DATA-DRIVEN SALES PROSPECTING

How to Contact, Qualify and

Close Deals Faster

Ken Krogue
President & Founder
InsideSales.com

Mark Ruthfield
VP of Sales
ZoomInfo
 Introduction
Page 2

from Ken Krogue

ZoomInfo is a data provider to The topics covered in this eBook are lead For more sales training material from
InsideSales.com and is an expert in research, pre-qualified lists and data industry leaders, check out all the
the industry primarily centered on lead append. This is a huge topic for us inter- InsideSales.com eBooks, available at
research and lead qualification in your nally at InsideSales.com. We recently made www.insidesales.com/ebooks.
data to dramatically increase your cold investments with ZoomInfo and others in
calling and sales prospecting. order to append and enrich our data so
we don’t waste all of our labor costs trying
The big problem we’re finding is that we’re to find the right person to call.
wasting a lot of our sales reps’ time by
asking them enrich the call data – correct Every year we test all of the list vendors.
telephone numbers, titles, etc. – instead Our dialer technology is a lot like having a
of spending their time on the phone, sell- gatling gun; it needs lots of ammunition.
ing. For years I’ve felt that this is a problem. The ammunition when you’re calling busy
After talking to my good friend, Trish decision makers is contact information. For
Bertuzzi, and reading her most recent three years running, ZoomInfo has had the
research study, we agree that one of the best ratio for overall contact information.
biggest productivity killers are reps who
are having to spend their day figuring out Because ZoomInfo is the best at what they
whom to call and how to reach those busy do, we decided to do a joint webinar
decision makers. (available here) and transformed the con-
tent into an eBook.

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 Table of Contents
Page 3

Introduction From Ken Krogue�����������������������������������������������������������������2 Published by InsidesSales.com

About the Authors���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������4 34 East 1700 South
Provo, Utah 84606
Lead Research - Why It’s Important��������������������������������������������������������5 877-798-9633
The State of Inside Sales����������������������������������������������������������������������������9
Copyright © 2013 All Rights Reserved
InsideSales.com Founding Case Study�������������������������������������������������10
CLOSER Model��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������11
Specialist and Generalist Models�����������������������������������������������������������12
How Sales Utilizes List Partners, ZoomInfo�����������������������������������������13
Whom to Target: Look for Sales Triggers���������������������������������������������14
The 15 Time Wasters��������������������������������������������������������������������������������15
Summary & Credits�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������16

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 About the Authors
Page 4

Ken Krogue Mark Ruthfield

President and Founder Vice President of Sales
InsideSales.com ZoomInfo
— —
www.kenkrogue.com www.zoominfo.com

Ken is a results-driven inside sales leader As the Vice President of Sales at ZoomInfo,
and visionary. The research and data-driven Mark is a high-energy, positive and passion-
approach he uses have led to best practices ate sales business leader, driven by results.
of contacting and closing leads. He pioneered Throughout his career, he has maintained an
the powerful sales automation PowerDialer, impressive 18+ year revenue growth streak. In
which greatly increases the effectiveness and 2013, Mark was a recipient of the Top 25 Most
efficiency of inside sales professionals. Ken is Influential Sales Professional Award from the
also a regular contributor to Forbes.com. American Association of Inside Sales Profes-
sionals (AA-ISP).

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 Lead Research
Page 5

Why It’s Important

ZoomInfo has over 70 million business How ZoomInfo Gathers of the sales prospecting tool. In exchange
people at over 6 million companies in our
database. Our goal is to map the business
its Data to Support this for this limited free access, ZoomInfo is
allowed to sync with the users’ Microsoft
world as near to real time as possible on a Lead Research Model Outlook and Google email accounts, allow-
daily basis. ing the technology to read signature blocks
There are three ways that ZoomInfo from sent and received emails.
Why do we want to do that? gathers data: patented web crawling
technology, crowdsourcing and manually The last way, which is a very small percent-
Did you know the average in the industry updated profiles. age of our data collection methods, is
for employee turnover is about 30 per- allowing users to go in and update their
cent? Also, our data shows that phone The web crawling technology extracts profile. People do this so they can be
numbers decay at a rate of 43 percent per information from millions of business sites updated from a recruiting and job-seeking
year. Title/job function is 66 percent per by looking at news feeds, industry pub- standpoint.
year, email is 37 percent, and company lications, SEC filings, press releases, etc.
name is 34 percent. There is consis- As the technology finds information on
tent change happening in the workforce. people, it actually extracts the information
Bring Your Leads to Life
That’s why continuous lead research is and puts it together in a searchable profile. On a day-to-day basis you want to learn
so important. It also attaches that profile to a company how to increase your lead research tech-
within the ZoomInfo database or directory. niques. There are a lot of tools out there,
including some ZoomInfo offers that can
The newest way ZoomInfo is gather- help your sales reps.
ing information is a crowdsource model.
ZoomInfo has approximately one hundred Making sure emails are valid, having regular
thousand customers using a free version database clean up, continually adding new

