Sales Prospecting Perspectives Weekly Recap – Week of August 9, 2023
Happy Friday, readers. At AG, we kickstarted this week with sales training for our inside sales reps at the Four Points Sheraton. Our reps spent four hours in the trenches with a professional sales trainer, practicing brain exercises, focusing on teambuilding, giving each other advice, sharing ideas and role playing specific sales scenarios. They came back to the office refreshed with information and ready to conquer more leads!
This week, we’d like to share two articles. First, Edge Coble at Sirius Decisions wrote a fantastic blog post about building a sales enablement function Research shows that 60% of companies plan to increase their sales enablement departments. When helping companies build them from scratch, Coble recommends they follow four steps: inventory responsibilities, coordinate with other departments, identify gaps and overlap, and orchestrate the "little enablement" with the "Big Enablement." Read the article to learn what these steps entail, and the benefits of having a sales enablement team for your business.
COO Peter Gracey (who features again later in this blost post) recently released a video as part of MarketingProfs' Take 10 series, 10-minute step-by-step tutorials. His topic, How to Collaborate Effectively and Turn Your Sales Team Into Marketing Groupies, hits home for us at AG Salesworks, where we pride ourselves in having little to no tension between these two departments. Watch this video to learn four reasons your sales team should be marketing groupies, why it's essential for marketing and sales to agree on the definitions of MQLs, SQLs and conversions, how to effortlessly help your sales team achieve their goals, and more.
Now, on to the weekly recap!
Monday: Over the years at AG, we have developed a call plan that works, as it receives many responses from prospects at all levels and departments. On Monday, inside sales rep Sam Goldman shared some of our secrets to success in her blog post, 3 Ways to Improve Your Prospecting Call Plan. She gives advice for pairing voicemails and emails together and following up instantly, trying projects again every few days without seeming too pushy, and engaging prospects by sending calendar requests. Read her article to learn more, and share the most important part of your call plan in the comment section!
Tuesday: On his 9-year AG-anniversary, Craig Ferrara admitted in his blog post, Do You Have Your Sales Team’s Back?, that in his time as an inside sales manager, there hasn’t been one day that he’s felt like his employees have let him down. He hopes, in turn, that his employees feel the same way about him. Sales managers need to have their team’s backs, protecting and mentoring them in tough situations, supporting them completely and giving them reassurance and inspiration to continue doing their job. His blog post includes tips for showing that you have their back and insight gained from other sales professionals such as Robert Sutton from the Harvard Business Review.
Wednesday: Pete Gracey, COO and co-founder of AG Salesworks, wrote NetProspex Data Health Scan: A Remedy for Poor Marketing Data on Wednesday. He described a helpful tool by NetProspex that examines data and provides a full demographic summary of it. The tool basically gives you the information so you can put your data to work for you. Without correct data, your sequence for success would be out of order, but in fact, it’s the most often skipped step by B2B marketers. Don’t assume your internal list is perfect; instead, try out NetProspex’s tool.
Thursday: On Thursday, Colleen shared some Google search tricks in her blog post, How to Make Google Work for You: 3 Tips for Inside Sales Reps. Finding contact information online can sometimes be hard, but with the faith that she could find everything on the Internet, Colleen found a few ways to Google the answer. Finding a prospect's direct line, searching a term on a prospective company's website, and searching for missing information about a prospect can all be made easier by changing up the search terms in your Google search bar. Optimize your Googling, and learn from Colleen's great tips!
Friday: On Friday, I wrote 5 Tips for Managing and Mentoring the Millennial Generation. By 2020, millennials will encompass 50% of the workforce. Contrary to popular belief, though, they’re not that different from other generations in terms of what they want from a workplace; they just might be louder about their beliefs. This blog post includes an excerpt of advice from our new guide, Managing Millennials: How the New Generation is Affecting the Workplace, about creating harmony between all generational cohorts and containing specific advice for managing millennials.
What were your favorite articles this week? What would you like to see next week? Comment below!
