Is There Accountability On Your Teleprospecting Team?
My first inside sales gig was anything but glamorous. At the time I shared a small office with another junior rep cranking out cold call after cold call just trying hit our quota. A big thing that stood out to me at the time was the minimal effort that my colleague was putting into the job. It confounded me that he somehow managed to pass over lead after lead with what appeared to be half the amount of dials I was making. I just assumed that he was better than me. At the end of our first two quarters he landed himself the fattest commission check, of anyone on the inside team. He soon moved on to a competitor taking an outside role based primarily on his perceived stellar performance as an inside rep.
What we soon learned after his departure is that the "pipeline" quality leads he was uncovering were really going nowhere. We also came to find out that all this guy was doing was buttering up his outside reps to take opportunities that were nothing more than a prospect granting "permission for a follow up". No defined timeframe, budget to speak of, or even someone with decision making authority. He did throw a decent lead into the mix every once in a while, which helped to throw everyone off the scent for a couple of quarters. At the end of the day though, I was the lucky devil tasked with re-qualifying most of the leads that he had originally passed. I was wondered why there wasn't some kind of process in place to prevent leads like these from slipping through, and at the same time I was angry knowing this guy made a significant amount more than I had in the previous quarters.
At AG we've developed our own unique perspective on how run an inside sales team. This perspective has been honed by the wide range of clients we have the pleasure of working with daily, but we also have the benefit of hind-site on what NOT to do based on experiences similar to the one described above.
Being an outsourced teleprospecting firm, we would classify ourselves as experts in the cold calling game. As a result, our clients hold us to a very high standard and they certainly have every justification for doing so. They are evaluating every one of the leads we are sending over, they are looking at activity numbers, comparing month over month performance, determining what percentage of leads is landing on forecast, etc. The question is, are you currently doing this with your inside team? These certainly were not questions being asked during my first inside gig - otherwise my colleague probably would have been fired before raking in a couple of fat commission checks.
Point is, you need to look beyond the volume of leads you are seeing from your inside reps.
Do you have any way of quantifying, on a short and long term basis, what value an inside rep is bringing to the table or is it based solely on the volume of leads they are passing?
Start with an honest assessment of your team's performance.
How is their day structured?
Do you have any idea how many calls they're making?
How are their leads progressing?
Do you have any visibility into what leads are landing on forecast?
This should help you to better identify which reps are adding value over the others that may just be playing the system.
Running a teleprospecting team is not easy, and your clients (i.e. sales teams) won't be giving you a free pass. Are you holding your inside teams accountable?