Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Mark Roberge, SVP of Sales and Services at HubSpot.

Let’s get this straight: teleprospecting does not exclusively refer to cold calling. It is the process salespeople use in order to prospect a lead on the phone.  Whereas cold calling can be impersonal and yield poor results, properly teleprospecting can humanize the interaction between a salesperson and a prospect through the use of helpful dialogue centered around prospect’s pain points, not the salesperson’s products. When you combine this process with an inbound sales methodology, you have a potent mix 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.

Before I entered the world of sales, I worked as a preschool teacher for a few years.  I truly enjoyed being a teacher and loved spending my days reading stories and singing songs.  Sometimes I miss it, but I do like to go home at the end of each day without someone else’s boogers on me.  

Teaching preschoolers and working in sales may seem like very different worlds, but there are many things I learned during my time as Miss Colleen that I can apply to my current job as an inside sales rep. Here are some sales tips from a former preschool teacher.

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.

“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.

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.

My husband and I have been considering purchasing a new home. Every Sunday we go to open houses and review our “must haves” before entering each house. While we are realistic that we may not get everything on our list; when we do end up buying, there are certain characteristics of a home that we just won’t budge on – one of them being a walk in closet for me, of course.

As a Business Development Rep for our clients, I’ve worked on a variety of projects in which I have had to support a variety of sales reps. For a few projects, I’ve worked mainly with a marketing point of contact and not directly with sales, while on other projects I speak with the sales reps on a weekly basis, if not more. It is important to have a strong relationship with the outside sales reps you are supporting to understand if the opportunities being passed are progressing down the pipeline and to get feedback on those opportunities.

Okay, okay - before you disagree with me, hear me out. Last week I was battling with a horrible thought – I questioned whether or not my team thought of me as a micromanager. We weren’t trending in the right direction as a team to reach goal, so I honed in on some details much more than usual. Historically, micromanagement has been known as a “bad word” but sometimes there is a time and a place for it, especially when managing an inside sales team. What I’ve found is that it’s okay to point out areas of improvement for your teleprospecting team and guide their behavior in the direction you are looking for. After all, you are in a management role for a reason. The key is to lead and coach your team while reassuring them you aren’t tracking their activities and looking over their shoulder because you want to make them miserable; you are doing it to help them grow as a sales person.  

One of my biggest goals with any new rep on my teleprospecting team is to establish appropriate habits. There have been many times that I've worked with insides reps with a  few years of experience teleprospecting and find that within the first  month of their employment at AG I have to undo much of what has already been ingrained into their sales approach. Problem is, if we condition our reps to just get a list of questions answered on a cold call that is exactly what they are going to do because that is what they have been trained to do.