Yes, sales often give up on good leads too early. This makes sense - it is unnatural to keep contacting someone after no response. They are actually making progress by becoming more familiar to the contact but they just aren't aware that they are making this progress. Persistence will help and 3 touches is not enough.
InsideSales.com put together this info-graphic emphasizing this point and some other pitfalls - timing is a big one.
Here are some golden rules I recommend:
- Give sales the ability to unqualify if it's clearly not a lead. For example: account doesn't make sense, job title doesn't look good or contact info is incorrect & not able to be dug up.
- Change up mediums of contact. The priorities are likely: email, then phone, then social, then other...
- 7 or more touches for anything that appears to merit a conversation.
- Give the sales rep the ability to put the lead into a nurture program (instead of unqualify).
Number of touches
The three touches rule is too lazy. I only encouraged it above as a limit when the rep is going in cold because the context was around avoiding anger. If the rep is going in cold I would argue that the prospects are less likely to merit good conversations and requires less thoroughness. Give your sales rep some flexibility and he or she will know what to do. If they don't go with the golden rule of three until they are comfortable prioritizing. Measure them on total touches, not touches per lead. Make sure they respect the cost and context of each lead.
Timing is important
Note that the timing rule still applies with the seven or more touches. If the first three can come quick (within the first week), the next four or more can be interspersed. Tweak the style and length of messages over the next week-3 months. Eventually you have to clear the tele-reps queue of old campaigns.
My own creative spin on this
I have a lead status called 'sexy-lead, keep trying' for ones that I never want to give back to marketing. The logic here is that they deserve my personal attention. In my mind their use case might be a bit specific and I want to communicate it effectively and don't trust our segmentation. I think of it as my own personal account based marketing. Not sure if this is a best practice as it limits the number of people working on the lead - they are only receiving my dumb sales-y messaging .