Sales Prospecting Perspectives

As a business development representative, I am armed with collateral to help prospects gain insight into my client’s products and services. This is part of our job- providing additonal information when we can’t qualify a prospect as a lead. But is there such a thing as ‘too much collateral’? The answer depends on a few things: your personal preference, how in depth your client wants to go, how many different solutions you have and the organization itself.

Recently, I was lucky enough to attend the AA-ISP Leadership Summit at the Palmer House in Chicago. It was a great event which was well attended by many great companies and thought leaders within the inside sales industry.  I came away thinking about two things: the inside sales role is truly evolving and many organizations realize they should have a social selling strategy, but most don’t realize how to do it or what to do with it.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Tom Knight, COO of SurgeryFlow.

Over the first quarter of the year, and in particular the last month, we have heard this question a lot.

For many, the question stems from doubt about the ability of Sales to produce replicable results, and for others it stems from a desire not to leave anything on the table. In both instances the answer is the same:

I’m going to be honest, I never really get into March Madness. Sometimes I’ll fill out a bracket, picking teams based on which color uniform I like better of course. This year I didn’t have a big interest in it – that is until I saw an email come through my inbox about our first ever 2013 BDR March Madness Tournament. Our contest development team really outdid themselves with this contest and their creativeness led to such great adoption across the company that I felt compelled to share (thanks guys!).

I have learned over the years that having a well thought out plan to reaching any goal makes all the difference. Building a pipeline is no different. When I was a rookie sales guy I was not much for business plans. Give me a list and a phone, and I'll make it happen was my motto. Guess what, it worked, I did make it happen. What I learned several years later is that I could have made more happen with less work, if I had only took the time to plan.

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. 

In the industry, we talk a lot about how to create the best environment for teleprospecting teams, from a day to day perspective, that will increase employee productivity. We’re constantly thinking of ways to incent our teams through more lucrative compensation plans, more robust training, better tools from a technology standpoint, etc. Something I have been thinking about lately is not only about how to increase performance through these methods, but also how to create the right physical environment  that creates a high energy space for reps to come to work.

March Madness has descended upon us and my bracket has already been busted! Let's hope your sales pipeline isn't experiencing the same thing!  

We usually reserve this portion of the recap to share an interesting article from the week. Today, I wanted to help our friends at Insidesales.com and Software Advice in promoting their 2013 Inside Sales Market Size Study. In 2010, Insidesales.com discovered that inside sales jobs were growing at a rate 15 times greater than outside sales jobs. They attributed the disproportionate growth to three key factors: The Great Recession made the lower average cost of employing an inside rep more enticing, Cloud-based CRM and online lead generation tools made remote selling more feasible, and a younger generation is increasingly comfortable doing business over the Web and phone.

In a perfect world of teleprospecting, every call would result in success, every assistant would be helpful, and every list would contain nothing but accurate, relevant information. Sadly, we don’t live in that world, but with a little work and the right tools, we have the ability to start building it. Resourcefulness while prospecting and making smarter dials and emails is crucial to inside sales success.

We are halfway through the month of March and hopefully you or most of your sales team is on pace for quota. If not, then you may find some advice or tools that could help in getting over that hump to finish the month strong right here. I'll recap this week's posts shortly, but first I wanted to share a great new tool from our friends over at NetProspex. In the past, I blogged about their State of Marketing Data 2013 benchmark report and this week they announced a new tool for marketers. Yesterday, NetProspex announced the release of their new Workbench, an instant, online data managment platform for B2B Marketers. Workbench is a cloud based service that puts marketers in direct control to help improve data quality used in their marketing and sales outreach. Some of the features include: a free Data HealthScan, the ability to assess hundreds of thousands of contacts, view the results of your HealthScan online or in a PDF format, organize and store files and assessments within Workbench and take actions to clean, enrich and grow your B2B marketing database. It is a great tool for marketers and the first of its kind available online.