(And Call Volume is Not One of Them)
I recently wrote in my blog post 5 Most Frequently Asked Questions About Outsourcing Inside Sales that gone are the days of closely tracking the number of activities when managing your inside sales team. While I still think measuring activities is important to a degree, I don’t think it should hold as much weight as it does for many inside sales teams out there.
The problem with placing such a large emphasis on the number of activities is that doing so confuses the purpose of teleprospecting. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. With this metric as a forefront in Inside sales reps’ minds, they tend to get caught up in making a high number of dials instead of focusing on making smart dials. Smart dials lead to quality conversations which in turn result in qualified opportunities for themselves or for the outside sales team to follow up on.
The times have changed, and with exciting new auto-dialer technologies, inside sales reps can really focus on having fruitful conversations instead of stressing about hitting their activity number for the day. All calling efforts are done for them, which allows them to reach upwards of 150 dials per day. Auto-dialers along with marketing automation really eliminate the time spent on manual activities, leading to more and more time for inside sales reps to focus on what they do best – talking to prospects live.
So what metrics should you track to ensure your inside sales reps are focusing on quality, not quantity? If activity number isn’t as important anymore, what is?
1. Number of Conversations.
As I said above, and it bears repeating, the key ingredient to a successful inside sales rep is their focus and motivation to talk to prospects, uncover quality information, and hopefully convert them to opportunities. As long as the rep is averaging 12+ quality conversations per day, they will uncover 8-12 opportunities per month.
2. Lead Rate.
The lead rate is the amount of leads your inside sales rep uncovers in comparison to the amount of conversations they have. While conversations are well and good, uncovered opportunities is the number one metric to track.
3. Positive Lead Feedback Percentage.
After a lead has been qualified, it’s crucial to track its quality. To calculate the positive feedback percentage, simply take the total amount of leads passed and divide by the number of leads that moved on to a next step Some examples of a next step are: scheduled follow-up or check-in call, scheduled demo or onsite meeting, etc.) This metric is just as important as their lead rate. Even if your inside sales reps are passing a ton of leads, it really doesn’t mean anything unless they have a high lead feedback percentage. This metric allows you to track quality, and that’s obviously what will ultimately yield high forecast, pipeline, and closed business numbers.
When I was on the phones, I remember my daily goal: 120 calls. Eight years later, we’ve seen a shift in focus, and now inside sales managers want quality conversations and quality leads. It’s less about how long you’ve been hammering away at dialing as many prospects as possible, and more about how those prospects are reacting and whether you’re able to move them on to the next step. Again, it’s not that number of dials isn’t important (it definitely is), but emphasis should be placed on what is resulting from them.
What metrics do you utilize to manage your inside team?
Laney Dowling is the Director of Customer Success at AG Salesworks. Laney's responsibilities include managing daily client engagements, inside sales team oversight, reporting, training, and ongoing contact list development and refinement. To read more of Laney's articles, click here.
