Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Give Your Outside Sales Reps Steroids!!!

A lot of companies don’t dedicate teams to cold calling. Instead, they use their outside execs to make cold calls and build their own pipeline. “Well Chris my company does that and we are doing just fine.” Using an outside rep to make cold calls doesn’t mean that you won’t make money and be successful, but in my opinion it does mean that you won’t make as much money and be as successful as you could be. Barry Bonds could hit 30 – 40 homeruns per year before he juiced up. 30 – 40 dingers is a great number. Then he hit the roids and put up 70+. (Don’t tell me he may not have taken them, his head grew man! He took steroids.) My point is that a sales rep without help can have a good year. A sales rep on steroids (fully qualified leads) can put up a record breaking year.

First off, feeding your sales reps qualified leads means that they can focus on one thing and one thing only, closing deals. To effectively cold call AND close deals you need to devote about 50% of your day to both prospecting and then working deals. Working on only qualified leads means that the sales reps production has the potential to immediately jump 50%, depending of course on the quality of the leads.

Second, delivering leads to your sales rep will prevent ebbs and flows in your forecast. Sales reps generally hate cold calling. Even the sales reps that say they don’t hate cold calling, still would rather be working deals than making cold dials. As a result, cold calls are made on an as needed basis. When the rep is working a full pipeline, they aren’t making cold calls. When that pipeline pushes through, they begin making dials again to fill up the sales funnel again. As a result, the Sales VP sees a constant boom and bust cycle in their revenue flow. One month you build the forecast, the next you close it out. It’s tough to do both at once. Having a constant lead flow will prevent this ebb and flow and give management the ability to predict quarterly forecast numbers.

Lastly, even though they may think they are, your sales rep probably isn’t as good as an inside rep at cold calling. Cold calling is something that takes a tremendous amount to focus to do well. When you are closing deals, you focus mostly on your sales skills. Personally, I constantly work on building rapport, presenting value, becoming an advisor, closing, but I never work on cold calling process, selling an initial meeting, asking the qualifying question or closing on a time to meet. Simply put, I don’t have the time to focus and be as successful as possible at both. Add inside sales reps to your team and let them focus on qualifying and let your outside reps focus on closing. The investment is heavy at first, but the payout is huge. You may be doing well now, but you could be putting up record numbers.