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:

It’s Friday, Friday, gotta pass some leads on Friday! Welcome back to our Weekly Recap. Here at AG, we’re excited for the weekend, just like Rebecca Black, so we can rejuvenate before coming back on Monday. Most people love the work environment here and coworkers have become friends, so even though it’s Friday, we never truly dread Mondays.

Sales professionals obviously prefer face-to-face meetings with their prospects but sometimes, given their territories, that just can’t happen on a regular basis.  The alternative has mostly been to set up a conference bridge, email over a slide deck or Powerpoint presentation or get on the phone to sell.  Maybe they’ll toss over some whitepapers so their prospects can read up before the call and prepare some questions.

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.