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!
My first real job out of college was as a supervisor at the front desk of a business hotel just outside of Boston. It was not the most glamorous position but it did teach me the importance of open communication from department to department, as this particular hotel was quite chaotic.
When I “stepped up” into my first Jr. Inside Sales role I thought things would be different, but within a week I was struck by the lack of communication I had with the sales team. My cube was placed smack dab in the middle of the marketing department with 5 other Jr. Inside Sales reps that were lacking as much direction as I was. We were tasked with following up on web hits, attendees to webinars and any other cold lists of target companies that marketing felt fit the profile of company we should be calling on. Anything that needed to be communicated to sales from the inside sales reps usually went through our sales operations manager or through marketing. Since our salaries were funded through marketing budgets, and we were perceived as "telemarketers", we were only allowed communication with marketing. Another challenge was that the sales team didn't have time to do any hand holding since they were too busy traveling and attempting to close business.
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.
Over the next few months we were able to pull down meetings with some of the low hanging fruit, but we struggled mightily to navigate through the target accounts. Having no direct access to the outside sales team, we were not provided with the subtle tips and compelling statements that could have increased our chances of uncovering a pain. The marketing material was always very helpful to send when we actually got a prospect live, but if we didn't define the pain we usually never sent the appropriate collateral to get them interested.
After a few quarters of banging ours heads against the wall, we were eventually able to convince management that we needed full access to the outside reps. We aligned 1 inside reps with 3 reps in the field and had regular weekly check-ins to review questions and progress made on our target list. This helped to accomplish a few goals for us:
1) Allowed the inside reps a much better sense of how to navigate through an organization
2) What to actually say when you do get a prospect live
3) The best collateral to be sending out post conversation
4) Outside reps developed more confidence in the opportunities the inside team uncovered
5) Allowed us to be more forward thinking about how to attack the territory quarter after quarter
Running an inside team I've found that I have become relatively adept at playing the role of peacemaker. It could have much to do with trying to corral the wide range of colorful personalities that I worked with in the hotel industry. While I know marketing and sales may not always have the best relationship, they need to put their egos aside and recognize that we are all working together toward a collective goal. Let us put down those egos, find some common ground and make the company a boatload of money working as a unit.
How about in your organization - do your Inside and Outside Sales teams communicate well? Would be interested to hear how others have helped bring these teams together.
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!
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!
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.
When setting up a new task that will appear on your homepage, we have found that there are 3 important labels to help streamline your teleprospecting campaign. It is important to label the prospect status, next task, and time zone. Meaning, before opening a new task you should be able to identify it with these labels. The prospect status will identify the urgency of the task and help the rep to prioritize. A prospect can still be in prospect (P), contact identified (CI), or even interested (I) mode. The next task will prepare you for your next activity with the prospect and this might be a voicemail 2 (VM 2) or no contact (NC). Labeling the time zone (ET, CT, MT PT) will help to map your day out and will ensure you won’t waste unnecessary time opening west coast contacts at 9:30am in Boston!
Labeling tasks also helps from a management perspective. I would much prefer to have “contact identified” on my home page rather than a majority of tasks still in “prospecting” mode. By glancing at your homepage, it is easy to identify if more work needs to be done to uncover the best person to speak with in your rep’s accounts. The same holds true for labeling the next task. If I see a magnitude of tasks in voicemail 4, 5, or 6 it is clear that there needs to be attention focused around the messaging for that particular campaign. If majority of prospects are not responding at the beginning of the call plan, some additional work around scripting and emailing is most likely necessary.
This is just a small sample of how we help keep our days organized and efficient with such high outbound activity. Do you have any ways to keep your day busy days more structured?
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”.