Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Father’s Day is coming up this Sunday, June 15th. If you haven’t already planned something for your father or bought a card yet, the stores are still open. My dad and I haven’t always seen eye to eye on everything, especially during the dreaded angst-filled teenage years. But he managed to put a roof over my head, food on the table and helped support me to get a degree.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Katie Kelly, Associate Inbound Marketing Specialist at HubSpot.

Traditionally, we think of BDRs as energetic, hungry, cold-calling machines. How can we get a prospect into taking a meeting? How can we get creative with our voicemails or sales pitches?

This worked well for decades - that was until our little friend, The Internet, arrived.

I have always been a firm believer that there are two types of people in this world: those who have children and those who don’t. The reason I differentiate between them is that those who don’t have children tend to think they are the best parents in the world, and some insist on telling you how to raise your kids.

Now, a bit about me: I am a father of three with a boy and two girls.  I have had my share of experiences with people saying things like, “I would never do that with my kids,” or, “You’re doing that?”  I have to admit, there was a time, before I had children, that I remember saying, “Oh my, I would never feed my kids french fries.”  Friends and family fall into one of these two groups. But when or if they have children, their opinions about parenting usually change, and they start to understand how difficult a task it is and stop judging others for their choices. The same can be said regarding outsourcing lead generation for sales and marketing.

Summer weather is finally starting to blossom. Spring has sprung, Memorial Day has passed, and the dog days of summer are on their way! Many of us have already begun to daydream of summer travel plans. I’ve been hearing buzz around my office lately regarding my colleagues’ upcoming vacations for the summer months. I’m sure my coworkers and I aren’t the only ones with trips in store. I was quickly reminded that a majority of my prospects will be taking time off during the summer as well. Before I know it, I’ll be running into hundreds of out-of-office messages.

According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics, there will be an 8.9 percent employment growth for sales representatives between 2012 and 2022. They project that an additional 132,000 jobs will need to be filled within that time period.

At AG Salesworks, we hire new teleprospectors with varying experience levels every month. On-the-job training is offered, as well as mentoring from other reps and managers. While many inside sales teams such as our own do have a training process in place, inside sales reps also hear many nuggets of advice along the way that may not be explicitly written in their training documents.

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Jeff Shore, an in-demand sales expert, author, speaker and executive coach. 

A client of mine presented a difficult but common challenge this week:

“We’re seeing the same numbers of prospects as we have over the past several months; we’re just not converting the sales.”

Been there?

This coming August, I will have been part of the AG Salesworks team for 10 years. It has been far and away the most time I've spent with any company in my career and also has been far and away the most challenging and enjoyable. 

The age-old question that every sales manager asks themselves is, “How can I better motivate my reps?” We often talk about rewarding our reps with things like money, extra PTO, company outings, and culture to keep them engaged. The reality is that while all those incentives are necessary, we sometimes forget about the intangible ways we can motivate and keep reps interested. In a meeting with my boss yesterday, he reminded us of something that is right at our fingertips that we sometimes forget about: Empowerment. It plays a very large role when it comes to motivating sales reps and it’s a great way to better your team as a whole.

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