Sales Prospecting Perspectives

There is nothing better than a sales manager who can speak from real experience when providing advice. It can be very difficult to relate to a boss who seems like they need to refer to a sales instruction manual.  It was always encouraging to know that my boss, at one point, had walked in my shoes and understood how to do the job. 

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Kevin Thornton, Executive Vice President - Sales & Marketing for VanillaSoft. 

Here is a statistic that may give you a jolt: “only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales.” (Source: HubSpot). This raises some questions:

• Are sales and marketing in alignment on what constitutes a qualified or sales-accepted lead?
• Am I purchasing the right lists & working with the right list providers?
• How are leads being reviewed and passed along to my sales reps?

A lot has already been written about sales & marketing alignment and list providers.  Today I want to talk about a third point:  how is your team’s next lead reviewed and passed along to a rep?

The hardest transition I've found when moving into a manager role is the change in relationship between you and former colleagues that you've once worked with. This changeover generally tends to be the biggest challenge for most new inside sales managers, whether they're responsible for training the inside sales team or for managing the managers.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a post from Patrice Morrison, a Business Development Representative at AG Salesworks. 

I’ve seen inside sales described using many analogies. But my favorite analogy by far is the comparison to the popular series, The Hunger Games. These books and movies focus on a woman who has to fight to the death in order to survive The Hunger Games, a twisted competition in which children ages 12 - 18 are forced to particpate, created by central officials to deter rebellion. Now you may be thinking: “How in the world could you see any similarities between the sales world and the dystopian world described by Suzanne Collins?” Even though they’re not shooting bows and arrows at jabberjays like Katniss Everdeen, inside sales reps actually share many qualities with Hunger Games tributes. Here are four:

Working in a sales-oriented job, inside sales reps have numerous goals to hit on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. But there are other goals to set besides the money-based ones. What personal goals can you set as an inside sales rep? One of the many things I love about AG is that we have various people with whom to discuss how to improve our prospecting skills in order to achieve our targets.

Over the years I’ve seen some common themes from my most successful mentors. Every day, they realized they had to check their ego at the door. We’re in this together and getting things done is NOT a one-man job. It’s a collective effort each and every day.

It’s the second full week of 2014 and our client implementations are in full effect as we kick off the New Year. As you can imagine, one of the biggest components to ramping up these implementations is script development. The creation of scripts is key to making any teleprospecting campaign successful and is the first thing we look at when it comes to ramping projects. There are a ton of questions that arise throughout the scripting process, so I thought it would make sense to address some of those concerns.

Happy New Year, Sales Prospecting Perspectives readers! We hope you celebrated the start of 2014 - and the start of sales quarter one - on Wednesday just like we did at AG Salesworks. While we're recovering from snowstorm Hercules in the Northeast, we're wishing you all a happy 2014 and sharing some articles we loved that helped ring in the New Year. 

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote advice for newly promoted inside sales managers in my post, New Sales Managers, Don’t Miss Out on This Advice. I focused on three areas of guidance:

At the beginning of the year I set a goal to improve communication across the entire company, from the way we communicate to our customers to the way we communicate among the management team, the way management communicates with team members, and how team members communicate with each other.  We invested in formal training, and had a summer outing with an Olympics theme which turned out to be an excellent team building opportunity. 

The additional emphasis on communication has had a positive impact on performance as well as morale.  Great ideas have been shared and implemented, team members have expressed interest in various areas, and as a result have had the opportunity to do more and in some cases get promoted.  When others see the positive impact they tend to become more engaged, which further improves the effectiveness of the team.