Culture Matters to Your Teleprospectors
As I've mentioned in previous blogs, teleprospecting is arguably the toughest part of the sales process. A big challenge for most of us is to remain motivated after getting shot down call after call. Any time I've been discouraged in the past, the common response from many of my managers was, "pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep pushing forward." In other words - suck it up and work harder.
While I can appreciate that determination plays a factor in your success, what are you doing beyond that to motivate yourself or your team to produce consistently?
Retaining highly productive inside reps can be very difficult. Prior to my AG Salesworks days, I worked on various teams that didn't take the time to cultivate their rep's development, and as a result, those teams saw significant turnover. I got one day of training, listened into a few reps make calls, and then was put on phones. I didn't get much more than a "Hey Craig, here is a list of our 500 target accounts. I don't have contact info, so dig around a bit and see what you can find. Good luck!" While the "sink or swim" approach may be a way to weed out your C players, the problem is that you're not creating the kind of environment where your A & B players are going to want to stick around either. Not only that, but the employee you may consider a C player could be a diamond in the rough, but if there is no effort put into their development, then you are not helping them realize their potential. What I've learned over the years is that in order to retain the best talent, your inside reps need to feel that you are engaged in their development.
Now, there are various factors that go into the development of a high performing telesales team. The most successful teams that I have worked with/on had one thing in common - the culture. Besides the love we all shared making cold calls (wink-wink) and the significant amount of money we could have made if we hit our number, the work environment generally set the overall tone. There is nothing more de-motivating than working in an office full of people who spend half their day complaining that they are not being challenged day-to-day or that that they feel they should be making more money. No matter how much I enjoyed my job, or the amount of money I made, being surrounded by the negativity only made me dread walking into the office every morning. Those are the kinds of jobs where you end up with a pit in your stomach every Sunday night knowing you have a full week ahead being part of the membership of the miserable.
So what have you been doing to foster the appropriate culture?
What training programs do you have in place to get the most out of your teleprospecting team?
Does your team have the tools at their disposal to net them the best quality leads?
Do you feel that you've set the appropriate incentives to get the most out of your team?
These are the kinds of questions we should be asking ourselves as we head into 2010. My opinion is that you start by focusing on taking care of your people and generally everything takes care of itself from there.
Keeping in mind that we are all still working with limited budgets, next week I wanted to cover some specific things that AG has done to not only motivate but also retain our best people.