Sales Prospecting Perspectives

With only one full week left before the holidays are upon us, it's important to ramp up your sales efforts to meet quotas for quarter 4. This week, we've curated articles about how sales and marketing can succeed in this final quarter. The reward? Spending time at home with the family during the holiday season. 

Here are some of our favorite articles from this week. Remember, we share around 10 articles a day on our Twitter as well. 

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Kevin Stemple, Database Manager at AG Salesworks. 

Securing clean and accurate contacts is a battlefield; there are data mines everywhere, ready to cause mass destruction to your day and CRM system. One must tread carefully, or risk near certain doom in the form of financial loss, duplications or wasted time.

This week was a busy one at AG Salesworks. During the first half of the week, our inside sales reps were passing leads like crazy. Their leads were so hot that a small electrical fire started in the office on Tuesday! No worries, though; we’re all safe, and there was just a bit of smoke in AG Central. After that, there was more excitement: The Summer AG Olympics. I’m happy to announce that Team USA won! Find pictures and more about this event on our Facebook.

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.

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.

In a perfect world of teleprospecting, every call would result in success, every assistant would be helpful, and every list would contain nothing but accurate, relevant information. Sadly, we don’t live in that world, but with a little work and the right tools, we have the ability to start building it. Resourcefulness while prospecting and making smarter dials and emails is crucial to inside sales success.

Recently one of our Directors asked me to speak with his teleprospecting team on leveraging social media channels for prospecting. Of course I was excited to do so since sales teams always seem to be the last ones to embrace the value of using new tools. While speaking with the business development reps, one skeptical sort raised their hand to ask a question.  This person had been very unengaged in our conversation (checking their phone for email, texts, or Facebook) and you could tell they were not very interested in what I had to say. Their question (or statement) was “My project wants me to drive traffic to a booth at an industry trade show, so Twitter isn’t really going to have any value to me.” You could tell by the smug delivery that the rep thought they had me backed into a corner. I think not!

Another month is now behind us as we slowly creep closer to Spring. As the temperatures begin to rise, hopefully your prospects are out of their winter doldrums and becoming more repsonsive as we make the final push to close out the first quarter strong. One of the big debates that is being discussed within the industry is the idea that Social Prospecting can replace Cold Calling when developing pipeline or trying to connect with prospects. OpenView Labs (an extension of OpenView Venture Partners) produced a great post this week on the subject with insight from some industry experts who weighed in with their opinions on the topic. They discuss whether social prospecting will make cold calling irrelevant and include a poll within the post to identify how big a role social prospecting plays in lead generation efforts within your organization. Full disclosure, I am quoted at the end of the article, but it is full of great content for anyone debating on the value of social prospecting and how it should co-exist with your outbound prospecting efforts.  

Oh lists…lists are great! Lists keep teleprospectors and inside sales reps busy and within those lists hold the potential for qualified opportunities and sales pipeline. Getting a fresh new list can feel like Christmas to a teleprospector. On the other hand, sometimes the size of a new list (3000-5000+) can seem like a daunting amount of data to deal with, like finding a needle in a haystack.  All the preparation, training and role playing won’t do a teleprospector any good if they are not equipped with the knowledge of how to properly manage and refine the data to get to decision makers faster. One of the mistakes I see teleprospectors make is what I refer to as “thoughtless dialing.” This is when a list is imported and the rep just goes down the list one after the other, voicemail/email, voicemail email…and so on. Knowing how to properly manage/refine that data and research contacts helps to provide purpose to those dials.

As a teleprospecting representative, one of the most important tools you have is our list. Getting warm leads is exciting; people are familiar with your company and you can take a different approach with your outbound calling efforts. But even before you can make the decision as to how you want to approach your prospects, you need to take a look at the list as a whole.