Sales Prospecting Perspectives

This week marks my 9-year anniversary at AG Salesworks. It's been a great ride.  

Prior to joining AG, I spent some time working in hospitality, banking and technology. What I discovered is that the personalities I ran into within each of those industries could not get more diverse. With the experience I gained has come perspective on what­ I feel helps drive a team. It could be money for some, continuous praise for others or the challenge of what the job brings on a daily basis. One of the few consistent themes I've seen is this: You need to have your team’s back. 

As with any growing organization, we often debate different ideas that will allow us to scale. A big challenge is attempting to maintain a consistent lead volume from each new inside sales rep as we add to the team. The common solution I've seen with most organizations I've worked with in the past was to add managers to the team in order to solve the lead volume problems that arise as you scale. Generally, this tended to be the wrong way to go, especially if you were hoping in any way to see better margins (and a bigger bonus check).

Yesterday, it was 86 degrees outside. I was glad to be inside an air-conditioned office, but I also sympathized with my coworkers, who were calling for someone with “fiber” to help them move all our cubes outside. Oh, the cube life. I hope your business employees are doing well, and have been able to use their breaks to enjoy the much-coveted sunshine this week.

I often like to harken back to my first sales job in the hotel industry. It helps to keep things in perspective. Working a small patch of four suburban towns outside of Boston was a grind, to say the least. 

A nice benefit of working with a wide range of clients over the years has been the exposure we've had to the unique approaches in presenting a service or technology. Working with some of the brightest sales and marketing minds out there has helped to provide us fresh perspective on how to differentiate your product from the masses.

Those of us who have teleprospected in our day know that getting prospects to open up to inside sales person is no easy task. At times it can seem like pulling teeth for them to give us anything at all. 

Over the years, AG has been kind enough to send me off to a variety of professional development conferences, helping me to hone my skills in the many hats I’ve worn within the organization. Being a smaller company, I’ve fortunately been exposed to many scenarios that I may not have otherwise within larger companies. Typically these conferences provide me a wide range of topics/workshops which I can easily apply to my account manager/trainer/director job. 

If someone asked you a tough question that put you on the spot, would you tell the truth if your beliefs were contrary to your bosses beliefs? Tough one, right?

One of my biggest goals with any new rep on my teleprospecting team is to establish appropriate habits. There have been many times that I've worked with insides reps with a  few years of experience teleprospecting and find that within the first  month of their employment at AG I have to undo much of what has already been ingrained into their sales approach. Problem is, if we condition our reps to just get a list of questions answered on a cold call that is exactly what they are going to do because that is what they have been trained to do. 

It's reasonable to assume that when kicking off a teleprospecting campaign, the primary focus is going to be on the desired result: L-E-A-D-S. But what we often lose sight of is all the valuable data that can be collected as a by-product of your calling efforts.