Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Imagine you’re the CEO of a B2B high tech company. Your company has survived the most difficult start-up stages, and you’re ready to start successfully selling your product or service. At times, your solution is difficult to explain, but your engineers know its features like the back of their hand. You decide to insource your inside sales team.

You hire new inside sales reps, many just out of college. Your marketing team works on qualifying leads, but your sales team leaves many unqualified leads untouched. According to Marketo, 80% of leads generated by marketing are ignored by sales.

It's time for another #ProspectingChat over at AG Saleswork's Twitter account. As well as sharing many insights from sales and marketing thought leaders throughout the day, we will also be hosting a Twitter chat at 1:30 PM EST / 10:30 AM PST.

Back in the mid ‘90s, I was fresh out of college and managing a hotel front desk, with aspirations to one day become the General Manager. I quickly became accustomed to long hours and cranky business travelers, which most of us know can be challenging to say the least. At the time, a large percentage of my friends were living the high life at multiple tech company and making obscene amounts of money relative to their experience, as they were recent college graduates as well.

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.

The decision to outsource part of your sales team - whether you're revamping an insourced team or whether you don't have on insourced team - can be a very tough one to make. What are the most crucial factors to look for in an outsourced teleprospecting team? Most people's answer would be: cost. While cost of service is a very important factor when considering an inside sales teleprospecting partner, there are numerous other questions to ask to determine whether the company you're researching is well-run, successful, and most important, trustworthy. In a discovery call about that company, ask these 4 questions to get a real feel for the way they conduct their business. These questions and more are featured in our new guide, "Your Lead Generation Home Away From Home: How Outsourcing Teleprospecting and Inside Sales Functions Can Augment Your Tech Company's Revenue."

It's halfway through July! We’ve officially entered the dog days of summer. That means it’s time to start assessing Q3 goals and targets. July is the ideal time for inside sales reps to regain their focus so they can follow up the quarter with great results. But with beautiful summer weather and vacations planned for the not-so-distant future, it can be difficult for an inside sales rep to remain fully focused and motivated. Here are 3 tips inside sales reps can use to stay on task during the peak of summer.

(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.

Inside sales representatives and business development representatives spend a majority of their time prospecting companies to find and create potential sales opportunities. Depending on the type of project, an inside sales rep may have many different campaigns to follow up on, calling both warm and cold prospects.

Let’s recap the colloquial definitions of “cold calling” and “warm calling.” I contact prospects for my client who have expressed interest in their solutions through downloading information on their website or attending their events. Reaching out to a prospect who already has a relationship with your client or that you have previously engaged with is considered “warm calling.” It is also common for a sales rep to prospect campaigns in which the prospect has had no prior engagement with a client. This type of situation is commonly referred to as “cold calling.”

I have the opportunity to join calls with our inside sales team during the sales process frequently. It is exciting to speak with executives at companies who are in the beginning stages of creating an inside sales team themselves or are entertaining the idea of outsourcing. Choosing to outsource the function is often the result of these conversations, usually because these companies haven’t quite mastered best practices yet and need support. I really enjoy the task of taking on engagements to help develop the inside sales function, whether we continue our efforts after the first few months once up to altitude, or whether we hand off the inside sales processes to them once they’re running at full capacity.

Beginning a career in B2B inside sales is a great way to build job experience and fine-tune your professional skills. If you are a recent graduate with a background in sales or marketing and are looking to get your foot in the door of the business world, inside sales may be the career for you.