I was a huge A-Team fan as a kid. One of the more popular catch phrases came from John “Hannibal” Smith when he would exclaim, “I love it when a plan comes together.” The A-Team always had a plan and the A Team always won their mission. (Even though I was pretty sure they were doomed in almost every episode.) I like to compare my sales team to the A-Team every now and again. Sure we don’t stack up in a lot of the categories that you may think of. Despite my pleas to the CEO we have no weaponized van, no combat experience and no large, men with mohawks to intimidate our foes. We do however have one thing that the A-Team has, a plan, and that plan helps us to win our mission.
I suggest that sales reps create a desired order of events with specific goals before EVERY meeting (aka a plan). It takes about 10 minutes and it will make a world of difference when you are trying to move a prospect along and find out whether they may become a customers or are just tire kickers. Here is a basic format to start with. Keep in mind that this format will change quite a bit depending on the level of the call. A discovery call will have a pitch added in, a proposal call would have an ROI section, etc… These are just some of the universals.
Intro: It is amazing to me how many people don’t jot down or memorize a quick intro into the call. It is about 5 lines that set the table for the rest of the meeting. Talk about why you are having this meeting, what the goal is and what the format is.
Questions: It is said that we have two ears and one mouth because we are supposed to listen more than talk. Truth be told I think we have two ears because we’d look foolish with one and our hearing would be awful. That being said, you should have thoughtful questions prepared before you go into each meeting. The more well thought out the questions the better the information you will get in return. Use those ears and let your prospect answer without cutting them off.
Discussion Points: There are things that you want your prospect to know. It may be that you have worked in their industry before and have great experience, it may be that they are partnered with a company you work with and it could even be as simple as you are from the same area as one of the prospects you are talking to. Write these down and use them at timely junctions within your meeting.
Concerns: Sales reps use a lot of interpretation to discover the concerns the prospect may have about signing a contract with them. “We’ll he said he likes chicken more than fish…..big red flag right there”. I take a different approach. When you are trying to find out if a prospect has concerns, you should just ask them. “Bob thus far do you have any concerns that I can address.” The key is to make sure that you address your prospect’s fears before you move on to the next step. There is nothing worse than losing a deal at proposal because there was a misinterpretation of something you said in the discovery call, but you never addressed it.
Follow up: Set the stage for your next meeting based on the results of the one you are in the process of completing. This could be an exploration of a concern they have, an onsite demo, a proposal review, etc... The point is you should let your prospect know that there is a next step and that next step has purpose and should be important to them.
Sitting in a meeting where the sales rep has no plan is painful. The rep rambles in and out of thoughts not finishing one before cruising into another leaving the prospect to try and piece together what the sales rep was trying to get across. “Well, that’s an hour of life I will never get back.” Is not what you want your prospects saying when they get out of a meeting with you. Have a plan. Be the A-Team.
Happy Hunting!
As I've mentioned in previous blogs, list quality plays an enormous factor in our ability to drive leads to sales and build forecast (Are You Giving Your Inside Sales Reps A Good Quality List?) Ideally the time should be taken to weed out the inaccurate contact info, current customers and the independent consultants or students who download a whitepaper for "educational" purposes. What's the point of putting our inside sales reps at an automatic disadvantage before they even pick up the phone?
We often debate if we would prefer to target the individual that raised their hand or a clean list of high level contacts at your top 200 accounts. My two cents is that we would rather start from scratch with a list of companies and target contacts that have never been touched. The primary reason behind that is that I have complete control over the title and the organizations that I want to talk to. Don't get me wrong, a mixture of scrubbed leads with the low hanging fruit combined with clean target lists is the ideal scenario, with the obvious caveat that I don't have to deal with the time sink of scrubbing off the bunk data.
So let's assume you are working with this scenario. What titles would you typically target? Most of us are trained to call high into every company on every list, right?
Well, I'm not sure if I entirely buy into that on every list you're calling on. With your cold lists it's pretty typical to only have a VP or C-Level contact to call, but if you can, try to find multiple contacts since you're unlikely to get a response the higher you call. Tracking down those director and manager level titles make sense for a couple of reasons- 1) Working multiple angles gets you to an evaluator/decision maker much quicker to gauge interest 2)Most of the time the Director/Manager titles are the people you generally end up getting forwarded to anyway.
