Sales Prospecting Perspectives

As the end of summer draws near, hiring season looms upon us inside sales professionals. Many recent graduates will be looking for their first job after a relaxing summer, and many seasoned sales reps will be taking stock of their current positions. At AG Salesworks, we’ve seen many potential inside sales reps walk through our door for interviews in the past few weeks. However, our hiring process isn’t for everyone. After all, new sales hires frequently fail, so we want to make sure that we’re hiring the best talent to benefit our clients and our prospects. During the initial interview, we have a keen eye for personality traits that will help the candidate thrive in an inside sales environment. Here are 3 traits we look for in an inside sales interview and 3 questions to ask when assessing if a candidate’s personality is a good fit for your company.

I believe one of the most challenging aspects of sales teleprospecting is the first conversation.

You have less than a minute to prove yourself as a trustworthy sales rep. You only have your phone, your research, and your CRM to back you up. You can get bogged down by administrators or frustrated by curt replies. I’ve seen firsthand how extremely difficult it can be to build trust with a prospect on a first meeting.

(And Call Volume is Not One of Them)

I recently wrote in my blog post 5 Most Frequently Asked Questions About Outsourcing Inside Sales that gone are the days of closely tracking the number of activities when managing your inside sales team. While I still think measuring activities is important to a degree, I don’t think it should hold as much weight as it does for many inside sales teams out there.

The problem with placing such a large emphasis on the number of activities is that doing so confuses the purpose of teleprospecting. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. With this metric as a forefront in Inside sales reps’ minds, they tend to get caught up in making a high number of dials instead of focusing on making smart dials. Smart dials lead to quality conversations which in turn result in qualified opportunities for themselves or for the outside sales team to follow up on.

I have the opportunity to join calls with our inside sales team during the sales process frequently. It is exciting to speak with executives at companies who are in the beginning stages of creating an inside sales team themselves or are entertaining the idea of outsourcing. Choosing to outsource the function is often the result of these conversations, usually because these companies haven’t quite mastered best practices yet and need support. I really enjoy the task of taking on engagements to help develop the inside sales function, whether we continue our efforts after the first few months once up to altitude, or whether we hand off the inside sales processes to them once they’re running at full capacity.

Recently I was interviewing a candidate to fill the role of a Business Development Representative, and I was alarmed at one of the answers I heard. When I asked the candidate to walk me through their inside sales experience at their previous job, they began telling me that on their first day at the job, they were given a telephone, a computer, a desk, a printed list of names to call, and were told to “have at it.” Obviously I was in shock from this answer to think that inside sales organizations like this still exist, and it really got me thinking about how critical teleprospecting tools are when it comes to the success of inside teams.

It’s about that time again. Trees and flowers are in bloom, the temperature is reaching the mid 70s, and I’ve officially introduced open-toed shoes back into my wardrobe rotation. Summer is just around the corner, and you know what that means – it’s time to start gearing up for your sales company’s summer outing event! Company outings are a great way for your company as a whole to relax and unwind a bit. It’s a great time of the year to thank everyone for all of their hard work and to increase employee morale (especially when the event takes place on a work day).

Over the past few weeks, one sales training topic keeps coming up over and over again and if it’s coming up for me and my peers as a hot topic, I know it’s probably one that a lot of other inside sales leaders are talking about as well. The idea of ‘role plays' is the topic I’m referring to. Role plays were never my favorite thing to do throughout the training process as an inside sales rep, but I knew they were the best way for me to learn.

Last Friday afternoon as the day was winding down, I got into a discussion with some of our top performing Business Development Reps. I asked them, “What was your biggest challenge this week when making your dials?” One of them immediately answered, “Admins!” This got me thinking about how difficult it really is to get through administrative assistants and other gatekeepers. Gatekeepers hold their positions at companies because they are very good at their job – a side from overseeing all aspects of general office coordination, they know exactly how to monitor and manage inquiries from sales professionals like us. Although it can be very de-motivating when a gatekeeper won’t direct us to their boss, there is no reason why we can’t find alternative ways to get to these executives.