Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Inside Sales Reps: Pick Up The Phone!

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

  

I have recently started to leverage Twitter as an outlet to stay current and explore various authors/sources of business best practices and business topics.  Believe me, I know I am late to the party – but if you know me well, you know this is a huge step.

When I was in school at San Francisco State I had a management teacher that would have us read material from the Harvard Business Review.  So when I logged into Twitter a few weeks ago I began “following” HBR.  I must say I have enjoyed all of the content that I have read to date and have gained some good perspective on topics that relate to my career but also a number of things outside of my career scope as well.

I wanted to draw attention to a management tip they provided last Friday regarding the need to “stop emailing and pick up the phone” it turns out that this excerpt was adapted from a blog posting by Anthony Tjan entitled “Don’t Send That Email. Pick up the Phone!”.

Now, Anthony Tjan discusses the topic of picking up the phone versus relying on the various electronic outlets that are available to us in communicating in a number of ways, including conflict resolution or communicating important business  decisions.   I could not agree more and in the world of teleprospecting that we operate in I say pick-up the phone because qualifying a sales opportunity can be categorized as an “important business decision”

I found the management tip of “stop emailing and pick up the phone” right in line with something I like to stress to team of teleprospectors I manage.   There are often times as I walk around the office that I see a team member laboring over the creation of an email to a prospect – I will pop over and ask what they are doing and the response I hear most is “trying to write an email to help qualify this prospect that just sent me a note” – my immediate response “you will have better results if you pick the phone up and call the prospect?” – we go back and forth for a minute and eventually we tend to land on the idea that in order to uncover a strong opportunity and really develop the areas we are looking to qualify, picking up the phone is the best way to get this accomplished.

Is your inside sales team relying to heavily on email?