Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Josiane Feigon, President of TeleSmart.

Millennials are currently flooding inside sales organizations, and their numbers aren’t going to be reduced. They come in a broad range of work personality-types: some are uber-professional superstars with high leadership potential, while others treat the office like a dorm, walk around with their wrecking balls, and have extremely short attention spans.

The challenge of ramping them up and transferring knowledge is big. Since many millennials don’t want anyone telling them what to do, any type of training that involves a talking head or an authority figure is not well received. Here are some issues that inside sales training must overcome if it wants to reach millennials:

I just wrapped up my first fall Sunday Funday. We watched the Pats, had some friends over, cooked some fall-inspired food, and may have had one or two pumpkin beers. This is my absolute favorite time of year. It's a fresh new start as we close out the summer and get ready to start the last quarter of the year. An influx of new customers goes hand in hand with that, and it’s always exciting to kick off new client engagements.

Last week, I had the chance to help train a fresh new crop of recruits for a long-time client of ours. After 12 years of trying to figure this teleprospecting thing out, I'd say we're completely sold on how we do things internally around here. The interesting part for me is seeing how others not immersed in the AG Salesworks culture react to our process and mindset. Fortunately, most of the post-training feedback was in line with what we wanted to hear. The long and the short of it was that we helped provide a framework on how to best attack all warm and cold opportunities. Sometimes, all inside sales need is a place to start. 

Last week was my 10-year anniversary at AG. At times, 10 years seems like eons ago, but honestly most of the time it truly feels as if time has flown by. During this period, I bought a condo, got married, had a child (who is now 7), sold a condo, and bought a house... all while watching AG grow from an 8-person shop to the 60 folks we are today. 

As the end of summer draws near, hiring season looms upon us inside sales professionals. Many recent graduates will be looking for their first job after a relaxing summer, and many seasoned sales reps will be taking stock of their current positions. At AG Salesworks, we’ve seen many potential inside sales reps walk through our door for interviews in the past few weeks. However, our hiring process isn’t for everyone. After all, new sales hires frequently fail, so we want to make sure that we’re hiring the best talent to benefit our clients and our prospects. During the initial interview, we have a keen eye for personality traits that will help the candidate thrive in an inside sales environment. Here are 3 traits we look for in an inside sales interview and 3 questions to ask when assessing if a candidate’s personality is a good fit for your company.

I'm a big teamwork guy. I like when everyone can share credit.

That may seem like an overly obvious statement for most of you out there, but if you asked yourself if you're a team player, what would your answer be? Deep down, do you prefer to collaborate with others or tackle things independently? I don't think there's really a right or wrong answer, but at some point, inevitably, you're most likely going to need to collaborate with a colleague or boss on a portion of your work in order to take it to the next level. 

As I've discovered over the years, the more responsibility I take on, the more I realize that working independently isn't really an option for me. As much as I would like to have direct control over my world, I realize that there are far too many moving parts for me to not have to rely on others for their input and insight. I'm perfectly fine with that, and I came to terms with that reality long ago. Most of us will have to if we have any intention of working in a management capacity or in inside sales. 

(And Call Volume is Not One of Them)

I recently wrote in my blog post 5 Most Frequently Asked Questions About Outsourcing Inside Sales that gone are the days of closely tracking the number of activities when managing your inside sales team. While I still think measuring activities is important to a degree, I don’t think it should hold as much weight as it does for many inside sales teams out there.

The problem with placing such a large emphasis on the number of activities is that doing so confuses the purpose of teleprospecting. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. With this metric as a forefront in Inside sales reps’ minds, they tend to get caught up in making a high number of dials instead of focusing on making smart dials. Smart dials lead to quality conversations which in turn result in qualified opportunities for themselves or for the outside sales team to follow up on.

About a month ago, I talked about the challenges I've faced when managing conflict and I offered a couple of ways to address these obstacles that I’ve learned over the years. Since then, I've really made a point to consider alternatives to proactively manage conflict.

However, maybe “conflict” doesn’t have to be such a dirty word. It’s all in the tone with which we choose to approach a potentially contentious situation.  Being assertive doesn't have to be ugly if we come at it from the right angle.

The hardest transition I've found when moving into a manager role is the change in relationship between you and former colleagues that you've once worked with. This changeover generally tends to be the biggest challenge for most new inside sales managers, whether they're responsible for training the inside sales team or for managing the managers.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Howard Brown, Founder and CEO of RingDNA.

There was a time not so long ago when your average B2B salesperson spent more time on the road than a major league baseball team. But now, more and more companies are hiring remote reps, also known as inside sales. These reps possess many of the same sales skills as field sales reps. They close high-ticket deals and build long-lasting customer relationships, all while racking up far fewer frequent-flyer miles. They also typically carry increasingly large quotas. According to the Bridge Group, the average inside sales rep’s quota in 2013 was $985,000.