Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Do you ever get to the grocery store and find yourself rolling up and down the isles wasting time gathering your thoughts on what you need? You forgot to write out a list, you have no clue if you need milk or cheese, dish soap, paper towels or what you stocked up on last week.

This week when I sat down to blog I was having some difficulty deciding on what to write about. After sitting at my desk racking my brain for a topic, I started googling “How to get started writing a sales blog” and one of the first tips I came across was to go to my email inbox and check out the incoming subject lines from clients to determine if there was a recurring theme. If I noticed a continual pattern, the article instructed me to blog about that topic. Sure enough, when I went to my inbox, I kept seeing the phrase “Feedback on Leads” coming through from different clients. Bingo, I thought - there was my topic for the week. 

My friend Tom runs an inside team for a software company in Boston. He gave me a call the other day asking for my opinion on his compensation package for his inside sales reps. We both compensate our inside sales reps based on performance, but Tom sees performance very differently than I do. Tom pays his reps by the number of opportunities they pass on a monthly basis. The more appointments you set for the outside team, the more money you get. Every time a sales rep has a conversation with someone you passed, the little cash register noise goes off in your head. I hear this from a lot of people that run inside sales teams.

Before we do a quick recap we want to highlight a great article we found this week from Howard Sewell, President, Spear Marketing Group where he discusses the importance and value of an inside sales team, and the questions you should ask yourself before launching a lead nurturing program. 5 Questions To Ask Before You Launch A Lead Nurturing Program.

I have written about the importance of closing the loop between Marketing and Sales.  It is equally critical to close the loop between your inside and outside teams! There can often be a disconnect between an inside sales team and the field reps. Once the lead has been passed over there is no further communication between the two parties as to how the call went. The value of having a feedback process in place is that you can make sure everyone is on the same page and that the inside sales team is aware of what makes for a good opportunity.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you another guest entry from one of our BDRs, Jill Ryan. 

Today's Sales Prospecting Perspectives post is from Chris Lang, AG's Sales Director. 

I am obsessive compulsive about organization. My OCD for organization manifests itself in my kitchen these days. About 3 weeks ago I decided to pull everything out of my cabinets and drawers, and rearrange them so that the things used most were on the forefront of the shelves and the rest would fall back in order of how often they are needed. I pulled various utensils, gadgets, measuring devises, scales, pots and pans out of the pantry and placed them on the kitchen table. I looked at the massive pile of kitchen accessories in front of me and realized something. "Man I don't use any of this stuff.....I don't even know what some of it is." Take for example the enormous fork and spoon that come as part of your utensil sets. What the heck is that fork for? Do you give it to a gigantic neighbor after you serve them a brontosaurus steak?  Moving on I saw that I had 4 different whisks, a blender, a hand mixer, one of those mixers attached to a huge stainless steel bowl and one other tool that looked like you could mix, chop, process and teach a dog calculus depending on the attachment you used. You know what I use to mix things...a tiny fork. It does takes me 6 hours to make pancakes. Maybe that's what the giant fork is for! This was a common theme. I have the tools to measure ingredients in any increment you need and yet I measure with my hands or terms given to me by my mother such as "A dab of" or "A slew". I have 5 cutting boards and knives that ninjas would think are unnecessarily sharp, yet I cut food on a plate with an old steak knife.

Stage 1:  Initial Quality Assessment. (This occurs immediately following the first call.)

If you have established your teleprospecting team, you may already be up and running with your inside team generating leads for your outside sales team. This is great, and exactly what the purpose and goal of your teleprospecting efforts should be. One important question you need to ask yourself, and your outside team, is how are the quality of those opportunities?

In my recent webcast, Perspectives in Teleprospecting - A Closed Loop Strategy, I talked about the importance of having a closed loop feedback process in place to track all of the qualified leads that your telesales team is uncovering.  When you are investing time and money in a lead generation program you want to be able to prove the effectiveness of your campaign and make sure that all of the qualified opportunities that your team is passing over to sales are being nurtured appropriately.