A majority of the leads resulting in closed business for our clients began with a conversation with those director level contacts or below. It's pretty rare for us to see inbound lead from a CIO who downloaded white paper....as most of us know he/she tasks others to do the preliminary research before they get involved.
We've struggled with a few of our clients who use lead scoring through their automated marketing platform to rate their leads, with a large percentage of scoring weighted heavily on the quality of the title. Unfortunately there were very few leads that scored high enough because most of the leads were directors, managers and analysts downloading the info. We've also learned (the hard way) that just because a lead receives a high score out of your marketing platform doesn't always mean they're the right person.
Eventually what we recognized with the inbound marketing lists was that it would be best to follow up based on the company vs. the title. Rather than just calling into a VP downloading info, we took the time to also contact the business analysts as well. Generally what we discovered was the analyst actually picked up their phone and more often than not, played an integral role in the decision making process. At the very least they could provide us the intelligence we needed to have a very healthy conversation when we DID get the big boss live.
The point is - don't neglect the little guys. Just because a lead didn't receive a 100% from your fancy marketing automation tool doesn't mean it should be ignored.
Happy Friday!
Well, it’s the “unofficial” last weekend of summer…but not the end to some great blogs from our team.
I found a great blog this week that really mirrors what we try and keep in mind every day here at AG. In Barb Giamanco’s blog titled: The Great Sales Lead Generation Debate. She talks about the constant discussion on Quality vs. Quantity, and the importance of having a healthy balance. It’s a great read as it puts both sides into perspective.
Monday, August 30th
Does your inside sales team have the tools to succeed? – Ilona Jazdowska discusses in her blog the tools she’s found to be a most useful when it comes to performing successfully in inside sales.
“I have had the opportunity to work for a variety of clients. Some coming right out of the gates with little to no name recognition (some with products still in Beta!), companies with cutting edge technology, others part of the Fortune 500. From my experience, I know what I need to be successful. I am going to share with you some of the preliminary homework that you need to do in order to make your time and investment as successful as possible…”
Tuesday, August 31st
Do Your Inside & Outside Sales Communicate Well? – Craig Ferrara offers some great insight into his past work experiences and how communication is key in sales success.
“It seemed so foreign to me to not be allowed to communicate directly with the outside sales reps. at the hotel we would simply call or walk down to the department we needed answers from. Even if it wasn't the most pleasant conversation, we eventually found some common ground which allowed the team to work more seamlessly from that point forward.”
Thursday, September 2nd
5 Questions To Ask Before Sending Out That Sales Proposal– Chris Lang discusses 5 important questions that you should be asking yourself before you send out the sales proposal.
“Sometimes sales reps act like used car salesmen. “What’s it gonna take to get you into this storage solution?” “Look at this encryption right here…it’s just beautiful and I’m willing to give it to you for half the price!” The pitch is feature and not value focused and then a proposal is given to the prospect, often times without even hearing what the prospect’s full set of needs are. Not shockingly, close rates are usually low when the sales process is less complex than that of the ice cream man selling to a toddler. (He always got me with the Choco Taco) Here are a couple of questions to ask, pre-proposal, that will ensure your prospect is ready to move forward...”
That sums it up! We hope Earl doesn’t ruin your weekend! Be safe and we’ll see you Tuesday!
I’ve just come back from a few days off with my Kids. We spent a nice long weekend at our favorite beaches on Cape Cod. On Monday of this week I learned a very valuable lesson regarding how often you need to reapply sunscreen to your children when at the beach. If you’ve seen my picture on our website, you’ll note that I am about as tanned as a glass of milk. My children have been blessed\cursed with the same pigment. Because of that, we are always very careful to lather them up with enough sunscreen to actually repel UV rays all the way back to the sun. However, I was a bit negligent in my fatherly duties on Monday only reapplying once over the course of the day. This resulted in two very crispy, red, and agitated kids at bedtime Monday night. Had I reapplied even one more time during the day, my kids would have slept like angels; instead we had several nice long chats over the course of a very sleepless night….and now for the gigantically desperate attempt to tie the reapplication of sunscreen to the training of teleprospectors!!
You see, training is like sunscreen for your inside sales reps. If you reapply training regularly to your inside sales reps, they stay sharp on the phone. They are reminded of best practices and how to use them. The reapplication of training strengthens core skills and maintains top performance. It gives you and your managers the forum to address any issues and concerns you have indirectly and to gain valuable insight into who your “A” players really are.
