Sales Prospecting: Who's Helping Your Sales Team?
Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Chris Lang, AG's Sales Director. Chris lives and breathes sales and sales prospecting, and we are very happy to have the opportunity to share this entry from him with our readers. Thanks Chris!
01/07/09 - "My sales rep's are going to do all of their own calling. We gave them each a list of a couple hundred accounts and they will need to prospect, navigate and develop their own forecast. We think that is the best way to build the relationship and sell to our prospect base." -VP Business Development, XYZ Corp.
03/25/09 - "Things are going great! We have a lot of deals in the hopper and should see some closed business pretty soon. I think we will stick with this at least through the end of the year. Ping me towards the end of Q4." -VP Business Development, XYZ Corp.
04/21/09 - "We have been closing some great deals, but I'm worried about my forecast for the 2nd half of the year. Can we talk at some point mid next week?"
-Panicked VP Business Development, XYZ Corp.
Those are a couple of excerpts of an ongoing email conversation I had with a VP Business Development in 2009.
It is a fairly common one actually.
The powers that be think the sales team should be able to cold call, establish their own relationships, nurture their accounts and then close business. The company will save money on not having to use an inside team, marketing will feed the sales teams leads, commissions will only have to be paid to the sales reps....everyone wins! While this method does work in some cases such as very small target universes, some government and aerospace solutions, etc., the effectiveness of this approach for the majority of technology companies is very much in question.
Let's say you have a sales team that is 100% on board with cold calling and they love it. They wake up everyday and tell themselves, "Its time for the gold calls!" If one were to go to this odd and upside down world, you would eventually see a major issue with having your sales team make all of their own dials. Having your outside team do inside work creates major ebbs and flows in your forecast. The Sales Executive starts with little to no forecast. They don't have a lot of deals to work on so they fill their time with cold calls (as they should in this scenario).
After a couple of months the reps should have built up an adequate amount of opportunities to keep them busy working on and closing deals. As soon as they have active deals to work on they focus as much as possible on closing, because that is what you compensate them for. I don't know any VP of Sales that compensates based on conversations, number of dials, number of leads, etc. While they are working on all of these deals they aren't cold calling to the level you need to provide consistent levels of forecast . The result is a lack of back fill to promote closed business in future quarters. The deals they are working will eventually come to disposition one way or the other. When the dust settles, the Sales Executive will have to start all over building forecast again. During those forecast building months you will have minimal amounts of business closing as the reps feverishly try to replenish their own forecast. The resulting ebbs and flows in forecast result in sales executives that aren't making enough money, a VP Sales with a lot of gray hair and a very unhappy CEO.
Your outside sales executives are trained to close deals. They identify pain, propose solutions, move a prospect along the sales process and bring a client to a yes or no answer. The sales executive role is a full time position. The teleprospecting role is a full time position. The effectiveness of both is in major jeopardy if you try to pay one person to do both.