Sales Prospecting Perspectives

3 Tips to Ensure Your Lists Will Help Your Inside Sales Team Succeed

  

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Supporting your inside sales team with lists is a lot like preparing for Thanksgiving day. If you’ve ever hosted Thanksgiving, you know how much preparation goes into it, and it isn’t something that you can throw together over night. It takes a lot of planning, and so much goes into it – if not planned properly, it hinders your ability to make Thanksgiving day a success and odds are you won’t get the desired results you were hoping for.  The same is true when it comes to creating lists for your inside sales reps – if you don’t put the necessary planning into it, you are pretty much setting you and your team up for failure. Here are some of the ways you can ensure your lists lead to successful campaigns:

1. Communicate with your team prior to pulling a list.  Can you imagine what would happen if friends and family did not let you know what they were bringing to Thanksgiving dinner? You would probably end up with 5 bowls of mashed potatoes, 8 different cranberry sauces, and no stuffing or gravy. The key to planning Thanksgiving is to make sure you communicate responsibilities to your guests to make sure this doesn’t happen. When building lists, it’s also important to communicate with your inside sales reps to ensure success prior to pulling a list. Your reps are the ones on the phones day in and day out – they know the best titles to speak with and the criteria of the best companies to call. If you don’t communicate with them prior to pulling or purchasing your list, you may end up with a list of wrong titles and companies that aren’t a fit.

1. Create a list sooner rather than later. You wouldn’t take the Turkey out of the oven before it was ready, right? Timing is key when cooking on Thanksgiving, and timing is also key when it comes to getting a new list in front of your inside sales reps ahead of time. By keeping reports of how many leads your inside sales team has left in the “Not Contacted” status, you will be able to keep a close eye on when your team is getting low on names to call. Keep a close watch on when they approach the 300 mark left in this status and start thinking about creating a new list for them. If they go a day without a list, you are setting you and your team up for low opportunity volume, so it’s important to stay on top of this and it’s best to do it sooner rather than later.

1. Cleanse the list to avoid any hiccups. When it comes to extending the invite for your Thanksgiving day celebration, have you ever worried about who to invite or whose feelings might get hurt if they think they aren’t invited? To avoid this, it’s best to plan ahead and avoid a potential disaster by including everyone. Similarly, in order to make sure you don’t encounter any hiccups when it comes to your team calling their lists, it’s crucial to put the list through a cleansing process. The last thing you want to do is worry about contacting and upsetting an existing customer throughout your team’s calling efforts, and by scrubbing your lists, you can avoid this.

As we approach Thanksgiving, it’s important to think about how we can help our teams from a list perspective. Just like those of you hosting Thanksgiving this year, you can’t create a Thanksgiving feast on your own, you need to count on others for support, just like our reps are counting on us to make their calling efforts a success.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!