Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Russ Heddleston, CEO of DocSend.

Traditionally, sales has relied largely upon human relationships: successful salespeople know their product and their audience and are enthusiastic about talking to people, pursuing, and closing leads with persistence and moxie. Aside from these personal qualities, until the advent of Salesforce in 1999, the only external tools a salesperson needed were a Rolodex and a phone. In the last decade, technology has dramatically changed the landscape in which inside sales reps operate: the Internet has given the general population unprecedented access to information, the penetration of mobile has allowed people to access this information anywhere and anytime, and (somewhat ironically) the number of people who actually answer phone calls has diminished.

At the same time, the tools that salespeople rely on have evolved and have changed how salespeople gain insight into leads, interact with customers and prospects, and organize their efforts. Here are a few tools that have helped salespeople gain new insights and pursue new strategies for success:

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a post from Mike Lipka, an Inside Sales Representative at AG Salesworks.

What could Michelangelo’s sculpting techniques teach you about reaching quota? The answer may surprise you.

Michelango’s mastery of sculpture was without rival, and his philosophy on his craft was equally brilliant. Believing that the figure he was sculpting lay “trapped” inside the block of quarried stone, Michelangelo slowly carved until a perfectly refined image began to reveal itself.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest blog from Gareth Goh, Content Marketing Manager at InsightSquared. 

If you have a team of outbound prospecting reps, spare a minute to give them some love, attention and empathy. After all, they have perhaps the toughest job in your organization: making cold calls to hit aggressive dial targets day after day can be a grueling experience that weighs on even the most motivated and productive prospecting reps.

At the same time, both you and them know how important their role to the organization is. Without them, your sales pipeline - and subsequently, your bookings results - would be substantially smaller. What can you, as their manager, do to ease the painful monotony of their day-to-day job responsibilities?

Provide them with the structure they need to really do their jobs well.

(And Call Volume is Not One of Them)

I recently wrote in my blog post 5 Most Frequently Asked Questions About Outsourcing Inside Sales that gone are the days of closely tracking the number of activities when managing your inside sales team. While I still think measuring activities is important to a degree, I don’t think it should hold as much weight as it does for many inside sales teams out there.

The problem with placing such a large emphasis on the number of activities is that doing so confuses the purpose of teleprospecting. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. With this metric as a forefront in Inside sales reps’ minds, they tend to get caught up in making a high number of dials instead of focusing on making smart dials. Smart dials lead to quality conversations which in turn result in qualified opportunities for themselves or for the outside sales team to follow up on.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing.

Many sales organizations often struggle with how to predict which sales will close. Their sales forecasts are weak, or non-existent, and that fact affects their bottom line.

Your sales forecast influences numerous decisions in your company’s sales process. A weak sales forecast not only affects commission checks, but also the success of your entire organization. It’s tricky to predict which sales will close or which prospects will be qualified. However, when it’s done right, an accurate forecast will keep a business on course, using past figures to predict short- or long-term performance.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing.

Whether you’re managing sales for a large enterprise organization, or are trying to build business for your own one-man-shop, these tips should help guide your thinking, strategy and action when building and managing a bigger sales pipeline.