Sales Prospecting Perspectives

The office is teeming with people moving between desks, rushing to write information down or share something with a co-worker. Phone conversations can be heard from every corner of the office, and the voices mingle to produce one low drone, a din heard throughout. In one corner of the office, a man hangs up the phone and emits an exasperated sigh. In the other corner of the office, a woman jumps up for joy, pumping her fists in the air. There’s an air of excitement in the office: success could happen for anyone; anyone can make a difference. It’s a wild house of ambitious thrill-seekers; it’s a jungle in there.

“Please place me on your no-call list.”

This is the phrase I’ve learned to repeat whenever someone calls my house during dinner time. Some anonymous person is always trying to solicit my money for products I definitely don’t need. A Shake Weight? No thank you! A subscription to Martha Stewart Living? Certainly not! A common misconception about these calls is that anyone who uses the telephone to increase revenue for a company is an annoying telemarketer. But that’s simply not true.

Several months ago, while shopping at my favorite clothing store, a sales associate approached me asking if she could help me find anything. She eagerly greeted me by the door, as it was slow and I was only one of two customers at the time.  Normally I would probably pass up the help and say I was just browsing, which is usually the case when I go there. I like to look around and see what’s new, what’s on sale.  However, that day I had gone in there with a purpose; I was looking for a particular pair of jeans that I was unable to find online.

Few would argue that many accounts and prospects that need to be nurtured can often be overlooked.  In the stream of advice and information discussing the inside sales process, I feel that lead nurturing is neglected.  These nurtured accounts could very well be your future customers. 

A nice benefit of working with a wide range of clients over the years has been the exposure we've had to the unique approaches in presenting a service or technology. Working with some of the brightest sales and marketing minds out there has helped to provide us fresh perspective on how to differentiate your product from the masses.

About a year ago as I was frantically running through the office looking overwhelmingly stressed from my workload, my boss said to me, “Not to be mean, but you are bringing this on yourself.” At first I was completely thrown off by his comment. I thought – the nerve! Here I was running around for the good of the company and he makes a comment like that. It wasn’t until I sat down with him to express my frustration when I realized…he was right. After talking about it, he made me realize that I had a problem delegating and I was trying to do everything on my own – partly because I felt I wanted to do it my way and also because I didn’t want to add more to anyone else’s plate. I felt like I would rather deal with the stress of it all and not impose on my reps or anyone else that could potentially help me out. Our talk really resonated with me and I haven’t been the same since. There are so many benefits to delegating to your team beyond just giving you more time to do the tasks you need to do.

Those of us who have teleprospected in our day know that getting prospects to open up to inside sales person is no easy task. At times it can seem like pulling teeth for them to give us anything at all. 

There’s been a lot of talk about millennials recently. In case you aren’t familiar with this term, a millennial is used to describe a segment of the population born between 1980 and 2000 (approximately that is - different sources tend to give slightly different date ranges). The term seems to be making its way into more and more conversations that I’ve been having with my peers when discussing managing inside sales teams. So many inside sales representatives out there fall within this generation, and a hot topic of conversation more recently is how to attract this generation from a recruiting standpoint and how to manage them once they join your team.

In an age where phone ringers are set to silent and text messaging is a primary form of communication, finding a successful voicemail strategy can be daunting and discouraging. It can be tempting to just rely on emails for leads, or set up an automated system to leave messages for you, but the ability to leave an effective voicemail is still a valuable skill to learn. Here are some pointers I’ve learned from my time on the phones.

Last week, a friend of mine sent out a link to Cold Call Me Maybe on Tumblr. If you’re in sales and haven’t seen this clever blog with gif animations yet, I highly recommend it for a good laugh! One of the animations I found particularly funny was specific to the concept of objections and the caption read, “When a prospect has an objection that you don’t really know how to overcome…” which you can see here.