Sales Prospecting Perspectives

A few minutes ago I was eavesdropping on two BDRs that were recording their voicemails to use with our new auto dialer software. In between their giggling, it was music to my ears to hear them continue to re-record their voicemail messages until they were just right.

At the start of the year, our organization rolled out an auto-dialer software. With the software comes the ability to increase contact and qualification rates for every BDR within our organization. Like anything new that’s being implemented, user adoption was an obvious concern during the process. As to be expected with any new technology, objections from the reps came up, questioning “What’s in it for me?”

Last week, a friend of mine sent out a link to Cold Call Me Maybe on Tumblr. If you’re in sales and haven’t seen this clever blog with gif animations yet, I highly recommend it for a good laugh! One of the animations I found particularly funny was specific to the concept of objections and the caption read, “When a prospect has an objection that you don’t really know how to overcome…” which you can see here.  

Something I find clients ask pretty regularly is, “Would you guys call into this list to help drive attendance to an event of ours?” We are always happy to do it because we are typically able to drive additional attendance to their events, on top of what they were able to drive from their own marketing efforts. The last two events we worked on were very last minute and we only had two weeks to call on the list of prospects – with that said, we were still able to drive 6 new prospects to each, so who knows how many additional attendees we could have sent if we started calling efforts earlier.

Before recapping our blogs from last week, I wanted to highlight a quick read I ran across this week on B2BLeadBlog recarding the 2012 MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report.  The two highlighted survey results were regarding lead generation tactics and the level of effectiveness of the surveyed tactics. It wasn't surprising to see that 81% of the 1,900 marketers surveyed use email marketing in their lead generation strategy, but it was great to see is that Social Media came in with the third highest number of votes with 72%.  In regards to effectiveness though, only 63% of marketers found social media either very or somewhat effective and 88% found email marketing effective.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Website Optimization also had high marks in regards to effectiveness with 88% and 87% respectively finding those tactics to be either very or somewhat effective. 

If you’ve checked out any of my previous blogs, you may know that I typically blog about a hot topic of discussion that had come up for myself and/or one of my clients during the previous week. Last week in particular, I ran into three instances where the idea of following up on contract and maintenance renewals came up as immediate needs. In each of the three cases, the client expressed that they wanted to make sure they were staying on top of their renewal strategy in order to maximize their revenue potential. Seeing as though such a significant portion of revenue comes from contract and maintenance renewals for many companies out there, I thought I’d give my two cents on the topic, and share some thoughts about renewal strategies in hopes that others will share theirs as well!

Isn't technology grand?  I woke up this morning to that annoying alarm sound that makes us all cringe when we hear it.  But once I turn off the alarm, I hear a nice soothing voice that tells me the temperature outside, the forecast for the day and any traffic concerns with my morning commute.  It's amazing what we can do with the amount of data that is streaming across our networks and the applications we have for this information is becoming more readily available. That bodes well for the sales industry, where having real-time access to customer information can be the difference between a closed or lost deal.

My wedding date is quickly approaching and I couldn’t be more excited as everything seems to be coming together with November 24^th quickly approaching. There’s just one small aspect of getting married that for some reason makes me feel a tad uneasy: changing my last name. With an unusual name like “Pilpel” you are probably wondering why I would be feeling uneasy.  It is quite difficult for people to pronounce, let alone spell, but I’ve had my family’s name for 28 years and taking on a new one will be a big change. The important thing to remember is that although sometimes changes might bring on a feeling of angst or anxiety, change is usually a good thing. I can easily relate this feeling to an experiment my boss rolled out to the Directors and Business Development Reps at our company a couple of weeks ago, which was to focus less on a high daily activity number and instead focus on whatever it takes to pass more qualified sales opportunities. I’ll admit I was a bit hesitant with the idea at first because it was different from what we are used to; however, with the change we’ve seen positive results which has really changed my opinion.

Last week of September and you can already see the Halloween decorations and pumpkins being placed in people's yards.  The temperatures have begun to drop here in New England and apple picking is the top weekend family activity. 

Last week was a whirlwind kind of week. I would have done anything just to have a few extra hours in each day. Along with my regular tasks, list needs and requests from clients were at an all time high. Calling on brand new lists is always exciting to anyone in inside sales because they bring a fresh audience to target. But, adding new lists to your database comes with much more work on the front end before the list is ready to call on. The lists need to be populated with new contacts and scrubbed against the existing database to avoid creating duplicates. It will also needs to be properly formatted in excel prior to importing to keep fields in your CRM clean and consistent. These tasks are ones that an inside sales rep nor an inside sales manager can accomplish alone, which is why I wanted to blog today about how appreciative I am for our internal list development team.

Recently I was doing research regarding turnover rates for inside sales representatives and I came across an interesting quote from Trish Bertuzzi, President of The Bridge Group, Inc.  Trish was replying to a question about how long you should expect an inside sales representative to stay in the position. She explained, “Our 2010 LeadGen Metrics & Compensation report has the average tenure as 2.1 years. Subtract from that the 3.2 months it takes to ramp them and you really need to consider how to get the most out of this investment.” Although it’s been a couple of years since this report was released, it still falls in line with what we are seeing today for inside sales positions.