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 Lead Research
Page 6

Why It’s Important

Report - Sample Qty %
prospects, and appending email/data are Contacts in original file 100,000 100%
important and necessary steps for fresh, Contacts with email in original file 40,000 40%
current leads. Validation of Emails
Rows in original file with email 40,000 100%
So what does this mean in the real world?
Records with valid emails 30,000 75%
Take a look at this real world example
Records with invalid emails 10,000 25%
on a client providing us numbers (we
rounded numbers to make this easier on ZI Updated for Invalid Records
the eye) from an internal database on a Records with invalid/unknown emails 10,000 100%
CRM of 100,000 contacts. The client had ZI contacts - replaced invalid records w/deliverable records 1,000 10%
40,000 contacts with an email address of ZI Added to Current Records
the 100,000. However, the client was not Records without emails 60,000 100%
sure how accurate these emails were. So,
ZI appended records missing emails 20,000 33%
through our ability to validate emails, we
Records without direct dials 60,000 100%
let him know that of the 40,000 contacts,
30,000 had valid emails – 10,000 did not. ZI appended records missing direct dials 20,000 33%
Records without missing titles 60,000 100%
Out of the 10,000 that weren’t valid, we ZI appended records missing titles 20,000 33%
tried to find valid email addresses. Of Net New People in Current Accounts Not in Database
those 10,000 incorrect email addresses, At current accounts 50,000
we were able to find 1,000 good emails to
Net New People that Fit Company Criteria - Outside of Current Accounts
replace the bad ones.
Outside current accounts 50,000

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 Lead Research
Page 7

Why It’s Important

We looked at the 60,000 records that specific title level. Having the correct infor- to their buyer persona which they didn’t
were incomplete – meaning missing email mation is game changing. have before.
addresses, titles or direct dials. We were
able to append 20,000 emails to contacts In the last two sections, where it says “Net When companies reach out to us for a free
that did not have emails, 20,000 contacts New People in Current Accounts not in test, this is exactly the kind of thing we can
that didn’t have titles, and 20,000 con- database,” we were able to actually take do to support their success before their
tacts that did not have direct dial numbers. the unique companies from the 100,000 sales team actually starts its prospecting.
So, this lead research and finding 20,000 contacts provided and come back to them
additional direct dials is critical for the with approximately 50,000 new relevant ZoomInfo can also perform analysis
InsideSales.com’s PowerDialer. contacts that match their buyer persona on industry, headquarter location and
as well. We were also able to find new company size.
For the correct titles, this is also relevant. companies and 50,000 new contacts that
Perhaps your sales reps were targeting a fit their target market, again matching back

Ti Lim
Get 1,000 Just-verified m it
e ed
O
f fe
Business Contacts for Free r
Power your database with updated leads. Get your free list

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 Communications Gamification Prediction Data Visualization

Sales Acceleration Technology

Improve sales through science with InsideSales.com.

• Contact the right prospects, in the right • Motivate your sales team by making the
way, at the right time. sales process visual, competitive, and fun.

• Work smarter by predicting which leads • Bring your sales data to the forefront by
you are most likely to contact, qualify, making it visual, meaningful,
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 Page 9

The State of Inside Sales

During the crash of 2008, the inside sales Projected Number of

industry started growing like crazy. As a
company, we were worried after the crash,
Inside Sales Reps
but our company took off. The projected number of inside sales
reps by 2020 will be just under 3.5 mil-
Why? lion, according to BLS.gov. Inside sales, as
a skill set, is changing the way sales and
Because inside sales is counter-recession- marketing are done. We’re also finding that
ary. In 2008 it was growing 15x faster than 20 percent of sales reps are pure inside
traditional outside sales. That number sales – meaning 100 percent of their time
today has leveled off some. In our 2013 is spent selling remotely.
Market Size Study, we discovered inside
sales is growing 3x faster. We’re finding
that outside sales reps are now spending
about half of their day on the phone doing
inside sales kind of work.

