Sales Prospecting Perspectives

I just wrapped up my first fall Sunday Funday. We watched the Pats, had some friends over, cooked some fall-inspired food, and may have had one or two pumpkin beers. This is my absolute favorite time of year. It's a fresh new start as we close out the summer and get ready to start the last quarter of the year. An influx of new customers goes hand in hand with that, and it’s always exciting to kick off new client engagements.

As we launched one program in particular last week, my client asked my all-time favorite question: "What makes for the best programs when it comes to inside sales engagements?" The below are crucial elements of a successful inside sales or lead generation effort from my perspective:

I've always prided myself on creating the best culture I possibly can for my inside sales team. The last thing I want is for people to trudge into the office on Monday morning with a look of dread in their eyes, feeling like they have a full week of misery ahead of them. Keeping a good company culture is also partially selfish for me, because I don't want to spend 40 hours a week with miserable people who drain the life out of me. 

I think the CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, summed it up beautifully in this Venn diagram he posted a few weeks back on "The Three Qualities of People I Most Enjoy Working With."

Whether you’re building your own inside sales team or considering outsourcing your teleprospecting functions, it’s important to know and perfect the training process for new hires.   

Over the last couple of months, AG Salesworks has seen many new faces.  As a Manager of Client Operations, one of my jobs is to oversee the training of new hires on my team.  Having previously been very active in the training team as a business development rep, I happen to think we have a very effective process that has only improved over the years.  Here are a few training tips we follow to ensure successful onboarding of new hires at AG:

1. Pack their day.  

This coming August, I will have been part of the AG Salesworks team for 10 years. It has been far and away the most time I've spent with any company in my career and also has been far and away the most challenging and enjoyable. 

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a post from Patrice Morrison, a Business Development Representative at AG Salesworks. 

I’ve seen inside sales described using many analogies. But my favorite analogy by far is the comparison to the popular series, The Hunger Games. These books and movies focus on a woman who has to fight to the death in order to survive The Hunger Games, a twisted competition in which children ages 12 - 18 are forced to particpate, created by central officials to deter rebellion. Now you may be thinking: “How in the world could you see any similarities between the sales world and the dystopian world described by Suzanne Collins?” Even though they’re not shooting bows and arrows at jabberjays like Katniss Everdeen, inside sales reps actually share many qualities with Hunger Games tributes. Here are four:

Some folks would describe me as a bit of a hippy in my office. I'm fairly laid back and try to remain as even-keeled as possible. My disposition could have much to do with the amount of times I was hit in the head throughout my younger years... but I guess I have to roll with it. 

A word I have seen pop all over the business blogsphere these days is “gamification.” Gamification in the workplace in the simplest of definitions is making a game out of employees' day-to-day activities. In the various articles I have read on the topic, the opinions seem to be split on the overall effectiveness of gamification.  Farhad Manjoo of The Wall Street Journal feels that it has the “potential for stifling creativity and flexibility in the workplace, and the growing sensation of being watched, and measured, in everything we do.”  Others believe that creating a game out of an everyday work task increases competition and therefore productivity.  Now I can’t speak for the larger companies (the AMEXes, IBMs and Googles of the world) who leverage a gamification strategy to increase productivity, but I can say that at AG we like to keep it simple and effective.  I’ll share with you an example.

I’m going to say a word. And immediately you are going to form an assumption, positive or negative, about this word. You can’t help it, because that’s how we react as humans.