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!
So, you have set your next years goals. You know what revenue numbers you need to hit and you have established the campaigns and marketing events that are going to get you there. Now you need to execute and follow up on your leads. Whether you are planning on outsourcing your teleprospecting team or not, put yourself in the shoes of the sales team and make sure that you are providing the components needed for your efforts, and theirs, to be successful. 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.
- Product Knowledge: I know this seems obvious, and it is. Of course we need to know what you have in order to sell it. Yet keep in mind that [our] goal is not to “sell the product” but to uncover the pains and establish the needs in support of your solution. Therefore, what helps the calling efforts is a clear understanding of which capabilities resonate with whom within the company.
- Competitors/Differentiators – The number one reason that a company is not interested in your solution is because they are using something or someone else. It is extremely important to have as much information on your competitors as there is on your solution and what differentiates you in the market. This knowledge provides us with the ability to speak specific to inefficiencies of your competitors and extract pain points that the prospect may not have been aware of in the past.
- List – Whether you outsource, or have an Inside Sales Team, there is nothing better than being provided a targeted list of contacts that are involved, someway or another with what your product addresses. It becomes extremely time consuming when Inside Sales folks are provided lists with no contact names, email addresses and/or phone numbers. That’s not to say they can’t find that information but it significantly impacts the number of dials that they are able to make.
- Marketing – Sadly, the phrase “can’t judge a book by its cover” does not always apply. It is important to make sure that your first impression counts. Is your website up to date? Do you have case studies? What is your marketing material? Very often an Inside Sales Rep is asked to send additional information and there are times that I am reluctant to send something, because I feel that it demeans the quality of my clients’ product. Prospects want to see comparisons, specifics, and testimonials (i.e. case studies). Have PDFs that speak specific to the top 3 or 5 highlights of your solution, and make sure these are marketed towards the CEO, CIO and Director level contact.
These are a few of the key areas that I find to be most useful when building a successful teleprospecting campaign. When all of these areas are addressed, I can go into my calling efforts with the confidence of knowing what the value proposition is and the value that we can provide. That leaves only the hardest part left, catching the prospect live….but we have tricks for that too :D
How did everyone’s week go? We had some great blogs this week by Laney Pilpel, Craig Ferrara, Peter Gracey and Chris Lang.
As always I would like to point out a particular article I found this week that’s worth noting. Paul Castain wrote a blog titled: The 7.5 Deadly Sins Of Prospecting!. It listed 7 (and a half) things that you should not be doing while prospecting. It’s a great way to see if you are indeed guilty of these “deadly sins” and how to keep from committing them!
Monday August 23rd
Polite Persistence Pays Off For Inside Sales – Laney Pilpel offers some great pointers as to how and why being polite but yet persistent can pay off.
“The theme here boils down to this: Persistence, or what we like to call at AG, “Polite Persistence.” I think that sales people tend to get a bad reputation for being too forward, which is why we train our reps to be persistent in the nicest way possible. We accomplish this in many ways, from our tone and messaging to the amount of times we contact prospects throughout our call plan. There are two examples that really stand out in my mind and exemplify how we really go above and beyond to get the most meaningful conversations and quality opportunities possible without giving up.”
Tuesday August 24th
A Call Plan Can Help To Fix The Gap Between Sales and Marketing – Craig Ferrara touches on an article that he read this past week that discussed how to best deliver “sales ready leads”. He went on to explain how building an effective lead nurturing process was important.
“The last thing we want is that gap between your sales and marketing team to become a place where sales leads go to die. To prevent this from happening I suggest start by putting a call plan in front of your inside sales team. Step one should involve following up on any inquiry (assuming it's been scrubbed in some way) within 48 hours. As we all know, the longer a lead ages it becomes less and less likely the lead will convert to an opportunity for your sales team.”
Wednesday August 25h
0#, The Oldest And Still Most Effective Move An Inside Sales Rep Can Use – Peter Gracey discusses the oldest trick in the book, hitting 0# and how important it can be when getting key pieces of information in your calls.
”By requiring that you speak to someone live on every call you end up casting a wider net within your target organization and most importantly you get yourself a sales ready lead faster than your competition.”
Thursday August 26th
3 Ways To Shorten Sales Cycle – Chris Lang offers some great points on how to shorten the sales cycle.
“I certainly encourage all sales and marketing executives to find new ways to increase their forecast. However, you should not turn your back on the proven methods that work just because they are “old school” and in many cases tougher to do. Roll up your sleeves, do the dirty work and close some deals.”
That covers it! We hope you all have a great weekend! See you Monday!
