Sales Prospecting Perspective Weekly Recap - Week of July 30, 2023
So, first I must clear the air and apologize for the infrequent weekly recaps, and I have been taken out and tarred and feathered as a result.
With that said and out of the way, I wanted to take this opportunity to share a great post on Selling Fearlessly this week. Babette N. Ten Haken, author of Do You Mean Business, writes a guest post in which she discusses identifying your customers, both internally and externally. In her post, Everyone is a Customer of Everyone Else, one of my favorite sections is highlighted below:
How you define “customers” becomes your delivery of your vision and your professional expertise, and your ability to create value for your organization. It’s how you move from being perceived as an order-taker to serving your customers as an innovator and leader.
Take a few minutes to read this great post and share your comments.
Now, on to our recap of the week.
Monday, July 30, 2023
We began the week with a great post from Director of Client Operations Laney Pilpel discussing a subject that all sales organizations hold near and dear, Client Retention. In her post 5 Ways To Maintain Your Clients, Laney provides 5 factors crucial to keeping your clients: Exceeding expectations, Honest Communication, Quality of Work, Being Responsive, and Keeping Up With Trends. Unfortunatley, most of us have experienced losing a client and know it could be one of the worse feelings. Check out these tips so you don't have to ever feel that way again.
Tuesday, July 31, 2023
Craig had a great post discussing how your inside sales reps can address a couple of the tougher question when trying to obtain information to qualify your prospects. It is always difficult to ask your prospect on the phone if he is the ultimate decision maker regarding your product. You have been directed to him as the correct contact, but often there is still someone higher who rights the checks. To the same degree, determining whether there is budget available to support the addition of your product can seem like a daunting task. Craig provided 3 ways to present these questions, without your prospect feeling as if they aren't the person you should be speaking with: feed their ego, let them know you want to make the best use of their time, and getting a sense of how.
Wednesday, August 1, 2023
I had asked our President what he thought was one of the trends he was seeing in the industry. We discussed demand generation programs and it got me thinking about what other issues come in to play regarding a successful demand generation program. In my post, I offer two other areas that should be discussed when evaluating your demand generation program: your product and your sales staff. If your product is not a fit for the market place you are targeting, is that the fault of your demand generation team? Or, your not seeing closed business from your sales rep, even though you have had multiple leads progress in your pipeline that are not resulting in new business, is this your demand generation program? It is easy to target demand gen as an area that needs addressed, but don't be too quick to make a change when your attention may be required elsewhere.
Thursday, August 2, 2023
Eric provided a great analogy in his inaugural post for AG comparing how you need to prepare for a hockey game to how your inside sales reps should be preparing for their month. He provided 5 great tips to ensure you are having success: getting a good warm up in, starting strong, playing as a team, keeping your stick on the ice, leave it all on the ice. Follow these steps and your hockey game as well as your monthly performance should see drastic improvements.
Friday, August 3, 2023
We ended the week on a different note with a great story from Kira based on the Disney classic Aladdin. In this story, our main character is surprised by a genie while working in her cube. The genie offers the rep 3 wishes, which we later find out weren't granted because the rep was capable of doing these on her own. She wished for a solid rapport with all the reps she supports, the ability to get through all her probing questions while qualifying a lead, and, lastly, she didn't want to feel defeated by her prospects and remain positive throughout the day. Our rep realizes that she has the power to control these issues and didn't need the help of a genie after all.
I hope you guys enjoyed this little recap and take a few minutes to read the entire posts. Have a great work week and we'll do it again this time next week.