Overall, like reapplying sunscreen, reapplying your training continuously builds better and more productive inside sales reps. And, most importantly, it keeps them from getting burned on the phones. Stay tuned next week for more inventive attempts to tie real life situations back into teleprospecting.
Happy Friday Everyone!
Hope you all had a great week. We had some great blogs this week from Chris Lang, Craig Ferrara, Peter Gracey and Ilona Jazdowska. Find out whether your Sales Executives have the “IT” factor, how blogging has made Craig a better Inside Sales Manager, interesting points on good subject lines, and the importance of making sure your prospecting efforts are geared toward your target audience!
Before I get started, as always I’d like to note a great article I found this week:
Ron Karr’s Business Development Blog talks about voicemail messaging and how to leave Voice Mail Messages that Generate Call Backs. It’s a great piece as it discusses the importance of being aggressive, to the point, and mixing it up when leaving those messages. Each voicemail is different so make sure you are letting them know that you truly WANT them to call you back.
Monday, July 26th
Do Your Sales Executives Have The "IT" Factor?– Chris Lang as always, manages to relate his sales experience to that of his personal life. He offers a great analogy on how even at the age of three his nephew exhibits the “IT” factor, and how that character trait is important in a Sales Executive.
“I’ve been reading a lot of discussions on LinkedIn about what makes a great sales person. I see most of the same words time and time again to describe good sales executives, “Hard working, money motivated, honest, direct, and personable”, to name a few. While all of these are undeniable characteristics of a good sales person, I feel that the biggest factor is often left out, the “IT” factor. “IT” is what the best sales reps have in them and “IT” is hard to find. “IT” is the difference between a rep that makes quota and a rep that crushes the number quarter after quarter.”
Tuesday June 27th
Blogging Has Made Me A Better Inside Sales Team Manager! – Craig Ferrara discusses how despite his original thought of blogging being more for the Marketing team, it’s helped him grow as a Sales Team Manager.
“As I was looking back at all of the AG blogs over the past year, there were a few concepts discussed that are not always being put into action as regularly as I would like. This process, I’ve discovered, has also been a great way to self police myself and others I work with. Again, it’s great to talk about all of this in theory but if you are not putting it to practice then what’s the point? Practice what you preach baby!”
Thursday July 28th
The Best Email Subject Line For Teleprospecting I've Seen Yet. - Pete Gracey came across a great email subject line this week which triggered his inspiration in this week’s blog on how critical something as simple as a subject line can really be…
“I'm a big believer in subject lines driving the success of your emails. Your content means NOTHING if you don't first get the prospect to open the email. One of my old school favorites was "follow up: Pete from AG Salesworks". That one always seemed to at least peak people's interest in terms of "what is this guy following up on"? or "do I know Pete"? Either way, they opened it more often than not. Hopefully my content was up the task and they became opportunities for us, but that is a blog for another day.”
Friday July 29th
Are Your Teleprospecting Efforts Targeted To Your Audience? – Ilona Jazdowska discusses the importance of making sure you’re not sending out the same kind of messaging for every prospect.
“We all play the sales game, and we all acknowledge that a lot of the success comes from reaching out to as many people as possible. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by sending a generic email with no relevance to the role of your prospect. Taking the time to customize your messaging to the specific needs of that department demonstrates the research done on your part and your sincere interest in making their job easier.”
That about covers it! I hope you all have a great weekend! See you Monday!
It's a little past mid month. Time to give each one of your inside sales reps a mid month diagnostic check up. There are many different keys that make up a successful month's prospecting and it's important that you check in with your people mid month to see how they are doing with each.
When Laney and I evaluate and review our inside sales reps mid-month, we look at their performance in three separate areas. We don't just look how they've done, but we all look at whether or not they have what they need to finish strong for the last 2 weeks of the month.
1. List: I'm not talking about the quality of the list. I assume that if you read my blog you may also read that of our resident list expert Craig Ferrara. If you are a disciple of Craig, then your list is fine from a quality standpoint. What we focus on mid month is whether or not the inside sales rep in question actually has enough people to call. How big is the list of suspects? In order for a teleprospector to be optimal and meet the metrics of his\her call plan they need a minimum of 500 companies in play at all times. If you are short of that number mid month....then you better find some more or your inside sales rep may not hit their goal.
