11 HUGE Reasons Inside Sales Teams Are Not As Good As They Could Be
Posted by
Chris Lang on Thu, May 10, 2024 @ 01:07 PM
One of our company mantras is that, if done correctly, calling campaigns are a great way to bring in predictable amounts of forecast quarter after quarter. Unfortunately, a lot of teams out there just haven’t mastered the whole “done correctly” part. We try to be delicate when asked to critique our client’s internal efforts. “Well, telling the prospect to buy from you or else they’re stupid may work, but maybe you could try (this) instead”. Since you don’t sign a check to me, I will come right out and give you some of the more common mistakes I see (no sugar coating).
1. White Noise – Your team calls prospects and leaves the same boring, disinterested voicemail or gives the same prospect agnostic, vanilla pitch time after time. Focus on each call and bring something different to the prospect. Leaving the same boring message will leave you with the same bored prospects (and no leads).
2. Right pitch, wrong target – Don’t pitch the solution to people who won’t be influencing the decision, aka “the admin pitch”. Instead of discussing your product, pitch why they should put you in touch with the decision maker or appropriate contacts.
3. Pitching based on features - People buy if they think what you have will help them make money, save money and/or mitigate risk. Keep your focus on that.
4. Giving up too early – 2 calls doesn’t mean the prospect is unresponsive, in fact, after 6-8 calls you still may not connect. Be polite, but be persistent and call until you get an answer.
5. Not making enough daily dials – 70 calls and 30 emails per day. Don’t shake your head at me, it can be done. You don’t need to do research to know the CEO’s shoe size before you place a prospecting call. The best way to get info on a prospect is to ask. If you are calling cold, 2 minutes of research and then dial.
6. No Call Plan – Depending on who the prospect is, how many times you have called and what they know about you, you should have a call plan that is adaptable and leads you from a group of unknowns to a much smaller group of qualified and interested prospects. Every call is different and has purpose.
7. Not tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) – At a minimum you should be tracking how many dials you make before you have a business conversation, how many business conversations it takes to find a qualified lead and how many leads (of a consistent quality) it takes to hit your forecast number. These numbers should be benchmarked and used as KPI’s to help you predict how your quarter and year will shape up.
8. Knowing when to hold and when to pass – Make sure your inside reps know how to qualify the lead and then get it in front of sales. Overly confident reps sometimes try to over qualify leads and lose them by getting down rat holes they shouldn’t be in. Reps lacking confidence will pass the leads before they are qualified. Both are equally bad.
9. Not focused entirely on lead generation – Your inside team should be focused on making dials and nothing else. Everything else is more appealing than cold calling, but nothing is more important. Keep them focused on what is important.
10. No one to lean on – Getting rejected as much as inside sales reps do is extremely hard. Doing it alone with no other reps to bounce ideas off of or commiserate with about the jerk that just told them to “screw” is a nightmare and will lead to poor performance, lower morale and higher employee turnover.
11. Bad Data – Don’t give your team crap and expect them to produce gold. Get a good list and call it right away. Hint: the list you bought a year ago and haven’t touched is crappy now.
I could write a lot more, but this is a blog not a novel and I’m a sales guy with a number to hit!