Sales Prospecting Perspectives

How Does Your Inside Sales Team Deliver A Message?

  

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A lot has been written lately on the AG Salesworks Blog about different approaches to inside sales/teleprospecting and specifically about having “business conversations” with the right people within our target audiences.  Recently, I was reading a number of articles from various sources on the web, and I stumbled upon an article posted on Inc. by Tom Searcy titled, “What a 9-Year-Old Can Teach you about selling”.

The message in Tom’s article can not only be leveraged in selling, but also in managing an inside sales team.  As Managers and Inside Sales professionals, the importance of being concise when leaving a voicemail, sending an email, and especially when we get a prospect live on the phone, is ingrained in our minds.  Being brief and to the point can be lost in the process of developing messaging when we focus too much on inserting “buzz words” or “industry terms” that we’re certain our audience can identify with.  While we believe that we are endearing ourselves to the prospect, we may actually be making them less receptive to having a conversation with us if we don’t present our message in such a way that the value in spending a few minutes on the phone with us is clear to them. 

As Tom Searcy points out, when crafting our voicemails and emails and thinking about the types of conversations that we’ll be having with our prospects, we have to ask ourselves the three questions that his 9-year-old asked him, and to make sure that our content is as clear as possible when answering them:

• What do we do?
• Why do people decide to hire us?
• Why don’t they do it themselves?

If we follow this path in helping our inside sales/teleprospecting teams to develop optimal messaging and also in how we manage them, we will see the results of our efforts increase across the board.  I don’t want to sound like I am not placing any value on speaking your prospect’s language, but in the world of inside sales, we have to be extremely cautious of how we are communicating with our target audience, and understand that our responsibility is to keep it clear, clean and precise.

Thank you Tom and daughter for the reminder!