2. Lead Quality: When you are managing people making outbound dials you've got to find a delicate balance between volume of calls and quality of the opportunities passed to sales. Take some time mid-month to review the quality (assuming you have a closed loop feedback process in place) of the leads passed by each inside sales rep and make sure they aren't playing too much of the volume game. If you see their quality score is low, have a sit down and review each lead with them. Gently reinforce that quality is just as important as quantity. You'll see immediate refocus.
3. Moral: When your occupation involves as much daily rejection as teleprospecting, you can get a little down. Don't ever forget that your guys and gals on the phones take a lot of heat over the course of a day and may need a little pep talk now and again. Run your Leads Passed List by inside sales rep and start at the bottom. The folks having the slowest month are most likely to need a little reenergizing. Take them out to lunch, review the good things they've done, sing them a song...it doesn't matter, just make sure you let them know you understand their job is tough and that you are there to help them get back to a high level of performance.
These are just a few nice and simple ways to reconnect with your team and make sure you are all on the path to a solid month. Good Luck!!
I’m sure it’s happened to everyone at some point in time. It can be easy to think that if you don’t acknowledge a problem, it doesn’t actually exist. I have done it many times on many occasions. For example, I get into my car and the flashing service engine light comes on. I think, well my car is driving fine so there is no problem here. One week later my car doesn’t start when I am already running late to a meeting – now it’s an even bigger problem. Or that time I went on a ski trip even though I had a sore throat and came back with a 102 fever for quarter end – not smart. These are all “red flags.” While not setting an appointment for my car or going on that ski trip may have had its short term benefits, the later consequences overshadowed these benefits.
The same holds true for a teleprospecting campaign. To ensure the success of a project, everyone has an important job to do. Communication can be so important to get this job done. If you are picking up on one of these “red flags,” it is important to address this immediately.
Here are a few important things that should not be ignored:
List Status:
It is crucial that an inside sales rep communicates their list status. It can take quite some time to pull new data and lists. Waiting until a list is finished can slow down activity and be detrimental to a project. That being said, it is also important to address the quality of the list before it becomes a problem. The worst thing an inside sales rep can do is blame low performance on list quality when this could have been addressed much sooner in the game.
Low response rate:
Avoid spinning your wheels with emails and voicemails that don’t work. If you are getting to the end of your call plan too often with no response, make sure to revamp your emails and voicemails. Don’t wait for your performance to suffer before strategizing on new messaging that will make you more successful. Pete Gracey had some great tips in his recent post 2 Rules to Email By for Successful Sales Prospecting.
Qualified out prospects:
If the majority of your conversations are turning out to be qualified out, communicate this with your sales team. Strategize on better verticals, organization sizes, or geographic regions to call into.
These are all examples of road blocks that may seem minimal or inevitable at the time. However, to deliver the highest form of success it is crucial to never wait until these “red flags” affect your performance. Stay ahead of the game and your competition by proactively ensuring your project is in the best position to succeed.
On a recent client phone call, one of our clients asked, “How do you actually get responses from these people?” There are many ways to accomplish this – some companies believe making 200 dials a day until someone picks up is effective, while others target a third of that number and use different methods to catch their attention. I’m sure both ways are effective, but at AG, we prefer the latter and have found it to be the most effective method based on our experience cold calling.
So what can you do to gain better results from your outbound activities to get responses from your prospects? We are constantly testing new methods to increase the amount of conversations our inside sales reps have, as more conversations = more opportunities converted. Reaching the prospect takes some leg work and below I have shared a few of our favorite tips and tricks on how to do it!
Leave a voicemail. How many times do you get up from your desk per day for a meeting, lunch, coffee, and so on? We believe that when we call our prospects, they aren’t purposely ignoring our call but maybe they are away from their desk. For this reason, we find voicemails to be extremely effective. If you are no contacting, they will never know you are calling, and you might miss the opportunity if they do in fact have an active initiative.
Talk to as many people as you can. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t call someone in Marketing if I needed to talk to someone about IT security. At the same time, you need to make the most out of every dial and talk to as many people as possible. 0# is a great trick to use for this – sometimes the most effective conversations are with assistants who can point you in the right direction of who to speak with. Also, if you only have one contact at a company, use 0# to find more and also call into the operator to get directed to the appropriate department. Use contact databases to find more contacts, and don’t forget to utilize your own CRM. If you aren’t contacting more than one person at an organization, you definitely aren’t making any progress especially if you aren’t leaving voicemails.