I just finished reading a great article from Josh Stailey with The Pursuit Group regarding how to best deliver “sales- ready- leads”.
http://www.imakenews.com/thepursuitgroup/e_article001828768.cfm?x=bhcrTyc,b26bn4tC
He touches on the misaligned expectations that exist between marketing and sales (my favorite topic) and how it results in limited attention being paid to those early-stage opps. As a result, most of them run the risk of falling through the cracks. Josh makes some excellent suggestions to prevent this from happening such as leveraging technology, launching an effective inbound marketing program, along with the use of metrics to link marketing leads/programs to revenue growth. But the most important suggestion he made (in my mind anyway) was building an effective lead nurturing process and I wanted to expand a bit on this..
Josh points out that nurture process can last for months, so both marketing and sales need to have an action plan in place to stay on that prospect's radar. At AG it's simply "the call plan". While I’m a firm believer in leveraging every tool at your disposal, we’ve learned the hard way that no matter how creative you get in reaching out to your prospects, nothing beats a good ol' fashioned phone call.
The last thing we want is that gap between your sales and marketing team to become a place where sales leads go to die. To prevent this from happening I suggest start by putting a call plan in front of your inside sales team. Step one should involve following up on any inquiry (assuming it's been scrubbed in some way) within 48 hours. As we all know, the longer a lead ages it becomes less and less likely the lead will convert to an opportunity for your sales team.
Most inside sales teams recognize the importance of continual follow-up with our prospects, but what we learned over the years is that you cannot rely solely on email or solely on the phone. It requires an effective combination of the two to quickly determine if an interest exists now or down the road. The problem with using email alone is that it tends to be less personal and the prospect may feel less inclined or compelled to contact you when they are starting to evaluate. When you rely only on the phone, you'll recognize, as many do in teleprospectng, that people rarely call you back. As a result you might find yourself out of the loop on the details when let's say they are actually getting close to potentially putting out an RFI/RFP.
The theory behind our call plan is that you can't assume that your prospect will ever respond to you. A consistent and deliberate approach combining both phone and email will greatly increase the chances that you will hear back. Hey- it may not be the response you are looking for, and you may get some folks that aren't all that fond of your persistence...but at the very least it will allow you to determine if the prospect is worth pursuing further and how much nurturing may be required.
A big focus for the AG team last week was simple enough: talk to more people to get more quality conversations in, and the leads will come as a result. I think this was the perfect reminder of what the team needed to hear to really increase their productivity, and the resulting conversations and opportunities prove it. Every sales person knows this theory is true, but sometimes all of us need a gentle reminder to stay persistent and not to become lazy. In a note to the team last week, Pete Gracey, the president of AG said, “You have not done your job if you hang up the phone before you get someone live when prospecting into a company.” I found it interesting how the reported conversations doubled last week after he made this comment.
The theme here boils down to this: Persistence, or what we like to call at AG, “Polite Persistence.” I think that sales people tend to get a bad reputation for being too forward, which is why we train our reps to be persistent in the nicest way possible. We accomplish this in many ways, from our tone and messaging to the amount of times we contact prospects throughout our call plan. There are two examples that really stand out in my mind and exemplify how we really go above and beyond to get the most meaningful conversations and quality opportunities possible without giving up.
- When it comes to calling into a company, we are hunters! A lot of companies out there will only talk to C-level contacts, and ignore the rest of the organization. We make it a point to not only reach out to the C level contacts and their assistants to get passed down, but then we contact managers and directors below them until we get the answer we are looking for. We may not always have the information available to us, so we utilize contact databases to find more people to call and never forget to use 0# to talk to as many people as possible. An interesting point here is how to incent inside sales people to have these quality conversations, and to stay persistent on those lazy days - what better way than to incorporate number of conversations into their compensation plans.
- We don’t stop at phone communication - we compliment it with immediate email follow ups. We realize that most of the executives we reach out to barely have enough time in their day to finish their work, let alone take a call from someone they don’t know. Because of this, we send brief, to the point emails to make the best use of their time. If they respond to us that they aren’t interested, we don’t stop prospecting them until we know why. The best example of this was seen through an email exchange between a insides sales rep and a prospect a few days ago. The inside sales rep emailed a prospect and the prospect said “I’m not interested. We already have a specific package for our industry that meets our needs.” Typically, I think someone might give up on this prospect or maybe even the company all together for the time being. Instead, this inside sales rep followed the email up by mentioning that many other companies like his were looking into this type of software and that if it was interesting to him now or in the future, he’d like to have a brief conversation now. The prospect replied by sharing more information about his environment, and referred him to their CFO, and the inside sales rep passed over an opportunity with the CFO the next day.
