Are You Doing Everything You Can to Attain Feedback on Your Inside Sales Team’s Leads?
This week when I sat down to blog I was having some difficulty deciding on what to write about. After sitting at my desk racking my brain for a topic, I started googling “How to get started writing a sales blog” and one of the first tips I came across was to go to my email inbox and check out the incoming subject lines from clients to determine if there was a recurring theme. If I noticed a continual pattern, the article instructed me to blog about that topic. Sure enough, when I went to my inbox, I kept seeing the phrase “Feedback on Leads” coming through from different clients. Bingo, I thought - there was my topic for the week. 
The emails from my different clients were all somehow related to tracking feedback on appointments that were scheduled to occur based on the leads that my team sent across. Each of them were either getting back to me with feedback they had gathered from their outside sales reps, or they were asking me for an update on the overall feedback on total leads passed throughout our client engagement. Seeing all the emails going back and forth about this reminded me how crucial it is to report on this information, whether you are an inside sales organization selling one or more products, or if you are an outsourced lead generation firm providing qualified leads for your clients.
The main reason why the feedback process is so important is because it shows the value that your team is providing to the sales and marketing teams. If you aren’t tracking this information, then the big shots won’t understand the value you are providing and won’t continue sending funds your way. There are so many different ways that each organization tracks and manages the closed loop feedback process, and here are a couple of different ways our company manages this with our clients:
- Build a report in your CRM system that tracks the feedback on whether or not your team’s appointments are occurring. If you attempt to track feedback with an excel spreadsheet alone, you won’t have very much success. It gets too complex, too difficult, and too time consuming to manage. If you enter some simple fields in your CRM system like “Was the call successful” and “Is the lead continuing on in the sales process”, you will be able to gather this info easily, and you’ll always be able to export the data for your clients to keep. The tough part is gathering this information from the sales reps. Unfortunately, sales reps don’t always like to take the time to provide this information. If you schedule a quick, weekly call with the outside sales reps, you can easily solicit this information and enter it into your CRM system immediately. This way, you are the one responsible for managing the info and it isn’t left in the hands of the outside sales team alone. The best relationships between sales and marketing stem from building rapport anyway, so a weekly call to connect about these opportunities isn’t a bad idea.
- If you aren’t able to get buy-in from your outside sales team to provide feedback, the best way to manage this information is through Opportunity reports in your CRM system. As long as you have created a unique field in the original lead that was passed by your team members, you should be able to pull an opportunity report that shows the opportunities created based on your team’s original leads.
As I said before, there are many ways to track the closed loop feedback process. Whichever way you are managing it, the key is that you are doing it. The positive feedback will ultimately result in the ability for you to keep your inside team growing because executives will see the tremendous value from your team’s efforts. What are the steps you are taking to ensure that you get feedback on your team’s leads that are sent to sales?