Sales Prospecting Perspectives Weekly Recap - Week of September 24, 2023
Last week of September and you can already see the Halloween decorations and pumpkins being placed in people's yards. The temperatures have begun to drop here in New England and apple picking is the top weekend family activity.
Organizations are setting up for their last quarter of the calendar year and many sales teams are disappointed with their pipeline. This is a difficult time of year for companies to begin new projects, so unless your inside sales reps have been doing their due diligence and creating their tasks appropriately from the summer, these next few months can be quite a struggle. Our President and COO Peter Gracey wrote a great article this week for MarketingProfs that will help struggling inside sales teams and is worth a read. Check out his article Don't Just Script... Teleprospecting Done Right.
Before I recap our blogs for this week, I first wanted to share a video post from Jill Konrath in which she discusses how cold calling is still alive and offers 3 great strategies to consider before dialing the phone. In her post 3 Cold Calling Strategies Savvy Sellers Use Jill discusses smarter prospecting. Reps need to do their homework on the prospect and the company before dialing. They need to craft targeted messages for the prospect that focus specifically on the prospects needs and concerns. And Jill's third strategy is to plan a campaign in which you utilize 10-12 targeted messages using a variety of media instead of relying on one call to get a response. All of these are great strategies for your inside sales team to follow and get your reps prospecting smarter.
Now, on to our recap.
Tuesday, September 25, 2023
Tuesday brought us a great post of Director of Client Operations Laney Pilpel in which she discuss the value of having a list development team in place to support your inside sales reps. In her post List Development Is A Valuable Piece To The Inside Sales Puzzle Laney provides three different perspectives on the benefits of having a list development team in place. From the Inside Sales Reps view, having the support of a list team enables you to spend more time making dials instead of wasting time looking for contacts. With your management team, having a list team frees up their time to be spent on the floor working and training with their inside sales reps. For C-level executives, a list development team keeps inside sales reps doing what they do best; staying on the phones and having valuable conversations with prospects.
Wednesday, September 28, 2023
Matt Fitts, Director of Client Operations, offered up another great post on Wednesday in which he talked about the value of inside sales reps having "business conversations" with prospects. In Business Conversations Equal More Sales Opportunities Matt talks about three goals all inside sales reps should accomplish when they have a prospect engaged in a conversation. First, uncover what is going on today? (company, technology in place, etc). Second, what are the problems they face today or foresee in the future?(budget shrink, technology specific gaps – e.g. ERP is not robust enough for future growth, etc). And his third goal inside reps should focus on is how does the prospect envision fixing the problems and when? Though understanding the technical side of a solution is valuable when having conversations with prospects, accomplishing the three goals stated above will lead to more qualified opportunities and a stronger sales pipeline.
Thursday, September 27, 2023
I wrote a post this week on relationship selling because recently I have seen a lot of posts claiming that it is dead. Building relationships with prospects has long been a valuable part of the business acquisition process. With today's demands and the need for instant gratification in a faster paced lifestyle, building relationships is still prevalent, but with the introduction of social network sites, we build our relationships differently from those in the past. In my post Relationship Selling: Not Dead Only Different I discuss how sales reps should be utilizing social media to learn more about their prospects before the initial conversation so that it is easier to build a relationship. There are also many examples of relationships being forged through social media channels which have lead to business partnerships and new clients.
Thanks for reading this weeks recap and I hope you enjoy your weekend of apple picking and football!