Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Employee retention seemed to be a taboo subject at my old sales jobs. If sales managers didn’t speak about it, the problem would simply not be a problem. Unfortunately, they seemed to be conditioned to accept that attrition was inevitable with a team of people making cold calls all day. It wasn't uncommon to see about 50% of new hires exit the organization after 6 months. Why? You've taken the time to interview, hire and train a rep, but once they're at altitude, they leave. No one should be OK with that.

Businesses consciously take great measures to create and sustain a positive online identity.  They want to be found, and once they are, they want to exude a good, lasting impression.  In the B2B world, the human behavior that precedes the act of evaluating and buying has changed drastically with the rise of social media and the availability of endless online intelligence. 

I know a lot of people who go to the gym regularly after work, and I myself have always followed that familiar routine. It wasn’t until I started reading over all the benefits from exercising before work and talked to friends who were doing it that I decided to give it a fair shake. There are many benefits for inside sales reps exercising before work.  In inside sales, exercise before the beginning of the work day can motivate you to put your best foot forward. 

Understand the Difference:

As sales professionals we come across these types of people all the time.  But knowing how to tell the difference between a so-called “Tire Kicker” and a “Window Shopper” is critical and will better help you to eliminate wasted effort. 

Having the know-how to find the right contact could be one of the most underrated functions of the prospecting process. This ability separates someone who is average and someone who excels. It sounds easy enough until you actually sit down and try calling into a company like Microsoft or IBM to see who handles some niche area of technology operations.

Technology companies create solutions that are complicated, have various levels of functionality as well as varying levels for usage.  Whether verbally or through content creation, marketers and sales professionals will run into a consistent issue: How do I explain this without rambling on and on?

Let’s just get this out of the way first and foremost: You don’t really need a college degree to get into sales.  It absolutely goes a long way if you have one but I know plenty of people who don’t have degrees and are in sales.  I went to an all business school and sales wasn’t an option as a Major concentration, and just recently it’s been added to the curriculum as a Minor.

I use Facebook.  So do you.  Your dog, or one of your friend’s dogs, probably has its own account.  I don’t really know why I keep using it.  Does anyone really know, though?  I guess I find some misanthropic entertainment in scrolling through the daily newsfeed to uncover anecdotal blips of ridiculous behavior.  My favorites are the self-pity posts.  These are the victimized, in which their mood has been terribly slain by the harsh reality that the newfound goal of the universe is to suppress just one individual’s complete sense of happiness and ambition.

Most if not all inside sales reps have a CRM that they work within, but not many sales executives create and/or enforce any sort of process for how their reps should be operating and logging information within that CRM.

Have you heard the news lately?  You know, the story about the parent filing a “bullying” complaint against a rival town because his son’s high school football team got beat badly?  The final tally was 91-0.