Sales Prospecting Perspectives

We’ve all had it happen.  You’ve built great rapport with a prospect. You’ve taken them all the way through your qualification process and they are seemingly a perfect fit. It’s the decision maker or direct pass down. The pain is real and your technology can solve it. They’ve validated that pain by indicating that they will spend money to alleviate it. They’ve indicated an acceptable timeframe in which they want to buy something, and you know everyone that will be involved in the decision making process. Then, after all of that, they refuse to book a specific time to meet with your sales rep.  

If you partner with a teleprospecting firm or have an in house inside sales team, they may have some sort of scoring system in place to evaluate the quality of the opportunities they are throwing over the fence to sales.  I applaud the idea in theory, but I can't help but equate it to letting a 6th grader fill out their own report card.  ALL A'S BABY!!  I'm not accusing your vendor or in house inside sales team of dishonesty; I'm merely stating that they are biased as they generated the opp.  If you really want to find out if your fully qualified leads are living up to that name, ask your customer...the salesperson receiving it.  You can easily ascertain the quality of an opportunity by asking your sales people these three basic questions. 

I’m very proud of the training program we have here at AG for new reps.  It has been developed and fine tuned over 8+years of doing this, and I’m confident to say that it is one of the best crash courses in how to qualify a prospect out there today.  We have our BDR’s (assuming you don’t miss any days due to record snow falls) up and running within 5 business days.  This isn’t “on the phone fumbling through dials” ready...it’s “passing fully qualified leads” ready.

We follow three main rules as part of our training process and I felt they would be good to share with all of you.  These three rules provide the fundamental backbone of our training and allow us to get reps up and running (delivering forecast) faster than many organizations.  Here they are...

1.  Every hour counts: 

I love collateral and content.  I read it, write it, and believe in it.  We use our client’s content constantly in our outbound emailing efforts.  Whitepaper Links, eBooks, Gartner Reports etc…you name it and we send it to prospects. 

Here at AG Salesworks each inside sales team runs their own contest on a monthly basis.  The contests are usually themed around the season or some special event that is occurring.  The general goal behind our monthly contests is to do something fun that either fosters healthy competition or builds team unity (or both). 

I have to be honest, I stink at planning these things.  I usually come up with the contest on the fly and roll it out 6 or 7 days into the month because one of my reps has asked me what we are doing for it.  They are always fun, and my team gets into it, but that is more because they are excitable people, not because I run a good contest.

We conducted a very rudimentary study of our monthly performance over the past 8 years and the results may surprise you.  How many of you have had inside sales reps come to you and say “the holidays are killing me, I can’t get anyone live on the phone”..or some variation of that line.  I used to feel the same way until I actually took a look at the numbers and realized that statement couldn’t be farther from the truth. 

Now that I have completed my first year of blogging I now feel I’ve earned the right to Jump the Shark and create my first ever Top 5 List.  While my team has been off the charts this month from a performance standpoint, they have also been refusing to listen to me (hence the great performance) so I’ve decided to pick on them a bit with this list.  For your reading pleasure, The Top 5 Excuses Given by AG Insides Sales Reps for Not hitting their daily call number.

#5:  “I forgot”.  Seriously, this was given to me once.  The gentleman in question forgot to hit his call number.  Now we don’t run a sweat shop here.  105 activities per day is the number, it’s not easy, but most certainly reasonable.  This response was so absurdly lame that I won’t even give it due by speaking anymore on it.

#4:  “I’ll make up the missed activities tomorrow”.  Great thanks.  If that is how we are going to run our business how about I short pay you next week and make up the difference on the following payroll.  Consistency is key in this business...don’t borrow from tomorrow at the expense of today.

#3.  “I was researching my accounts”.  In theory I applaud this concept.  Being prepared for a call with some knowledge of your target company and contact is a best practice.  However, you don’t need to review the quarterly financials of the company nor do you need the contact to respond to your Facebook friend request before you make the dial.  A simple check of your previous call notes and a visit to the company website will suffice.

#2.  “I was writing up my leads”.  now this one is tough.  They have a point here.  If I were a better boss I’d have a more automated way for leads to be written up (I’m working on it). That being said, c’mon people don’t set out to write War and Peace. Keep it informative and simple.  Unless you’ve had a killer day (3 leads or more), this just isn’t a viable excuse.

#1.  “This list is no good”.  Oh man, my blood boils even typing this blog.  If I had a nickel for every time I’d heard this excuse over the years I’d be able to afford a robot that could write this blog for me.  There is no magic list.  You need the company name, the email syntax that the company uses, and a phone number that gets you into their system.  That’s it.  Call the number, ask for your contact, when you hear that they left the company 10 years ago, ask for their replacement.  The original contact name you call is the right one 10% of the time.

I’ve got a great team of inside sales reps and like I said, they are killing it this month and quarter. That still doesn’t stop them from dropping these beauties on me daily. Next one to lay one of these on me gets a special shout out in next week’s blog!!

