Do You Know How Many Calls Your Inside Sales Team Should Be Making?
The best managers I’ve ever worked with generally spoke from their personal experience and not necessarily from the sales 101 instruction manual. It was always encouraging knowing that my boss at one point walked in my shoes and understood what it took to do the job. While this can be applied to nearly any job, I’ve found that it is particularly important when you are making cold calls. From what I've seen, if you’ve never made a cold call in your life your opinion more often than not doesn't carry much weight with your inside sales reps.
I equate cold calling to going through basic training. It can be difficult but it helps to develop your character, and provides the core fundamentals to succeed in sales. I can't imagine a private having much respect for a superior if they haven't spent time in the trenches (pun intended).
A common problem I've grown accustomed to, especially at a few of my old sales gigs, was the love affair that existed between the sales team and marketing. Neither group was afraid of offering their 2 cents on how to best execute our calling efforts. Very rarely did they actually agree on much, so the daily balancing act attempting to keep both units happy could best be described as exhausting for the inside sales team. When all was said and done, with all of the back and forth, we found the results to be comparable to previous campaigns and at times slightly lower.
One of the bigger points of contention that existed between each team was the amount of daily activity they felt was required in order to attain the campaign lead goals. The numbers seemed to vary wildly.
Marketing thought banging 50 calls an hour was an achievable number. Their thoughts were that it was just a numbers game. Make the call and just move onto the next name on the list. What they weren't taking into account was the time it takes to do a little research on the company, if we've spoken to them in the past... not to mention logging post call notes. What if we get the prospect live for a 20 minute discussion?
When it came to the outside sales team we found they had more realistic expectations in terms of a call goal. Some of them actually made some cold dials back in their early sales career, so they understood the value of being able to do some research before picking up the phone. The problem we ran into with them was that they felt we needed to do more research than necessary. They wanted us to read through the prospect web-site in detail, read-up on all press releases, check out the company bio on our target prospect and look up their profile on Linkedin. While I'm a firm believer in pre-call planning, there has to come a point when you need to just pick up the phone. It was almost as if they wanted us prepped like they typically would be before a big presentation. The problem was it was impossible for us to hit a reasonable call number or get remotely close to our monthly lead goal if we were expected to do a half hour of research before we called into each prospect.
Ultimately what we settled on was a call goal that made sense from the "numbers game" perspective, but also allowed us a bit of time to build in some necessary research. This is essentially the philosophy that helped us develop our call plan around here at AG.
It can be difficult to determine a realistic call goal since each department generally seems to have their own expectations. Take the time to understand what your inside sales folks are facing before you commit to a number that makes sense to YOU. After all, they're the ones making the calls each day and should have the best sense of what is realistic. The point is, we all need to come to a collective understanding on a number that won't burn your inside sales team out, and at the same time provides us with the quality and quantity of leads that make everyone happy.