Are You Measuring Your Inside Sales Team Connect Rate?
We all spend a lot of time focusing on how to handle live conversations and the importance of good scripting. As most of a teleprospector’s time is spent prospecting and figuring out ways to get that key decision maker on the phone – it is just as important to discuss how to actually get to that live conversation! If you have a team designated to developing new business and teleprospecting, the connect rate can be so important.
So how do you measure your rep’s prospecting skills? In a past blog, I emphasized the importance of tracking your rep’s connect rate and always focusing on increasing this for best results. This is because the connect rate directly reflects a rep’s prospecting skills. Connect rate is the amount of quality conversations that are occurring live on the phone. While it’s easy run down a marketing list and leave voicemail after email with each name in front of you, it is more important that you are prospecting further around the company and getting referred to more possible prospects involved in the decision making process.
Most opportunities we uncover do not come from a marketing list or even a targeted list of contacts. The best opportunities we find are discovered from getting directed around a company and finding key decision makers that aren’t self declared – you can’t find these on any marketing list or target list that can be purchased.
The best “in” to a key decision maker is a referral. The only way to get a referral is to prospect around a company. In order to increase your connect rate, call back into the company or 0# out to get someone else who may be available to talk on the phone. ALWAYS ask if there is a better person to speak with. The more contacts you bring in from other sources, the better your chances are of getting a referral or finding the right contact at the right time.
Typically, there is more than one person that can be involved in the decision making process at any given time – most of the time, there are several! Just because one person attended a webinar for your solution does not mean you should stop there. By way of a real life example of why pulling more prospects into your call plan is so important, I recently received an email from someone who was interested in companies looking to attend his career fair. He obviously sent an email to the person at AG who was the contact person when we had attended the show in the past - most importantly, he didn’t stop there. He also sent this email to each person on the management team, and from there it landed in my inbox. It just so happens that I was the person tasked with finding new recruitments that week. If he had just sent it to our previous contact, I would have never received this email (as we were pretty busy that week), and he would have never sold attendance space to AG.
Measuring the connect rate is very important to us as it directly reflects how well our reps are prospecting. What do you do in terms of measuring quality conversations?