Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Use Multiple Inside Sales Reps To Boost Results.

  

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Cold calling is a tough job. Just look at it from a numbers standpoint. In my market, if you make 100 activities per day (calls and emails), you will likely have about 10 – 15 meaningful conversations. Of those conversations only about 3% - 5% will turn into real sales opportunities that can be delivered to a sales person. It translates to about 2-3 sales opportunities a week. So in the course of a week, they have to fight like hell to be rewarded only a couple of times. What makes it worse is that a lot of SMBs only invest in one inside rep, making it one of the loneliest jobs on earth!

I would highly recommend having multiple people cold calling in your company. Having more than one person banging the phones builds camaraderie, gives reps other people to bounce ideas off of, promotes the spread of new ideas and most importantly, promotes competition.

• Sometimes cold calling can be a very unsatisfying job. For example take that one week when despite putting in a lot of hours and dials, you found no leads. This is usually the same week that everyone you talk to sounds angry, most people are mean to you and one guy actually told you to go to hell and let you know how you could get there. It helps to have someone in the cube beside you so you can roll your chair out and tell them about the complete……um, jerk you just got off the phone with. Chances are they had the same call a couple of weeks ago and you can both laugh it off as you compare who talked to the biggest jerk.
• When you have more than one rep, you have more than one brain coming up with new and innovative ways to navigate through companies and deliver the value proposition. As managers, we tweak and tinker with an inside rep’s pitch and then send them out there to “trial by fire” with a new pitch. When you have multiple reps, they tend to tweak the message together making minor adjustments and then sharing them with each other.
• Chances are if the reps you have are any good, they are probably fairly competitive. Our reps here will practically glue themselves to their seats for a competition to win a coffee gift card. Sales roles and competitive personalities go together like peas and carrots, cookies and milk, calzones and hangovers. When you have one rep they see their results from quarter to quarter and they benchmark their performance based on the average results they have found. When you add in another rep or two they benchmark by comparing their results with those of the top rep.  Everyone wants to be top dog and the competition will drive productivity to a whole new level.

I know a lot of inside sales managers that add a second inside rep to their team with the expectation of the team number doubling. Because of the factors above, these managers are usually pleasantly surprised to see the number increase by a lot more than double as the production levels of the reps drastically increase when they have a couple of peers in the trenches with them.