Sometimes we tend to become lazy about being persistent, especially when we get shut down by prospects when cold calling every day. Always remember that persistence pays off and not to qualify out a company until you know exactly why they aren’t interested.
Happy Friday Everyone!
We had some great topics discussed this week by Nicole Puddester, Craig Ferrara and Chris Lang.
I’d like to highlight a great blog that I found last week by Kendra Lee, President of KLA Group. She offers some great tips on how to Create Opportunities in our tough Economy.
Monday, August 16thth
Organized Tasking for High Outbound Inside Sales Activity – Nicole offers some great tips on how to streamline your daily tasks to get the most efficiency out of your outbound activities.
“I’m sure you are all familiar with Salesforce. If you are not, reps using this tool have this great homepage everyday that has all the tasks for the day pulled up. After completing them, you can go ahead and create a new task for the following days. This is a refreshing way for inside sales reps to keep their day organized. That being said, with the number of outbound activity and quality conversations we have, it is important for our BDRs to further organize their day and keep it as efficient as possible.”
Tuesday August 17th
Do You Know How Many Calls Your Inside Sales Team Should Be Making? – Craig offers a great food for thought, when it comes to knowing and understanding what your inside sales team does, needs to do and ultimately, can do.
“One of the bigger points of contention that existed between each team was the amount of daily activity they felt was required in order to attain the campaign lead goals. The numbers seemed to vary wildly.”
Thursday August 26th
Are Your Prospects Qualified For A Face To Face Sales Meeting? – Chris Lang discusses the importance of qualifying the appointments, and how in the end that’s always the key to closed business.
“I still love to have face to face meetings. But in my experience there is no way that you can form a predictable sales forecast when meeting with unqualified prospects. That stays the same whether they are in the same room as you or on a phone thousands of miles away.”
That’s it for this week! Have a great weekend everyone, see you Monday!
The best managers I’ve ever worked with generally spoke from their personal experience and not necessarily from the sales 101 instruction manual. It was always encouraging knowing that my boss at one point walked in my shoes and understood what it took to do the job. While this can be applied to nearly any job, I’ve found that it is particularly important when you are making cold calls. From what I've seen, if you’ve never made a cold call in your life your opinion more often than not doesn't carry much weight with your inside sales reps.
I equate cold calling to going through basic training. It can be difficult but it helps to develop your character, and provides the core fundamentals to succeed in sales. I can't imagine a private having much respect for a superior if they haven't spent time in the trenches (pun intended).
A common problem I've grown accustomed to, especially at a few of my old sales gigs, was the love affair that existed between the sales team and marketing. Neither group was afraid of offering their 2 cents on how to best execute our calling efforts. Very rarely did they actually agree on much, so the daily balancing act attempting to keep both units happy could best be described as exhausting for the inside sales team. When all was said and done, with all of the back and forth, we found the results to be comparable to previous campaigns and at times slightly lower.
One of the bigger points of contention that existed between each team was the amount of daily activity they felt was required in order to attain the campaign lead goals. The numbers seemed to vary wildly.
Marketing thought banging 50 calls an hour was an achievable number. Their thoughts were that it was just a numbers game. Make the call and just move onto the next name on the list. What they weren't taking into account was the time it takes to do a little research on the company, if we've spoken to them in the past... not to mention logging post call notes. What if we get the prospect live for a 20 minute discussion?
When it came to the outside sales team we found they had more realistic expectations in terms of a call goal. Some of them actually made some cold dials back in their early sales career, so they understood the value of being able to do some research before picking up the phone. The problem we ran into with them was that they felt we needed to do more research than necessary. They wanted us to read through the prospect web-site in detail, read-up on all press releases, check out the company bio on our target prospect and look up their profile on Linkedin. While I'm a firm believer in pre-call planning, there has to come a point when you need to just pick up the phone. It was almost as if they wanted us prepped like they typically would be before a big presentation. The problem was it was impossible for us to hit a reasonable call number or get remotely close to our monthly lead goal if we were expected to do a half hour of research before we called into each prospect.
Ultimately what we settled on was a call goal that made sense from the "numbers game" perspective, but also allowed us a bit of time to build in some necessary research. This is essentially the philosophy that helped us develop our call plan around here at AG.
It can be difficult to determine a realistic call goal since each department generally seems to have their own expectations. Take the time to understand what your inside sales folks are facing before you commit to a number that makes sense to YOU. After all, they're the ones making the calls each day and should have the best sense of what is realistic. The point is, we all need to come to a collective understanding on a number that won't burn your inside sales team out, and at the same time provides us with the quality and quantity of leads that make everyone happy.
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.
