Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Inside sales representatives and business development representatives spend a majority of their time prospecting companies to find and create potential sales opportunities. Depending on the type of project, an inside sales rep may have many different campaigns to follow up on, calling both warm and cold prospects.

Let’s recap the colloquial definitions of “cold calling” and “warm calling.” I contact prospects for my client who have expressed interest in their solutions through downloading information on their website or attending their events. Reaching out to a prospect who already has a relationship with your client or that you have previously engaged with is considered “warm calling.” It is also common for a sales rep to prospect campaigns in which the prospect has had no prior engagement with a client. This type of situation is commonly referred to as “cold calling.”

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Katie Kelly, Associate Inbound Marketing Specialist at HubSpot.

Traditionally, we think of BDRs as energetic, hungry, cold-calling machines. How can we get a prospect into taking a meeting? How can we get creative with our voicemails or sales pitches?

This worked well for decades - that was until our little friend, The Internet, arrived.

Summer weather is finally starting to blossom. Spring has sprung, Memorial Day has passed, and the dog days of summer are on their way! Many of us have already begun to daydream of summer travel plans. I’ve been hearing buzz around my office lately regarding my colleagues’ upcoming vacations for the summer months. I’m sure my coworkers and I aren’t the only ones with trips in store. I was quickly reminded that a majority of my prospects will be taking time off during the summer as well. Before I know it, I’ll be running into hundreds of out-of-office messages.

Let’s face it: Not every cold call campaign is created equal. Data integrity and relevance vary with each purchased list, and these new lists are far from free. In a sales world that’s becoming more social, it’s more important to target and personalize your messages to prospects, setting yourself apart from the rest and refusing to provide "another sales pitch." Below are 4 ways to quickly find and engage more relevant contacts, building a warmer pipeline for prospecting. 

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Kevin Thornton, Executive Vice President - Sales & Marketing for VanillaSoft. 

Here is a statistic that may give you a jolt: “only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales.” (Source: HubSpot). This raises some questions:

• Are sales and marketing in alignment on what constitutes a qualified or sales-accepted lead?
• Am I purchasing the right lists & working with the right list providers?
• How are leads being reviewed and passed along to my sales reps?

A lot has already been written about sales & marketing alignment and list providers.  Today I want to talk about a third point:  how is your team’s next lead reviewed and passed along to a rep?

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt of a chapter from our recently published eBook, The Ultimate Inside Sales Prospecting and Management Success eBook. If you're interested in reading the 35-page handbook, click the link above.  

Lists and data go hand in hand. Some types of data can inform the way you develop your list, while other types of data are gleaned from already existing lists. According to NetProspex, more than 60% of B2B companies rely on “unreliable” data to fuel demand generation. In fact, bad data or poor data quality costs US businesses $600 billion annually. We want to show your company how you can prevent wasting money and use data to your advantage.

Having the know-how to find the right contact could be one of the most underrated functions of the prospecting process. This ability separates someone who is average and someone who excels. It sounds easy enough until you actually sit down and try calling into a company like Microsoft or IBM to see who handles some niche area of technology operations.

One of the first things we train new hires on is how to navigate a list in Salesforce. The reasoning behind doing this in the beginning of training is because Salesforce is something inside sales reps use every day. Knowing how to work a list will help you pass qualified leads easier than calling straight down a list of hundreds of names.

It’s been a busy week for everyone at AG Salesworks, but Peter Gracey especially. Our president participated in the largest inside sales summit in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, on June 20 from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific Time. He was accompanied by an all-star roster of sales professionals and authors who offered advice to grow your company’s revenue. Pete Gracey spoke about how to measure outbound success. To view this event on demand, register for free here.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Kevin Stemple, Database Manager at AG Salesworks. 

Securing clean and accurate contacts is a battlefield; there are data mines everywhere, ready to cause mass destruction to your day and CRM system. One must tread carefully, or risk near certain doom in the form of financial loss, duplications or wasted time.