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!
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.
Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you another guest entry from one of our BDRs, Jill Ryan.
Recently I was getting extremely frustrated with the concept of “maintenance mode.” How long can some one “maintain” contact with a person that has never answered before? I can’t stand calling someone for 6-12 months and leaving them voicemail after email, getting nothing in return. Part of this job is to gather market research on why someone isn’t answering so we can make the best use of our time. Personally, I pick up and hang up every time I see a surveyor on my caller ID. That person could be giving away the hope diamond and I would have no clue because I don’t feel like listening. Even after being in this business for a while and having countless conversations about the difficulties of cold calling, I still never throw the receiving end a bone.
So that leads me to this thought- why do I have no interest? I think the reason why people have no interest is because we are constantly on the defensive. “What are you trying to sell me? I have no money!” We are all guilty of assuming that the person on the line is on a mission to cram product down our throats. In my case, I’m not, hell I couldn’t sell you a CRM if I tried. All I want to do is see if you have a problem and if I can help solve it. So why not just say that directly? An email or a voicemail is not a close, an info commercial, or an opportunity to recite the year your company was most profitable. It is an opportunity to invite a person to have a quick conversation, point you in the best direction or tell you when to follow up. In the business of “Business Development”, we need to open the gates to new business in order to do our jobs.
Here are some ways I conquer my “maintenance mode” and get more people qualified in or out:
- Write new “maintenance mode” emails: Send your prospects a quick note with an updated case study, or some interesting new literature on your company.
- Call them during a holiday season or the summer and see how everything is going. The more memorable you make yourself, the better chance you have of building a relationship with that person.
I have had an outstanding response rate to this new email and I think it’s worth a shot to send it out to those people that declined your invitation 3-6 months back. Let’s face it, these people are not thinking about our products as much as we are. It’s our job to drop in and say hello and not lose to opportunity to share our story. Working on new personable attempts to make contact with your prospects will keep them out of the dreaded “maintenance mode” and place them into your pipeline.
Try this email:
Following up on information from XYZ Company—Jill Ryan
Mr Prospect,
I wanted to follow up on some information I have sent you over the past couple of months. I understood at the time, it did not make sense to connect. I wanted to touch base and see if you had any active goals regarding ____________ and ___________ at this time.
My role is at the very front end of the sales process; I just want to engage you early on with information regarding how we enhance ______________________.
Please let me know the best time to follow up, as I certainly do not want to bother you unnecessarily.
Hope all is well,
Jill Ryan
XYZ
000-0000-0000
Fill in the blanks with the problems you are looking to solve and see if you can conquer “maintenance mode”.
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!
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!
If we all enjoyed the same things, there would not be much variety in the World. There would not be a strong need for Marketing, and one simple message would be able to reach everyone the same way. But that is not the case – thankfully, otherwise life would be pretty boring. Granted, we all strive for the same end result, but the means to getting there is always different for everyone. This same concept most certainly applies for the different roles within an organization. The communal goal within an organization is to make more money, and reach new revenue goals year after year. It’s not a simple task, and it takes the synchronization of different components to get there – marketing targets the right audience, IT increases the productivity of the staff, sales has the right messaging, and the CEO ensures the unity of the machine. With this thought in mind, you need to be aware and acknowledge that some divisions within an organization may have little concern over what another department is doing; they have their own problems and tasks to deal with. That being said, it is important as a business development representative, to ensure that the time and effort that you are investing to penetrate a company is not being deleted or thrown in the junk mail folder due to lack of relevancy.
When targeting an individual within a company, leaving voicemails and sending emails, make sure that your bullet points highlight the capabilities that are relevant to the needs of your audience. A Director of IT will have less interest in your SEO capabilities than your ability to integrate with their current investments. The VP of Sales is not going to see the value of your solution if you are highlighting your ability to be deployed within 3 months rather than your ability to increase conversion rates.
When targeting IT, focus on functionality, integration or productivity. IT folks don’t want to keep changing the solutions that they have purchased, that makes them look bad. So try to speak about how you can provide “additional value”. CEOs are often interested in everything working together and the departments having what they need to succeed. The detailed functionality of the solution is not as important as the message of increased productivity and cohesiveness between all departments.
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.
The best email subject line I've seen in my career came through my Inbox this week. Brad G, one of our inside sales reps shared an email he had received from a prospect praising his persistence in prospecting him. We call it "polite persistence" here at AG and I was very proud that the prospect not only responded to Brad, but took the time to compliment his approach and work ethic. Love to see that. As I was closing out the email I glanced at the subject line that Brad had sent to the prospect.
It read "Attention: Jim - Final Follow up"
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.
Brad really kicked my older subject line up a notch by adding some very subtle yet effective verbiage. First, he uses "Attention" to start the subject. I don't know about you, but when I read the word attention I typically pay attention and read the next couple of words. Brad's got the ball rolling nicely here. Next he uses Jim's name. Personalizes it a bit...he's got Jim's attention (by saying "attention") and now Jim is a little more interested because Brad knows his name. Now its time for the grand finale'...Brad closes out the subject line with "Final Follow up". Brilliant!! He's gotten Jim's "Attention", Jim is somewhat comfortable reading because Brad used his name, and he tops it all off by leveraging the greatest fear every true blooded American has...missing out on something. By stating that this is the "Final Follow up", Brad has placed immediate importance on having his email opened and addressed by Jim.
It may seem like an over analysis to you, but hey, it's what we do here. The words matter, the choice of words, their placement, and their intended effect should be well thought out prior to being used. Nowhere is this more important than in the subject line of an email.
Brad nailed it here, and to prove it I figured I'd include the actual response he received from the prospect:
Brad,
You get extra points for being persistent. I do have an interest in seeing a demo of your application and its reports, but I have been quite busy. How about scheduling something on 8/13? That day is completely open on my calendar.
Jim
Jim was later qualified and passed by Brad and the discovery call has been set for our client's sales rep on 8/13. The devil truly is in the details.