Are You Proactively Providing Lists To Your Inside Sales Team?
I recently took on a new role at AG Salesworks and now more than ever am I responsible for the success of my team. Aside from maintaining clients, my job is to make sure that my team not only meets but exceeds their goals - especially when it comes to the number of qualified leads they uncover. I am learning pretty quickly that the key to this is to be proactive about providing lists and to realize that fresh lists really have a huge impact on the mindset of inside sales reps when it comes to achieving their goals. How do I know this? Last week to kick off the month of August I asked my team to send me an email with what they needed from me to hit their goals by month’s end - 15 out of 18 of the inside sales reps on my team referred to the fact that if they had a fresh list to dive into, they could hit the goal without a problem.
Since receiving the emails, I have taken a closer look to understand how I can better manage the list situation for my team before it becomes an issue. The question I have been asking myself is, “How do I know when it’s time to purchase a list or ask for a new, warm one from the marketing team?” Reps aren’t always going to come to you to inform you that their list is running low - in fact, they might not even know how many fresh names they have left to call because they don’t have the capabilities in the company’s CRM system to run reports to find out this information on their own.
One of the steps that I have taken is to build an easily accessible report in our CRM system that shows the amount of “New-Not Contacted” leads each of my reps has remaining (leads that haven’t been touched yet). I’ve made sure to create a graphical representation of the report so I can quickly see in a bar graph who is running the lowest and who I need to build a new list for first. Once the graph is made, it’s tough to say what the magic number is for when you need to purchase a new cold call list for them to call on. I used to think it was 100 contacts, but this week I learned that you should be on the lookout once you get close to the 500 mark. The reason for this is because a lot of times reps don’t change the lead status of leads in CRM systems because they forget, or they skip over a contact name because they know the company isn’t a fit. Therefore, the number of remaining contacts for them to call is inaccurate, thus your report is too. Once you drop below 500 leads left to call, make sure you purchase a cold call list, or, start asking Marketing if they have any marketing qualified leads for your team to follow up on. If the answer to that is “no”, ask if they’ve got a list of attendees for a Tradeshow or an upcoming Webinar that your team can call in order to drive attendance.
Without lists, obviously it’s impossible for inside sales teams to be effective. I’ve learned that lists can’t always be produced overnight, and it’s important to always plan ahead to allow for the amount of time it takes to get a new list in front of the team. What are the steps you take when it comes to getting lists to your inside team before it becomes an issue?