How to Train Your Inside Sales Team to Stay Organized
It’s Monday morning. You sit in your chair and elbow over a stack of papers in order to reach your keyboard. You open your email and check if your prospects have responded yet. If they don’t answer in a week, you’re just not going to contact them again. You think you might have a call scheduled today, but you aren’t sure what time. Maybe your prospect will just call you. Your thoughts are scrambled between big projects – meeting with the sales team to follow up on passed leads or working on a new script – and small projects – leaving 15-second voicemails and filing papers. It’s been 15 minutes, and just thinking about the work you have to do in the next 8 hours is making you stressed.
Disorganized inside sales reps make their own work days chaotic before even picking up the phone, but they’re not the only ones responsible. Inside sales reps learn from inside sales managers, who should be organized themselves, exemplifying an orderly work life. But how do you become organized in a busy sales environment? How do you encourage and teach your reps to be organized? What does organization even mean?!
AG Salesworks produced a guide for inside sales managers that answers all these questions and more. The guide includes a new definition of the verb “organize” for the inside sales environment, advice for how to organize your thought process, 10 benefits of an organized inside sales work life, a list of several digital and non-digital tools for organization and how to use them, and specific advice on setting goals and planning out the work day.
Here’s a glimpse of what kind of tips you’ll be able to read in this guide:
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Organize around the perfect day. For an inside sales rep, a perfect day consists of 100 activities of both inbound and outbound calls and emails: 45 outbound dials, 5 inbound calls, 40 outbound emails, 10 inbound emails. Overall, this should amount to 12 quality conversations a day. The prime calling hours are 8 to 10 a.m. and 3 to 5 p.m.
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Have a pre-call routine, where you 1) review your prior notes, 2) refresh yourself with the company’s prerogative by visiting their website and 3) arm yourself with alternative names to ask for if your contact isn’t available.
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Organize your to-do list. Use a to-do list to set specific goals, and to record your performance and calculate your success rate.
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Keep your desk clutter-free. Only allow a few things to remain on top of the desk, organizing the rest of it in folders or files within cabinets.
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Use the two-minute rule: If a task only takes 2 minutes, do it right away.
To read more about organization in the inside sales arena, download our free success guide here or by clicking the link below..
