of qualified leads that the campaign generated.
- Divide the number from Step 1 by the number in Step 2.
3. Return on investment
In the end, you must be able to determine whether an outsourced lead generation campaign or any marketing activity is generating a positive return. ROI calculations can become highly nuanced depending on the number of variables in play, but here’s one way to get a sense of the returns a calling campaign is generating:
- Based on your typical customer churn, determine the expected total revenue of an average customer. For illustrative purposes, let’s say an average customer provides $60K in annualized revenue.
- Calculate the value of each lead from the percentage of leads that sales converts into new customers. If 1 in 4 leads convert and the expected annualized revenue from an average customer is $60K, a lead is worth $15K.
- Calculate your cost per qualified lead from the calling campaign (see above). Let’s say it’s $450 per lead.
- Subtract the figure in Step 3 from the figure in Step 2. In this example, your company is spending $450 for every $15K lead – that’s pretty excellent ROI!
If you perform these calculations and feel underwhelmed by the ROI of your calling campaigns, you might want to compare your current firm’s performance to a different one – a firm with long-held experience and a solid track record of results.
Intelemark has over fifteen years of experience in lead generation and appointment setting. We track the performance of all of our agents across all campaigns, so you know for sure whether our efforts are improving your bottom line.
Contact us today to set up a test campaign and see for yourself what makes Intelemark different!