Sales Prospecting Perspectives Weekly Recap - Week of November 22, 2023
Good morning, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! We hope everyone had a fantastic week, especially those who were at Dreamforce, networking and learning more than ever about sales and technology. This week's weekly recap has a bonus at the end, so keep reading! For now, here are some of our favorite articles this week:
- Paul Castain shared 6 ways to get more call backs over at his Sales Playbook. Some of these ideas are very innovative; have you ever sent your prospect a personal YouTube video about how your product can help his or her company? You might consider doing so after reading this blog.
- As always, if you have any questions about B2B statistics, go to Ayaz Nanji at Marketing Profs. This week, he did research on what kind of content B2B buyers prefer to see and found that they prerfer short content and rely heavily on Google searches. If you're a B2B company, adhering to these guidelines might help!
- This week, Sirius Decisions wrote about how to tell if there's real trust in your sales and marketing relationship. Our focus on AG has been on fostering sales and marketing alignment and fostering trust between the two departments. This post poses a series of questions to companies wanting to know if there is trust in that relationship. Asking these questions might be a good exercise for your company to try!
- Over at the Harvard Business Journal, Scott Edinger wrote about the metrics sales leaders should be tracking. Don't micromanage; learn how to provide a new context in which your sales team can succeed. If you know what you need to improve - be it account management, opportunity management, or call management - this post will be able to help you learn what metrics to track.
- This November, our COO Peter Gracey was nominated to be one of the Top 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management in 2013. It's a great honor, and we hope you vote for him! Voting closes at the end of November!
And here are this week's blogs posts at Sales Prospecting Perspectives, and a little bonus if you keep reading:
Monday: On Monday, Laney Pilpel wrote Is Cold Calling Really Just a Numbers Game? Cold calling is not only about reaching a quota, and hoping that with a certain amount of touches, one person might say yes. There are several steps to having a well-oiled cold calling machine besides the number of dials, such as determining a call plan, training reps before they hit the phones, and create probing questions to pique prospects' interest. Join the discussion at Laney's post: Do you think cold calling is a numbers game?
Tuesday: Craig Ferrara wrote When Does It Make Sense to Role Play with New Inside Sales Reps? on Tuesday. Many sales companies start new inside sales reps with role playing early in the process, but Craig advocates for doing that later. Definitely still test their confidence and their drive, but perhaps setting up isolated role plays with particularly difficult scenarios early in the training may set reps up to fail. Some take a little time to rear up. Instead of starting role playing after a week of training, Craig says that sales organizations should start role playing after a month on the job.
Wednesday: On Wednesday, Megan wrote The Telephone Should Not Be the Black Sheep of Your Sales Strategy. With all this talk about inbound and social media, it seems like the telephone has been swept under the rug. Even though it's great that new sales and marketing techniques are being shared daily, it's also important to still have the skills to communicate on the phone and be able to pair up goals with the goals of the prospect, to learn how to listen well, to see the big picture of your product or service and prove that it's beneficial, and overall to have a quailty conversation over the phone, not in 140 characters on Twitter. Agree? Disagree? Commen on the blog!
Thursday: In this week's CEO Perspectives, Paul wrote Square Peg, Round Hole: Align Prospects & Employees to Company Goals. It's important to understand how client goals align with company goals, and to bypass those which don't, which might lead to process and production problems. Resources should be focused on working on an account that's a great fit, not trying to squeeze in a square peg into a round hole. This also applies to hiring; don't just think about getting positions filled and fast. Instead take the time to hire new team members who fit into the company culture.
BONUS: This week, we also published a new guide, How to Motivate Your Inside Sales Team to Succeed. It includes information about strategy vs. effort attributions, working harder vs. working smarter, and how to tell if your inside sales reps are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated. We researched the impact of motivation on salespeople in sources such as Sirius Decisions' reports, the Journal of Personal Selling, and many more. We hope this guide is useful to your team! Check it out and let us know how you feel about it; tweet to us at @AGSalesworks.
Thanks readers! What were your favorite blogs this week?