This is the third and final blog in a multi-part series introducing the three main categories through which AG Salesworks evaluates and manages the skills development of its Teleprospecting or Inside Sales reps.  We’ve found through the years that in order to have the highest level of talent in our space we’ve got to go well beyond simply hiring the best.  They aren’t the best when you first sit them down.  You’ve got to train them, coach them, reward them, and promote them.  Over the years, we’ve broken the teleprospecting job into three main disciplines.  In order for a rep to be optimal, they must excel in each.  Once we established the three main areas of skill that must be optimized, it became much easier for us to identify areas of opportunity and attack them. The three main skill areas that we focus on for our reps are as follows.

     1.       Organizational Skills
     2.       Phone Skills
     3.       Work Ethic

In Step #1, we discussed organizational skills.  They provide the foundation for world class teleprospecting. However, you can’t stop there.  

In Step #2, we discussed the all important phone skills.  What good is having all your ducks in a row to begin catching people live if you don’t have the confidence and message you need to turn them into fully qualified leads.

In Step #3, we are going to tie it all together by discussing some quick and easy ways to evaluate and improve the overall work ethic of your Teleprospecting and Inside Sales reps.

Contrary to what many of my friends and colleagues tell me, I believe that work ethic can be developed.  It isn’t something that we can only learn from our parents.  I believe strongly that if you create a company and an environment that people truly enjoy working in and care about then you can actually help them develop a strong work ethic.  Make special note of what I just stated in the last sentence.  You CANNOT develop a strong work ethic in someone if you haven’t first gotten them to care about and enjoy their place of employment.

So, for the sake of this blog, let’s assume your reps truly do care about their company and their jobs.  Here are three quick and easy ways to both assess and improve their overall work ethic.

1.  Educate them on the impact they can have:  Make sure you take the time to sit down, one on one, with each of your reps and map out for them how each dial they make impacts the bottom line of your business. They need to understand that every behavior they engage in that keeps them from focusing on prospects comes at a cost, not only to them, but to the company as a whole.  Build the waterfall for them.  So many calls, leads to so many conversations, leads to so many passed opportunities, which leads to “X” amount of forecast, which leads to “Y amount of closed biz, which leads to corporate growth and advancement for all..etc..  You get the picture.  Make sure you clearly explain how by going even a mere 5% above their daily activity goal can impact the company to such a degree that their lives will improve immensely.  In many cases the increased understanding leads to very organic work ethic improvement.    

2.  Reward the right behavior:  There are certain behaviors that scream “GREAT WORK ETHIC”, so make it a practice to get out of your comp plan comfort zone and reward them.  It doesn’t have to be money or prizes, simple recognition goes a long way when building work ethic.  Staying late, arriving early, volunteering for training of new hires, organizing team events are all great examples of little things people do that should be recognized verbally.  Make sure the whole team knows how much these acts mean to you in the hopes that it provides motivation for the rest of your team to act accordingly.

3.  Don’t just try to build, but maintain as well:  You’ve probably got many employees who came to you on day one with a work ethic that rivals your own.  Don’t make the mistake of assuming that they will always feel that way.  Managing work ethic needs to be done for your whole staff, not just those that need improvements.  Make positive examples of your best people for those that you are trying to improve. Consistently remind them of how much you appreciate their extra efforts and when the time comes, put them first in line for advancement in your company.  

There you have the AG Salesworks crash course on building and maintaining a world class Teleprospector. We stick to the basics outlined in these three blogs and can boast a staff that is one of the hardest working, well organized, and skilled Teleprospecting teams around as a result.  

This is the second blog in a multi-part series introducing the three main categories through which AG Salesworks, evaluates, and manages the skills development of its Teleprospecting or Inside Sales reps.  We’ve found through the years that in order to have the highest level of talent in our space we’ve got to go well beyond simply hiring the best.  They aren’t the best when you first sit them down.  You’ve got to train them, coach them, reward them, and promote them.  Over the years, we’ve broken the teleprospecting job into three main disciplines.  In order for a rep to be optimal, they must excel in each.  Once we established the three main areas of skill that must be optimized, it became much easier for us to identify areas of opportunity and attack them.  The three main skill areas that we focus on for our reps are as follows.

This is the first blog in a multi-part series introducing to you the three main categories through which AG Salesworks, evaluates, and manages the skills development of its Teleprospecting or Inside Sales reps.  We’ve found through the years that in order to have the highest level of talent in our space we’ve got to go well beyond simply hiring the best.  They aren’t the best when you first sit them down.  You’ve got to train them, coach them, reward them, and promote them.  Over the years, we’ve broken the teleprospecting job into three main disciplines.  In order for a rep to be optimal, they must excel in each.  Once we established the three main areas of skill that must be optimized, it became much easier for us to identify areas of opportunity and attack them.  The three main skill areas that we focus on for our reps are as follows.