Get This Study Now

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 InsideSales.com
Page 10

Founding Case Study

Our original founding case study was

conducted with PeopleWise, a division of
LexisNexis. When LexisNexis brought us
in, they had four lead generation reps, four
inside sales reps, and 12 outside sales 12 outside
reps. Their problem was that their growth 4 lead 4 inside
gen reps sales reps sales reps
curve was completely flat – they hadn’t
grown in about two years.

As we benchmarked their numbers, they

were only making 20 calls/day and set-
ting .5 appointments. By ramping up their
effort, we got them up to 170 calls/day
(8.5x increase) and 2.5 appointments/day
(5x increase). Then we used the CLOSER
350

se
se

rea
model. We were able to get them up to

rea

inc
inc
6.5 appointments/day/rep (13x increase)

x
x

8.5
8.5
with the same number of calls. After this Number of Calls: 20 170 170
consultation, they had three consecutive
months of record growth.
Number of Appts: .5 2.5 6.5
That’s the power of the inside sales

se
e
as

rea
re
model and why it’s revolutionizing the

inc
inc
sales industry.

13x
InsideSales.com | ZoomInfo 5x
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 Page 11

CLOSER Model

Internally, we use a model called the getting eleven appointments/day. By call- inbound marketing model: someone who
CLOSER model, an acronym for Campaign, ing them all in the same bucket we were responds to a web opportunity or form,
List/Leads, Offer, Skill, Effort, and Report- averaging 2.5 appointments. downloads something and then comes to
ing/Results. If you’ll remember from the you with need.
Founding Case Study, we tracked their
calls and appointments, which is reporting. Someone with need is 8x more likely to
Then we had them dramatically increase convert into the sales process than an out-
the number of calls that they made, bound lead with whom you try to generate
which is effort. interest. Inbound is a lead with need and
outbound is a list.
That was the magic that boosted the
results initially, but all we did was focus on Usually, the type of leads that come in are
effort and reporting. The first four parts for smaller accounts. If you want to see
of the acronym weren’t addressed. I want large, targeted accounts you need to start
to share with you how we got them to 6.5 To raise the number of appointments, cold-calling.
appointments/day and it was primarily we started at the 11 and worked
through testing their different list sources. our way down. This averaged to 6.5 The basic rule of thumb to remember is
appointments/day/rep. interest is the counterfeit of need. To
transform interest into need, you need to
Test Lists research and pre-qualify your leads to find
Each of these vertical lines is a different list.
Leads vs. Lists companies with the most inherent need
We made about 300 calls from each one of What’s the difference between a list and possible. The best way to do that is with a
them and found the first three getting zero a lead? A lead is someone who comes specialist and generalist model.
appointments/day. The very best list was to you with a need. HubSpot calls it the

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 Specialist and
Page 12

Generalist Models

The first thing we recommend you do is GENERALIST MODEL

Combined Appointment Setters,
break up your sales model into a specialist
Closers, and Account Managers
model. There are different kinds of models. Appointment Setter
Closer
A pure generalist model is a single sales Account Manager
rep who sets the appointments, closes
the sales and manages the account. The
specialist model is where you have the SEMI-GENERALIST MODEL
appointment setters, closers and account Combined Appointment Setters
managers all separate and doing what they and Closers
Dedicated Account Managers Appointment Setter Account Manager
do well. You’ll find those personality pro- Closers
files are all very different.

Our latest research shows that the special-

ist model is becoming more popular and
SEMI-SPECIALIST MODEL
Dedicated Appointment Setters
results are starting to come in. Combined Closers and
Account Managers Appointment Setter Closer
Account Manager
The model InsideSales.com advocates is
adding one new position at the front end
called the lead researcher. This person,
coupled with the data of pen services from
SPECIALIST MODEL
Dedicated Appointment Setters
a list partner like ZoomInfo, leverages your Dedicated Closers
entire team dramatically. Dedicated Account Managers Appointment Setter Closer Account Manager Lead Researcher
Dedicated Lead Researcher

