Collaboration Is Key With Your Inside Sales Team
Working in the world of sales I have sympathy for my brethren slogging away in the trenches trying to pull down a deal. With all of the calls I receive each day, I feel obligated to at least hear the sales rep out before I determine if their offering is something I may or may not have interest in. The same goes for the email solicitations I receive. I’ll take a minute to read (or at least skim) through their pitch to feel out whether or not this could be something that would benefit AG.
By taking the time to absorb the various solicitations we receive on a daily basis we accomplish a couple of things:
1) The product/services they are offering COULD actually be of great benefit to our business
2) It allows us to analyze/ critique how other organizations approach their cold calls and messaging
Over the years we’ve recognized that our approach needs to continually evolve. We can’t allow ourselves to rest on our laurels. And while you can say this about most any business, this should be an absolute requirement if you cold call. One of the better ways we feel to execute on this is through collaboration with your team.
A perfect example occurred today when AG’s president shared an email solicitation he received from a vendor interested in partnering with our organization. He was drawn in by the simplicity of the subject-line which prompted him to open the email, but he felt the content needed a little tweaking after reading through it. He asked that everyone to share their individual input. We evaluated the positive and negatives, recognizing that there isn’t always an absolute right and wrong way to communicate with a prospect. As a team we pin-pointed some of things we felt worked well along with the things we felt could use a little adjusting.
The beauty of an exercise like this is you are encouraging individuality and creativity with your inside sales team AND their ideas are being exposed to both their team members and management.
If you’ve conditioned yourself to just delete an unsolicited email you receive or cut the sales rep off while their halfway through their pitch - then you might be missing out. For those of you in the sales/marketing game, I suggest appeasing the karma gods by giving a minute of your time to the teleprospectors reaching out to you daily. Not that I have any intention of sounding like my mother but… how would you like it if someone did that to you? In the one minute you are allowing to listen/read the solicitation, you are also educating yourself on how others are getting in front of their prospective customers. As we all know-your message needs to evolve. Hey, some approaches may not work for you, but at the very least it gets you and your team continually thinking of how your messaging should be positioned.