Quantity vs Quality Sales Prospecting:
The Game of Numbers

Alena Bohomol, Co-founder of Prosply, shares some great insight into "the game of numbers", coming directly from our experience using two totally different approaches at Prosply.

In her video, she outlines Quality vs. Quantity as one of the biggest brain-teasers that sales professionals struggle with when trying to choose the right prospecting strategy. This topic relates to the quality of your contact list, the messages you send to initiate a discussion, your follow up strategy and any other activities that help you generate new clients.

Then, she jumps right into it: the results of a quality vs. a quantity-based approach and the SIGNIFICANT difference between them. Let's have a short overview of the two projects:

Project 1:
The client was a small Web and Mobile Development Services company from Germany with little to no experience in lead generation. The lack of understanding of their target audience, as well as their high expectations from the very beginning affected our strategy. They clearly put more weight on getting results fast, rather than on who and how we are reaching out to.

Our team decided to start with several industries that had brought good outcomes in the past for businesses similar to our client's. As there was some pressure to contact as many leads as possible in the shortest period of time, we managed to generate 710 leads and to slightly customize our email campaigns for different target groups. All this led to a rather generic approach and the following results:

In the end, when the goal was "quantity", the conversion was only 0.56% which was far from what we expected, given the amount of leads we contacted.

Project 2:
The second client was an Australian Machine Learning production house. We worked directly with a Project Manager, who was quite experienced in sales and had a good idea of who their ideal customer is. His goal was to fill their pipeline with new prospects that perfectly match their buyer profile by scaling the sales outreach via email.

Prosply helped him to thoroughly process the financial industry of Australia, where the client had been successful previously. How exactly did we do that? This time we personalized our outreach messages based on the industry, the job title of our prospect and any possible challenges that their company is facing. And guess what - that precise targeting worked!

In contrast to Project 1, we focused on contacting only companies that were relevant to our client and managed to be very productive with 11 meetings booked from the 400 contacted leads. This approach generated a 5X HIGHER conversion rate!

Conclusion

With these numbers in mind, you need to ask yourself whether it makes sense to put your message out there for everyone and hope for the best, or focus your effort on a smaller group of companies that are more likely to be interested in your product.

We have to note that this was our experience and different strategies might work for different companies, but it's still worth running this experiment to observe the impact on your conversion rate. Let us know if you got the same results!