Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Some people don’t always like the idea of summer ending and fall kicking in, but it is honestly my favorite time of year. Not only is fall a time for beautiful weather, apple picking, and pumpkin lattes, but it’s my favorite time when it comes to sales. With the summer months behind us, we are now well into the new season, everyone’s back and ready to close out the year strong. Directors and VPs are either looking to spend their remaining budgets for the year, or they are planning ahead for 2014. As a result, they are all willing and open to talking when they receive cold calls.

Our job is to find highly qualified sales leads for our customers that will lead to qualified opportunities. Our clients come to us with a need to fill their pipeline and want us to do so as quickly and effectively as possible. One of the first questions usually asked when speaking with potential or brand new customers is what we ­recommend for a call strategy for the campaign. To be more clear, customers who are either outsourcing or supplementing their teleprospecting efforts to us want to know if calling efforts should be focused on cold calls, follow ups on warm leads from marketing events, or target accounts identified by their own outside sales reps.

In my opinion, the answer to this question is fairly straightforward: calling efforts should be focused on all three areas because the potential of uncovering great leads can come from any of these sources. Sure, there are caveats, like the amount of resources and time you are able to allocate to each, but in general, I think the best route is to mix things up and call into a few different sources at any given time.

Anyone who has ever made cold calls or managed an inside sales team knows these infamous words from prospects: Who are you and where are you calling from again? This is likely the first type of objection immediately after you have introduced yourself to a prospect over the phone. The best thing to do is always be prepared to answer this question quickly, with confidence, and without hesitation. The question is, though: How do you create that perfect what we do statement for your team?

Last week our company took part in a great consultative inside sales training. I love these trainings because although some of the topics may seem obvious at first, we sometimes tend to put these fundamental topics on the back burner at work because other priorities end up taking up our time instead. The training from last week really helped to reinforce the topic of Knowing your Competition. Seems simple, right? It may seem straightforward, but ask yourself these questions. When was the last time you sat down and really thought about who your competition is? Do you ever think about competition in a different light other than during the actual sell? This training really emphasized the idea of not only knowing your competition when bringing on new customers, but more importantly, really being aware of your competition when it comes to retaining your existing customers. 

Weather forecasters have been describing the last few days as fall-like, and I love it! It’s been beautiful out, and while I’m sad to see the summer days fading away, I am excited for cooler, fall days ahead. The summer has been filled with beach days, summer vacations, warm weather, and unfortunately, some slower times in the sales world. We’ve seen a slight decrease in the amount of leads we're getting from clients for follow-ups, and out-of-office replies are flooding inside sales reps' inboxes, making it a bit more challenging to get prospects live on the phone.

Ever have a poor customer experience at Starbucks? I haven’t. I am always extremely satisfied when I leave there. From the moment you walk in, every employee smiles from ear to ear, they have a ton of energy, and if they mess up your order or take longer than expected, they give you a free drink, no questions asked. The key is this: they make it about you, the customer, from the second you enter their front door. Every employee seems to possess a positive attitude at all times. They truly make me believe that they love going to work and that satisfying their customers is their top priority.

Recently, it seems that everywhere I look I come across more and more instances of customer service, and it makes me realize how crucial customer experience is when it comes to retaining business. Unfortunately, customer success sometimes gets overlooked because time seems better spent on the obvious – running the operational day-to-day tasks of an organization. Just recently I took on the responsibility of customer success at our organization, and I have been thinking a lot about what the key components are to driving customer care for inside sales.

I’ll admit it. I think I have been avoiding the usage of collaboration tools for a number of years now. No matter how hard my boss has pushed it, I just couldn’t get myself to fully adopt the tools he was presenting. I would test it out for a few weeks and then would stop because I wasn’t recognizing the true value.  You may have been in the same boat as me. I just kept using the excuse, “I have my email to manage that.â€? After recently realizing that comments like this make me feel old and stuck in my ways, I started giving it more thought, and decided to jump on the bandwagon to give it a shot.

And when I did, something great happened.

Last summer I wrote the post 3 Sales Prospecting Tools You Can’t Live Without, where I discussed the top necessities every inside sales rep should have in order to be successful on the phones. One of the points I focused on was having a structured call plan methodology to follow, and the idea that there is a science behind how many touches prospects need to receive before they turn into a qualified lead.

I am so lucky when it comes to clients. I am fortunate enough to work with individuals who truly value what we do and trust our processes. They trust that we are the experts, and that’s the key to every successful customer engagement we run as a company.