The Client, a provider of NLP-enabled medical coding and health information management SaaS applications, routinely outsources initial prospecting activities to third-party agencies. With a sales cycle that can take more than six months to complete, the company believes its in-house sales team is best put to use nurturing and following up qualified opportunities instead of doing cold outreach.

The Client, however, has had mixed results with different outsourced marketing companies so far. The previous outsourced campaigns often ran into issues such as:

To support its recent refocus and product rollout, the Client planned a series of marketing initiatives designed to:

Prospect lists that need further profiling and updating

Not enough time given to product knowledge training

High percentage of no-show appointments

Appointments not properly vetted and qualified

This led the Client to briefly reassign much of the prospecting work to its in-house reps. But this move also produced underwhelming results. Scheduled appointments fell to 6-8 a month, and the Client saw a corresponding drop in the number of proposals sent.

It was clear that outsourced prospecting made more business sense for the Client, but the company needed to make sure that the agency it partnered with should focus on both volume and quality of sales opportunities being delivered.