Sales Prospecting Perspectives

A nice benefit of working with a wide range of clients over the years has been the exposure we've had to the unique approaches in presenting a service or technology. Working with some of the brightest sales and marketing minds out there has helped to provide us fresh perspective on how to differentiate your product from the masses.

Those of us who have teleprospected in our day know that getting prospects to open up to inside sales person is no easy task. At times it can seem like pulling teeth for them to give us anything at all. 

Last week, I was thinking about how much time I spend making dials and speaking with prospects, talking with my team, and corresponding with clients via phone and email. As a business development representative at AG Salesworks, I work closely with my director and manager on my team to ensure that I focus my time on the most important tasks. In a normal day, I communicate with my manager, director, other business development representatives, and other key players in our organization. I also speak with my client almost daily to make sure I have the most relevant contacts at the top of my list. In order to maximize time on the phones passing qualified leads, it is essential to have meaningful conversations with the other people that are important to speak with on a daily basis.

As a business development representative, I am armed with collateral to help prospects gain insight into my client’s products and services. This is part of our job- providing additonal information when we can’t qualify a prospect as a lead. But is there such a thing as ‘too much collateral’? The answer depends on a few things: your personal preference, how in depth your client wants to go, how many different solutions you have and the organization itself.

I’m going to be honest, I never really get into March Madness. Sometimes I’ll fill out a bracket, picking teams based on which color uniform I like better of course. This year I didn’t have a big interest in it – that is until I saw an email come through my inbox about our first ever 2013 BDR March Madness Tournament. Our contest development team really outdid themselves with this contest and their creativeness led to such great adoption across the company that I felt compelled to share (thanks guys!).

I have learned over the years that having a well thought out plan to reaching any goal makes all the difference. Building a pipeline is no different. When I was a rookie sales guy I was not much for business plans. Give me a list and a phone, and I'll make it happen was my motto. Guess what, it worked, I did make it happen. What I learned several years later is that I could have made more happen with less work, if I had only took the time to plan.

In December of last year I approached Matt Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group, Inc with an offer. I’d hand over the keys to our massive database of real, active, and standardized CRM data if he could do one thing for me. Could he find a way to make it useful.  Well, after many months of hand wringing, iterations, verbal altercations, and math, Matt has done just that.  Enter the Outbound Index.

Over the years, AG has been kind enough to send me off to a variety of professional development conferences, helping me to hone my skills in the many hats I’ve worn within the organization. Being a smaller company, I’ve fortunately been exposed to many scenarios that I may not have otherwise within larger companies. Typically these conferences provide me a wide range of topics/workshops which I can easily apply to my account manager/trainer/director job. 

In the industry, we talk a lot about how to create the best environment for teleprospecting teams, from a day to day perspective, that will increase employee productivity. We’re constantly thinking of ways to incent our teams through more lucrative compensation plans, more robust training, better tools from a technology standpoint, etc. Something I have been thinking about lately is not only about how to increase performance through these methods, but also how to create the right physical environment  that creates a high energy space for reps to come to work.

March Madness has descended upon us and my bracket has already been busted! Let's hope your sales pipeline isn't experiencing the same thing!  

We usually reserve this portion of the recap to share an interesting article from the week. Today, I wanted to help our friends at Insidesales.com and Software Advice in promoting their 2013 Inside Sales Market Size Study. In 2010, Insidesales.com discovered that inside sales jobs were growing at a rate 15 times greater than outside sales jobs. They attributed the disproportionate growth to three key factors: The Great Recession made the lower average cost of employing an inside rep more enticing, Cloud-based CRM and online lead generation tools made remote selling more feasible, and a younger generation is increasingly comfortable doing business over the Web and phone.