Sales Prospecting Perspectives

The AG Salesworks marketing team had a busy but extremely illuminating week at HubSpot's Inbound 2013. The conference provided some excellent content, motivation, and ideas.  We heard from distinguished speakers like Seth Godin, Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff), Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) , Ann Handley (@marketingprofs), Rand Fishkin (@randfish) and of course Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) and Brian Halligan (@bhalligan), all very unique and motivational. Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) and his team at Hubspot did a wonderful job putting on this informative conference that taught so many marketers how to think more innovatively! These conferences remind us to do a marketing and sales tune-up: are you really reaching your ideal target audience, are you closing the loop with sales, or are you efficiently nurturing leads down your sales funnel? Of course these types of questions shouldn't be brought up only as a result of attending an event or meeting, we should always be fine-tuning our processes and finding what works best, but events like this certainly spark a flood of ideas.

Client retention is critical to a business's success. Over the years, I have had a long, profitable relationship with several clients. It’s important for inside sales reps to not only believe in what they’re doing for themselves and for their company, but for their client’s best interest as well. Having a customer-oriented approach builds longer term relationships. But what does customer-oriented mean? How do you develop and maintain that relationship between clients? Below are a few tips I have found successful while engaging with clients: 

Going through a slump? Feeling like this fat cat?

Whether it's that time of the year, or your pipeline is looking depressing, or your personal motivation is lacking, there are endless reasons why you might be having a difficult period for passing leads. But this is not a bad thing. Since there are many reasons for a “sales slump,” this means that there are endless ways to escape it!

Here are some tips for getting out of a sales slump and back into doing what you do best:

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.

It's Friday, and that means it's time for a Weekly Recap! What did you do to motivate your sales team this week? At AG, we held Extreme BDR Bingo. Inside sales reps were distributed bingo sheets with squares such as: 30 dials before 10 a.m., 3 leads in a day, 700 activities in a week, arrive before 8:15 a.m., etc. The prize for completing five squares in a row was $50, and the contest was so successful that sales enablement was rewarded extra money to keep it going throughout the rest of the month (as more and more people kept winning bingo). It was a big success. Be creative in how you inspire your sales team!

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.” 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.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Jamie Shanks, Social Selling Expert at Sales for Life.

Last week, I was speaking to a client who was really down in the dumps. He had just found out minutes before our training session that a multi-million dollar engagement had fallen through.  They had been selected months before hand, and now it was T&C’s time, but their prospective buyers’ inner circle was just too indecisive.  Our client was extremely frustrated, as the ROI was there, the discounts in place… but their prospective buyer just couldn’t make up their mind.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Craig Wortmann, founder and CEO of Sales Engine.

“First we make our habits and then our habits make us.” – Anonymous

All of us have habits which lead to routines.  Once in awhile, it’s good to stop and recognize the routines that are running our lives. As professionals, salespeople are as susceptible as anyone to bad habits.  

Here are 5 things that we should all stop doing:

It’s never fun to lose clients, but there’s always something inside sales reps can learn from their client’s decision to leave which they can apply and improve upon when dealing with new clients. When clients end an engagement, it can be for many different reasons: budget, end of a campaign, decision to try a new inside sales team, restructuring within the company, etc. Whatever the reason is, it is sad to watch a client leave, but you can use what you learned from working with one company and apply it to another company when they sign a contract.

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.