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 How Sales Utilizes
Page 13

List Partners, ZoomInfo

Contact Append Contact Attrition

Our data decay rates hover around 32 Salespeople have a habit of working for a
percent. One of the worst things that can company for two-three years, and then
happen is to close a customer and not leaving. That creates a problem of wrong
know what industry they’re in or the size numbers and bad data. To make sure your
of the account. My first recommendation sales reps are being as productive as pos-
for a lead researcher model is to go to your sible in reaching leads, send your data to a
customer base and append all the data provider like ZoomInfo to enrich it and re-
in fields (industry type, size of company, profile the accounts.
title type, and title function) to find your
sweet spots. Best Practice:
PowerDialer
Comprehensive Cloud-based
Best Practice: The worst thing you can do is have your Communications Solution
salespeople sorting through data. You
• Increased contact rates
Focus on the areas where you have will be wasting high leverage labor cost
• Best practice analytics
the best close ratios, best revenue per by having them go and find a new phone
account, best customer retention, and the number. Just mark it in the database as a • Optimized sales workflow
shortest sales cycles. In other words, fish bad number, kick it back in the queue and • Total visibility into sales activities
in the same area of the lake where you’re let ZoomInfo or another data company try
catching the good fish. and find that number for you.
Start Free Trial

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 Whom to Target:
Page 14

Look for Sales Triggers

A company that has just received ven- However, keep in mind that every one Have they just taken money or moved to a
ture capital funding has money, believe of the sales reps reports to a sales man- new location?
me. They are being pressured to spend ager or director who does make decisions.
it effectively. Remember the ANUM Those other leads aren’t useless. Segment Any one of those could be a trigger that
model? You want to be speaking to people those leads out and put them in a differ- means they’re ready to learn more about
who have authority, need, urgency, and ent campaign with a different approach. your product. Those are the kinds of
money. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a When you call them, try something like, things we do with our data append model
list that already defines companies who “Hey, we met you down at Dreamforce and and it’s very powerful. We think it’s the
have money? want to know what team you are working new frontier of sales and marketing for the
on and who’s in charge of it. Can we get next year or two.
Tradeshow lists are gathered by someone an introduction to speak to the person in
giving you his or her business card. Those charge of sales?”
leads are great and are our favorite kinds
of leads. We pop them in our system. The That’s a gold mine! We’re still getting
problem is these business cards usually great value out of that list and lead, but
don’t have the size of company, title func- we’re not wasting the time we would
tion and industry type printed on them. have if we had treated that person like a
That’s when we send over our list to a list decision maker.
provider like ZoomInfo to enrich the data
and give it right back to us. From there we Finally, look for other sales triggers that
quickly define which of those leads has would make the company a good fit to
the ability to make decisions (remember, buy your product. For example, did they
authority!). just hire a new Vice President of Sales?

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 Page 15

The 15 Time Wasters

In 2004, when we started InsideSales.com, Another time waster, leaving voicemail,

we analyzed the top 15 ways companies has been remedied with the invention of
were wasting time. We studied every- a targeted, pre-recorded message which
thing from strategy to bad hiring, poor is left with the click of button. Other huge
management, low motivation and more. time wasters addressed in our whitepa-
Our LRM research highlighted immedi- per include fulfillment and lead research.
ate response. Here’s a data point that will Download the complete whitepaper at
blow your mind: www.insidesales.com/whitepapers.

The average company responds to its

inbound leads in 46 hours and 37 min-
utes and the average sales rep makes 1.88
phone calls to respond to a lead before he
or she gives up.

We’ve researched this with 16,000 time

periods and we’re finding you need to
be able to respond within five minutes, Download Now
making six to nine phone calls before
giving up.  If you do that you’ll contact
somewhere between 85 to 95 percent of
your leads. The average company only con-
tacts 27 percent of its leads.

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 Page 16

Summary & Credits

Now that you know the best practices of how ZoomInfo and CONTENT
InsideSales.com make the most of their leads though list generation
Ken Krogue |
and management, you can now implement these best practices and
http://kenkrogue.com
strategies to increase the performance of your sales and lead gener-
ation teams. Mark Ruthfield |
http://www.zoominfo.com
Remember, the biggest problem sales managers are finding is that
they’re wasting sales reps’ time by asking them to enrich the call data WRITERS
instead of spending their time on the phone selling. By understand-
Alex Orton |
ing this principle now, you’ll save yourself and your sales team a lot of
time and money. COPY EDITOR

Brittany Griffin |
For a more detailed, in-depth discussion on the best practices shared
in this eBook, watch the webinar featuring Ken Krouge and DESIGNER
Mark Ruthfield, available here.
Scott Humphries |

INSIDE SALES VIRTUAL SUMMIT Now On Demand

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