After writing my last blog entry on the introduction debates of cold calling, it got me thinking about other debates in the world of teleprospecting. Something that inside sales teams struggle with is deciding whether or not their call plan should include leaving voicemails for prospects. Some companies believe that they should call through lists and “no contact” prospects until they reach someone live. My question is, what if the people you are “no contacting” are in fact interested, but maybe they left their desks for a moment to get a cup of coffee? If this is the case for some prospects out there, isn’t leaving a voicemail necessary? I think it’s pretty clear what my argument is and I am interested in hearing what others have to say.
The key to leaving an effective voicemail comes down to the content of the voicemail. If you call someone and product dump, that will never catch their attention – at least that is what I have found in my experience. So what does work? Here are some of my tips for leaving an effective voicemail that will get you a call back:
Make it personal. Think about how many calls your prospect receives a day. Do you really think they want to hear you sound scripted when they listen to you? Sounding like a robot will result in your prospect immediately deleting your voicemail before they hear it in its entirety. Be your personable self while clearly stating the purpose of your call at the same time.
Avoid product dumping. This goes back to my robot theory – make your voicemail about your product without telling them every detail. Try another method like mentioning a pain or challenge that many other companies are experiencing within their industry that your product alleviates. Let them know that you don’t want to waste their time, but you would like to help them if this is a challenge they are experiencing as well.
Clearly state your contact information. Have you ever received a voicemail where someone left their phone number once, and you had to keep repeating the message until you were able to jot down the entire number? I know I have, and not only is it frustrating, but it takes time. With this idea in mind, a C-level contact certainly does not have the time or patience for this, and will be that much more inclined to delete the message instead of listening to it. As a result, I always make sure to leave my name and number once at the beginning of my message and then again at the end even if it sounds repetitive.
Call to action. This is the key to make sure you hear back from a prospect. Let the prospect know what you are going to do on your end if they don’t get back to you. For instance, a lot of us here at AG end our messages with, “I will follow up this voicemail with an email. If I should not hear back, I will follow up in two days.” This way the prospect knows that if they don’t want to hear from you again, they really need to reach out and give you a valid reason as to why.
So what is more effective: only reaching prospects live by “no contacting” or leaving voicemails in hopes of sparking some interest if they’ve stepped away from their desks?
It’s August. Soon the summer will be winding down, the leaves will begin to turn, Thanksgiving decorations will come out and Marketing and Sales VPs will begin the annual ritual of panicking if they don’t have enough pipeline. There are some very creative ideas that people come up with to create forecast in a pinch.
“Let’s take our prospects out to expensive dinners!” – Good that way they will be full when they don’t buy.
“Here is the plan…..We’re going to drive to the prospect’s building, jump out and whip footballs at them as they leave for lunch. Here is the catch, the football has OUR LOGO ON IT!!!” - The logo will show them who to sue for blasting them with a projectile.
On a more serious note, rather than run programs that take a long time to develop and can have a very unpredictable deliverable, I would suggest using a highly targeted teleprospecting campaign. It is proactive. a predictable and low risk method to build forecast towards the end of the year.
Your teleprospecting campaign should focus on reaching out to companies that you have identified as the “most likely to purchase”. The last 3rd of the year may not be the best time to test new markets if you need closed business. Take a look at the first 8 months of the year and identify the key characteristics of the deals that closed. Usually there are trends that can be spotted. Sometimes it is a simple as choosing a vertical that you have a strong hold in, other times you have to be a bit investigative to identify particular buying motivations that lead to shorter sales cycles. An obvious example of this would be compliance deadlines that companies need to hit to avoid federal/state penalties. Feel free to give me a dial if you are having trouble finding and calling a target group. I know a pretty good teleprospecting firm that could help!
Your target group should not be a universe of thousands of prospects. There should be enough prospects on your list to keep your inside team busy putting in a full calling effort into each prospect. Your list is too broad if the inside team can only put a couple of dials into each prospect. Keep it to a couple hundred prospects and focus on making “intelligent” dials.
Be sure to keep your pitch very value focused. People aren’t going to buy right now because your solution is “nice to have”. I live in a condo in city with a very thin and steep staircase. My lack of coordination has me falling down the steps once a month and it’s hard to move anything wider than a freeze pop into my house past the winding part of the stairs. An elevator would be nice to have, but my stairs will have to do until I have an “elevator budget”. (Which my wife ranks just above my request for “buy a monkey budget”) However, if someone were to make a case that having an elevator would increase the value of the house upon resale and save me money in medical bills, maybe we would consider it. My point is focus on how your solution will save money, make money or mitigate risk – pitching a “nice to have” is not going to get you to your number.
Good luck closing out the year!