During interviews, candidates typically ask me the same question: “What trait makes someone a great rep for AG?” There is not one specific trait that a makes an inside sales rep great at the job. The best inside reps aren’t necessarily the ones who have the very best phone presence or make the most dials. There are 4 important categories to measure in order to gauge your inside rep’s performance. The goal is to push your reps to excel in all 4 categories in order to guarantee their best performance for your team. Here is what they are and how to best measure them:
Prospecting Skills
This is how resourceful and quick to get to the decision maker your inside rep is. Our rep’s Connect Rate (average quality conversations/day) allows me to identify this. The more quality conversations or talk time your rep has getting to the right person, the better their prospecting skills are. A rep who spends more time speaking with contacts in an account as opposed to “calling down” a list and blindly leaving voicemails and emails, will get to the right person sooner and indentify an opportunity faster.
Phone Skills
The best inside sales reps are fast at creating next steps. Opportunity Conversion Rate will help to determine how many conversations are passed to opportunities. The higher this rate is, the faster your reps are at generating interest and converting accounts to opportunities based on their conversations.
Work Ethic
To a degree, the job of an inside sales rep is a numbers game. It is important that you are ensuring a consistent flow of outbound activity with each of your reps. Make sure you are staying on top of the activity number and consistency with average calls/day. The best reps know the numbers game and go the extra mile with their outbound activity on a consistent basis.
Competitive Drive
Most importantly, a great inside sales rep is competitive. With all of the other basics in place, you should see that your rep is always meeting and/or over achieving their goals. As always, it is important to measure how well your rep is doing against goal.
I have found that the best reps excel in all 4 of these important categories. A rep can have the work ethic without the phone skills to convert opportunities, phone skills without a competitive drive to do well, or if you have a competitive candidate, it is important to make sure they possess the ability to have the necessary skills in place to make them successful on the phones. You get the picture, it is important to push your reps in all 4 of these areas to ensure optimal performance from your team.
What trait(s) do you think make a great inside sales rep?
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