Sales Prospecting Perspectives

I believe one of the most challenging aspects of sales teleprospecting is the first conversation.

You have less than a minute to prove yourself as a trustworthy sales rep. You only have your phone, your research, and your CRM to back you up. You can get bogged down by administrators or frustrated by curt replies. I’ve seen firsthand how extremely difficult it can be to build trust with a prospect on a first meeting.

(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.

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Janelle Johnson, Director of Demand Generation at Act-On Software. 

In B2B marketing, sales and marketing emails play different but equally important roles in a successful communication strategy. Marketing emails lure the leads, and sales reels them in. But if nobody ever opens your messages, they won’t do your organization much good. Getting a prospect to open an email can be extremely challenging in today’s crowded marketplace. Many of us get hundreds of emails every day. Which ones make you click? Which ones make you hit delete?

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

It starts with a hesitation.

It becomes an objection.

It festers into a doubt.

And it costs your company leads.

What I’m talking about is sales call reluctance. It doesn’t come from the prospects; it comes from the sales reps themselves. Whether you’re a new teleprospector or a seasoned inside sales rep, everyone experiences varying levels of call reluctance when B2B prospecting.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Cari Zoch, Marketing Manager at Avention, a company that offers real-time, actionable B2B data to deliver 21st century business info, solutions for sales, marketing and research. 

Salespeople are always looking for the holy grail when it comes to making cold calls. They can sort their lists, segment criteria but what’s most important?  Timing.

I’m here today to argue that timing is more than finding the best day of the week or the time of the day to pick up the phone. In fact, it varies by industry and type of prospect anyway.

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?

Have you been struggling to get traction with your prospects lately? When was the last time you changed up your email templates or updated your voicemails? Maybe it’s time to take a look at your messaging strategy.

The role of an inside sales rep at AG Salesworks is a unique experience. During my time at AG, I have had the pleasure of working for four separate clients. I’ve transitioned from balancing two half-time projects to working for just one client full time. Each of my clients differed vastly from the other, which made the transition from client to client very tedious. I had to endure an extensive amount of training in order to fully understand my new project. And at AG, our inside sales reps are expected to ramp up on a new project in a week’s time! Ramp ups may be overwhelming and stressful for inside sales reps, so here are 4 steps to help make your ramp-up week a smooth transition!

Businesses consciously take great measures to create and sustain a positive online identity.  They want to be found, and once they are, they want to exude a good, lasting impression.  In the B2B world, the human behavior that precedes the act of evaluating and buying has changed drastically with the rise of social media and the availability of endless online intelligence. 

When I was growing up, I was a non-stop talker. Some of my family and close friends might say I still don’t know when to stop talking. Well, most acquaintances would probably be a little alarmed about how energetic I can be and how much I can talk. This is part of the reason I knew I would be successful in sales. But, it could also have been the thing that hurt me the most. Learning how to control a conversation is an essential piece of every day in the life of an inside sales representative.