Sales Prospecting Perspectives

I am going through the most exciting time in my life and I couldn’t be happier. Not only am I expecting a baby boy in one month, but I just became an aunt for the first time. Meeting my nephew Luke the day he was born was amazing and I know the same will be true when our little one arrives soon.

I'll admit it: I never liked role plays. I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily in the minority here. Remembering back to my first few sales jobs, role plays were inevitably part of the training and were what I always dreaded the most. Don't get me wrong: I saw the value in going through the exercise, but I never felt that I put my best foot forward. How can you when you haven't fully absorbed the service/technology you were tasked with calling on?

The other day someone said to me, “When it comes to cold calling, it’s really just a numbers game. By reaching out to 100 people per day, there’s bound to be someone who says yes.” The comment took me by surprise and I thought to myself, "Wow, do people really think that’s all there is to cold calling? Do they really think of it as 'mindless' dials that will eventually lead to someone who says yes?"

Niti Shah is the Head of Sales Content and editor of the new Inbound Sales section of HubSpot’s media hub. You can follow her at @nitifromboston

You’ve just hired a new rock star salesperson for your organization – she’s had a few years of experience in complex sales and knows her way around the block. She’s a prospecting guru, great at building rapport, and can negotiate like a pro. There’s one problem – she’s never heard of inbound sales, and that’s going to affect your sales and marketing alignment unless you teach her these three lessons during training. 

I have been meeting with my team recently to better understand what they like, don’t like, what they would like to see more of, less of, why they joined the AG team, why they stay, and whatever else I might learn that can help improve the AG employment experience. Each and every person I have met with told me they were attracted to AG for a number of reasons, but the most important one was our training. They wanted to be at a company where they could learn. We are very proud of our internal training program and continue to invest and improve it. The conversations I am having validate that we are on the right track.

This week marks my 9-year anniversary at AG Salesworks. It's been a great ride.  

Prior to joining AG, I spent some time working in hospitality, banking and technology. What I discovered is that the personalities I ran into within each of those industries could not get more diverse. With the experience I gained has come perspective on what­ I feel helps drive a team. It could be money for some, continuous praise for others or the challenge of what the job brings on a daily basis. One of the few consistent themes I've seen is this: You need to have your team’s back. 

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.

If you're human, then I assume you struggle, as most of us do, with balancing your time during the day. Sure, there might be days where you manage to check off every item on your list and it doesn't seem like such a monumental task, but that situation generally tends to be the exception more than the norm for us lately.

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.

It is 9:27 AM EST and your phone rings.  The number is private but you’re in a good mood because your day isn’t as hectic as every other, so you answer, “Hello?”

The person speaks.  It’s someone named ‘Nick’ calling from ListenToThisSolution.com.  His voice is haggard and sounds more like he was hoping for your voicemail.  Out of habit you bring up your Outlook calendar for the day, its wide open.