Make the most out of your emails. Email templates are great – just make sure to tailor them to who ever you are sending them to. Spend a lot of time tweaking your emails and email subject lines to find out which ones are most effective for you. Send them shortly after you leave your voicemails otherwise the prospect is sure to forget who you are and won’t make the connection if you don’t. It is no joke that we often receive emails such as this “I am not interested because I don’t have budget right now, but for what it’s worth, your email was great and I am going to have my team adopt a similar one.” Even though we didn’t get a person that was interested, we now have ammo for when we want to reach them live closer to the calendar year when they do have budget again.
There are many other ways to get a response from your prospects - What have you found is the most effective way for your inside sales team to accomplish this?
To be aggressive or not be aggressive. That is the question. You've just had a wildly successful Webinar. It was a packed digital house full of your hottest prospects and you are certain you'll get some new forecast from it.
The first instinct of every inside sales organization is to begin their follow up calls in earnest with a dedicated and regimented calls plan the day after the event. I applaud your energy and excitement as well as the fact that you've got a call plan, but I will caution you on one thing. Following up too aggressively and too quickly with your sales pitch after a webinar can be a great turn off to your prospects.
I'm not saying you don't want to reach out to them right away, but you want to be very careful about how you reach out to them in the immediate time following the event. We have found that the best way to turn webinar attendees into gold is to hold off on our politely persistent teleprospecting plan until at least a week after the event.
Instead of immediately turning the leads over to your team, set up to send them two emails over the course of the first week following the event. It is most important to have the presenter (s) of the event be the people that send the intitial email. This email should be nothing more than a "thank you" for your attendance and a link to the presentation that was given.
At the end of the week, the second email should be sent by the presenter(s) again and be very quick and to the point. It should thank them again for attending and then let them know that one of you your colleagues will be following up with them via phone next week to determine whether or not your organization can be of more help....and example of that email could be...
John,
Thanks again for attending our recent webinar "Building a Reliable Sales Pipeline in 30 Days". I wanted to let you know that one of my colleagues here at AG Salesworks will be following up with you next week via the phone. It will be their goal to discuss, in more detail, how we may be of assistance to your company.
Regards,
Pete
Once you’ve sent your two emails, the gloves come off and your inside sales reps should begin following their call plan with your prospects. I know that this may sound counterintuitive to what you've typically read or thought, but much of our techniques are derived from how we like to be dealt with. There is nothing I dislike more than getting a call the day after an event. Give me some time to digest what I've seen.
Of course you need some stats to feel better about what I'm saying. Here is the only one that matters. The Lead rate (% of conversations that turn into leads passed) increases by 2% when employing this non-invasive follow up approach. That is a huge difference.
How do you follow up on your webinar attendees?
With a 12% connect rate, a typical inside rep’s job consists of 88% “non-live” communication. That being said, it is very exciting to get your identified contact live on the phone. This moment can be so overly anticipated, that it is easy to get caught up and forget to ask that one last very important bit of information. The goal is always to qualify an account, extract pains, and create interest. Your objective is always to get to the end result, which is to qualify in or out. Just because someone expresses no immediate pain or interest, your job is not done. To make the most of every conversation you need to understand why there is no immediate need. Thus it is important to have the appropriate follow up questions ready for the various reasons that could be presented:
- They do not qualify (qualify out) - why is their environment not conducive to your product/service?
- They have a competitor in place (satisfied) – What competitor?
- No funding in the immediate future – When do they anticipate the ability to evaluate in the future?
- Project not a priority in the immediate future – When will this be more of a priority?
This information is very important to capture for many reasons. If there is no immediate need/interest, make sure that you know when to reach out in the future. Things change, just because there is no opportunity now, doesn’t mean that this will be true in 3 months. Don’t settle for, “I have no interest.” This phrase can be a very popular email response. I always make sure that our BDRs are sending follow-up emails asking how they are solving the problem today and when to reach out in the future. This information can also be very useful to our clients to help bridge the gap between marketing and sales by helping marketing to segment their audience and sales understand their competitive landscape. Of course we always ask for inside referrals. Depending on the conversation, you can even try asking for a referral to an outside colleague/friend at another organization that may benefit.
How do you help your inside sales reps make the most of every conversation?