Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Everyone has months that are up and down due to holidays, vacations, changes at work, you name it. But there are a few constant hurdle's that pop up making it difficult to hit monthly quotta's, causing frustration and stress in the office. Below I will share some common obstacles or roadblocks that inside sales professionals must be prepared to handle if they are going to be successful within the sales industry. 

First, Happy New Year to everyone – I hope 2013 is starting well! 

In my last post of 2012 I discussed the importance on the types of questions our teams are asking as inside sales reps when they are having a conversation with a prospect.   So to carry the theme loosely across to my first post of 2013, I wanted to discuss the importance of listening. 

Social Media Optimization (SMO) refers to using social media outlets to increase awareness about your brand/product and increase web traffic. But, SMO is no longer limited to marketing and brand building for organizations, but has grown to encompass many different departments within the organization such as Human Resources, Client/Customer Satisfaction, product development, Business Development and Sales. As these other departments start to realize how to effectively utilize social media channels, SMO is taking a bigger focus within organizations.

We had another great week of posts for me to recap, which I will get to shortly. First I wanted to share a great post written by Jennifer Wong at Optify , who offers 9 suggestions to keep in mind when trying to compose compelling emails in her post How to Craft Compelling Email Content. I won't reveal all 9, you'll have to read her post for that, but I wanted to share a few that I thought were very valuable. Personalizing your email is going to be very important when you are trying to increase your open and click through rates. Another suggestion I liked was adding a reminder into your emails. Most people don't remember where they left their information, help them remember before they mark your email as spam. You should always include a call to action with your emails and the final suggestion I wanted to share was the need to encourage feedback. That is one of the best ways for marketers to discover if the message is having the desired effect.

As I was driving into work I began to think about the upcoming day and what I had on my schedule.  I started to think about the interactions I needed to have and realized that over the course of a day I interact with a wide variety of individuals, clients, team members, managers, my peers, my boss, and even the Mass Pike toll collectors some days.  All of these interactions include having a conversation. 

Kicking off a new outbound teleprospecting campaign requires careful preparation and a proactive, yet adaptable, outlook.  Below are some of the intangibles and physical assets you should be mindful of within the first two weeks of a new campaign:

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.