Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Holy hell.  I’m exhausted.  What a year so far.  I had a feeling things were cranking along in the land of Outbound, but it wasn’t until my good friend and “Math Guy” Matt Bertuzzi sent me the first draft of the mid year Outbound Index that I truly understood just how fast things had accelerated.  

There is a natural sequence to most of the activities we engage in on a daily basis.  Every day is a series of steps leading to an endless amount of completed projects that combine to create what is our life.  If you are hungry and need a meal, you find a recipe, shop for ingredients,  cook,  then eat.  If your kids need new clothes, you find their size, their desired style, you shop, they wear the clothes...  Job done.

In December of last year I approached Matt Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group, Inc with an offer. I’d hand over the keys to our massive database of real, active, and standardized CRM data if he could do one thing for me. Could he find a way to make it useful.  Well, after many months of hand wringing, iterations, verbal altercations, and math, Matt has done just that.  Enter the Outbound Index.

Few types of people can impact a teleprospecting reps day more positively than the sales rep(s) that they support. When you are creating opportunities via Outbounding, sales is your customer. Therefore, any teleprospecting rep worth their salt cares what their assigned sales reps think about them. When played correctly, a great sales rep can actually increase the value they are receiving from Outbound by playing the right role.  Unfortunately, it’s been our experience that they usually end up subtracting value through their interactions with their assigned teleprospecting reps. In many cases it’s up to the manager who oversees the teleprospecting team to provide the leadership, guidance, and big stick required to keep sales in line in terms of how they deal with their assigned teleprospectors.  

Outbounding. This is the term we think people should start using to describe a formal Telequalification process. Here’s how we define it at a high level.  

I love automated email marketing.  It has changed the rules of the game for opportunity generation firms and allowed us to dramatically increase rep productivity.  When you dial in the right automation tool for your marketing organization you see the immediate impact in the form of increases in web traffic and inbound opportunities for your teleprospecting team.  However, the majority of companies seem to stop there.  They automate the delivery of their high level marketing message, but don't push that same automation out to their sales teams. 

I've had my fair share of management mistakes over the last 15 years. Some are far too epic to openly admit via this blog. Mistakes, while horrendous in the near term, can serve you well later on. Looking back on some of my doozies, I remembered some more substantial ones from my days as an entry level manager in the hotel industry.  

With the non-stop press coverage of the coming election I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and share some election year related data with all of you.  We just concluded the best January in our almost a decade of being in business.  I know that the main reason for our great sales and client retention performance last month is our people and processes, but for some reason I felt that there may be other forces at play as well. 

It's that time of year again.  The time of year when the AG Team never ceases to amaze with its holiday cheer.  

We once again had a wonderfully mistake filled holiday party.  Tomorrow we'll be having an employee driven Holiday Pot Luck for lunch.  All great stuff for sure, but none of it compares to my favorite  helping out those in need and this is where the AG crew truly shines.  

It's that time of year where every blogger in the universe posts what they are thankful for, or tries to work what they do into a Thanksgiving meal metaphor.  Given my general lack of creativity I LOVE THIS TIME OF YEAR.  I love it because I can do a top ten list of things I'm thankful for.  This has been a banner year for AG so I have much to be thankful for.  I consider myself a lucky man to be a member of this team and to truly enjoy what I do. Without further adieu, here are the top 10 Professional things I'm thankful for this year....