4 Questions You Need To Answer Before Building a Touchpoint Model

May 2, 2014

Spring Stepping Stones
Let’s talk a little bit about sales touchpoint models. You know, the cadence with which you contact your prospects in the course of a day, week, month, and year. Does that bore you? Well, guess what, as a BDR Manager or contributor to an outbound lead generation team, this is your holy grail. In order to properly map the buyer journey, this model needs to be buttoned up with your team. If you don’t have it down-pat today, that’s okay, but you need to get started! Here are the four questions (and some answers) that will help you get to work building now.

The 4 Questions You Need to Answer Before Building a Sales Touchpoint Model

1) How Many Touches Should Each Lead Have and Over What Period of Time?

You can’t go on emailing and calling your leads forever. Take a look at the historical data in your CRM. How many calls does it typically take before getting a lead live? How many conversations does it take to book an appointment? Look at closed deals and determine how many times a lead was contacted before the opportunity was created.
Half-Life
Don’t have historical data? That’s okay — there are different strategies that you can use as jumping off points and then tweak accordingly based on the results you are seeing. My personal favorite is the half-life strategy created by sales expert, Jeff Hoffman. In short, the amount of time between the first touch and the second touch is cut in half on each subsequetial touchpoint in order to create a sense of urgency.
My Advice: Just pick a rhythm and commit to it. The beauty of a touchpoint model is that it gets all your reps behaving the same way—instant calibration. Once you have established a rhythm you can adjust and tweak accordingly

2) How Do I Track the Touches?

Make your CRM your best friend. By logging the activity and setting up the appropriate follow-up tasks, you will be able to track a lead as it progresses through the cycle. Work with your reps on how to appropriately tag and title the activity. “Touch 1,” “Email 2,” whatever you decide, get your reps tagging touches the same way for accurate reporting.
My Advice: It is up to you as a manager to police their use of your CRM, so make sure that you reinforce good behavior with individual dashboards for self-monitoring.

3) What Happens After the Model is Over?

Well, it depends on the maturity of your organization and the information gathered during the outreach program. In an ideal world, at the end of the cycle you will have gathered enough information to either:

  • Set an appointment (because that’s what we are here for)
  • Enter the lead into the appropriate (focused!) nurture program
  • Set a follow-up task for the lead 1-3 months out, depending on the capacity and goals of the organization

4) How Long Should I Wait Before Restarting the Model?

Avoid the lag time by having the start of the next touchpoint model clearly defined. Personally, I never like to wait too long. As we know, priorities are ever changing in an expansion-stage organization. Ideally, no quarter should go by without having contact with your lead. Even if it means sending a one-off email outside the model, just to stay engaged. If you have a marketing nurture program in place, have alerts set up where if a lead engages with an automated email or fills out a form, a rep can follow-up with them accordingly.
My Advice: If someone says to follow-up in six months, cut it in half. Chances are they aren’t going to remember exactly when and if there is a specific date they have in mind (budget planning) you want to be sure to catch them before it is too late.
Reps are constantly grappling with how often they should contact a lead or the appropriate length of time to engage with a lead before cutting them off. If there is a clear program in place, it will help them be more efficient with their time and increase their level of productivity.  
Those were my four questions for you, but do you have any for me? Post them below and I will do my best to get an answer to you.

Associate

<strong>CeCe Bazar</strong> is an Associate on OpenView's investment team. She was previously a Sales Strategist also at OpenView.