When I first got into the sales world years ago, describing my phone skills as a bit “green” would have been an understatement. My first gig was as junior sales executive at a small corporate hotel in the suburbs of Boston. Though I have some fond memories getting beat up trying to pitch catering services and negotiating room rates, I would say that I persevered. I may not have had a ton of guidance and training, but after a few months I thought I had turned myself into a pretty decent sales rep who knew how to cold call.
Fast forward to my next sales job. I came to my senses and got the hell out of the hotel world, making the transition to selling for a software company. I was under the impression that I could make a quick impact having a decent amount of experience cold calling under my belt. (Man was I mistaken!) Sure I was able to land some decent leads, but primarily those came from follow ups on whitepaper downloads and “contact us” hits from their website. Let’s be honest, a monkey could transition those kinds of leads to the sales team. When I focused my day on making pure cold calls, I discovered that calling into technology executives, Human Resources and HRIS titles all day was a much different animal than calling meeting planners and travel managers. The biggest adjustment for me was realizing IT folks rarely call you back. Similar to some old school sales guy with an inflated ego, I had just expected people would get back to me after 1 call and 1 email. (Apparently travel managers had much more time on their hands.)
After about a month of falling on my face and a significant amount of assistance from my amazing boss (who now happens to be the President of AG Salesworks). I started to make some progress. What we recognized was that we needed some kind of formalized call plan. Prospects may have called you back when they expressed warm interest but they rarely did when you cold called into them. Apparently touching a name on my cold call list a few times and moving on wasn’t the right move. Though I had good intentions by putting this “call plan” together, we fell a bit short on the execution end of things because it wasn’t driven home with enough consistency. More often than not, when warmer stuff came through the primary focus shifted quickly away from the cold calling effort. Bottom line there wasn’t enough follow through.
So once again, fast forward to my start with AG. At that point I felt that I’d developed some pretty solid prospecting skills. Similar to my other sales gigs, I was fairly successful primarily due to my willingness to put the extra effort in, but there was no question in my mind that there was room for improvement. Our company was/is unique in the sense that we call on multitude of titles in a multitude of industries for a variety of technology companies. As a result, we realized that we needed a universal approach on how to get on EVERY prospect’s radar. It took us a year of tweaking to finally feel as if we had a solid sense of the process. We analyzed hundreds of leads we passed over that year for our clients, blended with every single title and industry we were calling.
After a long and sometimes painful year, we were able to come up with our universal way to attack each and every prospect. Don’t get me wrong, we consider it a “living breathing process”. We’re open to changing things up a bit, (depending on what the situation calls for) but after that year we came up with something the AG Salesworks teams believed in and could easily follow. Believe it or not, that was when AG began its meteoric rise...alright that’s a bit of a stretch but we did begin to see an huge increase of leads passed each month.
As you can see from this long and winding tale, I took the difficult path to becoming what I describe as a “legitimate” inside sales rep. While I can say there really is no magic answer to becoming wildly successful, it is always my intention to have my team learn from my mistakes. Never allow yourself to get complacent enough to think that you've truly got it all figured out. The simple keys are determination, consistency and most importantly the willingness to learn and grow.
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