Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Imagine you’re the CEO of a B2B high tech company. Your company has survived the most difficult start-up stages, and you’re ready to start successfully selling your product or service. At times, your solution is difficult to explain, but your engineers know its features like the back of their hand. You decide to insource your inside sales team.

You hire new inside sales reps, many just out of college. Your marketing team works on qualifying leads, but your sales team leaves many unqualified leads untouched. According to Marketo, 80% of leads generated by marketing are ignored by sales.

Whether you’re building your own inside sales team or considering outsourcing your teleprospecting functions, it’s important to know and perfect the training process for new hires.   

Over the last couple of months, AG Salesworks has seen many new faces.  As a Manager of Client Operations, one of my jobs is to oversee the training of new hires on my team.  Having previously been very active in the training team as a business development rep, I happen to think we have a very effective process that has only improved over the years.  Here are a few training tips we follow to ensure successful onboarding of new hires at AG:

1. Pack their day.  

It's time for another #ProspectingChat over at AG Saleswork's Twitter account. As well as sharing many insights from sales and marketing thought leaders throughout the day, we will also be hosting a Twitter chat at 1:30 PM EST / 10:30 AM PST.

The decision to outsource part of your sales team - whether you're revamping an insourced team or whether you don't have on insourced team - can be a very tough one to make. What are the most crucial factors to look for in an outsourced teleprospecting team? Most people's answer would be: cost. While cost of service is a very important factor when considering an inside sales teleprospecting partner, there are numerous other questions to ask to determine whether the company you're researching is well-run, successful, and most important, trustworthy. In a discovery call about that company, ask these 4 questions to get a real feel for the way they conduct their business. These questions and more are featured in our new guide, "Your Lead Generation Home Away From Home: How Outsourcing Teleprospecting and Inside Sales Functions Can Augment Your Tech Company's Revenue."

1. What kinds of clients do you serve?

Identify the specialist and generalist outsourcing companies. Generalists will take any type of client, but their processes won’t be specific to your industry. Many generalists only see a 20-30% conversion rate to next steps in the sales process. However, with a specialized teleprospecting firm, you should see a 60-70% conversion rate. Specialists will make a point to say that they specialize in the tech industry. Specialists will also have an army of advocates for their service, and are happy to provide you with client references and/or case studies specific to your industry, product or service, or perhaps even share how they solved a similar challenge to the one your company is facing. If you want a more streamlined sales process with people who have experience selling products and services similar to yours, steer clear of the generalists and only consider specialist sales providers.

I have the opportunity to join calls with our inside sales team during the sales process frequently. It is exciting to speak with executives at companies who are in the beginning stages of creating an inside sales team themselves or are entertaining the idea of outsourcing. Choosing to outsource the function is often the result of these conversations, usually because these companies haven’t quite mastered best practices yet and need support. I really enjoy the task of taking on engagements to help develop the inside sales function, whether we continue our efforts after the first few months once up to altitude, or whether we hand off the inside sales processes to them once they’re running at full capacity.

During the initial discussions with sales and marketing executives, there are always common themes in the questions that are asked. As AG Salesworks is a top consideration for many companies out there, I thought it would make sense to address the questions that I hear the most:

1. How many opportunities should I expect to see per month, after the team is fully ramped?