Driving performance requires accurate and focused measures of performance. This is especially the case for account development and lead generation teams. I have recently been interviewing both InsideSales.com customers and non-customers (predominantly from the B2B High Tech/Services/Telecom industries) to identify the optimal metric to use when measuring the success of account development reps. I found that these companies are actually using a wide array of criteria that include talk time, dials per day, appointments set, appointments held, and opportunities set.
The most successful teams, however, are all using some variation of opportunities set. Specifically, the most common metric I heard is called TQO, or Totally Qualified Opportunities. A TQO is an opportunity that actually contributes to the sales pipeline and has a close ratio that is within the same ratio as the existing sales process. This metric provided much greater visibility than any of the others I saw.
Then I dug into the number of TQOs that an account development rep can reasonably achieve in one month. This number ranges from 16 to 28, and seems to vary due to differences in industry, maturity of rep, list type and source, and company/product brand. The […]
20th century Canadian scholar and media theorist Marshall McLuhan once stated that when it comes to communication, “The medium is the message.”
In his mind, it was not always the content of the message that mattered, as much as the the method in which it was delivered.
For example, a television set can deliver a broad variety of messages through the media of video and sound—sitcoms, “reality” shows, newscasts, the NFL, talk shows, cartoons, full-length feature movies, and Shark Week. However, we often forget what TV can’t control—the fact that the recipient has to receive those messages under a very specific set of conditions.
The viewer has to be in front of a television screen, tuned to the right channel, able to hear the audio portion of the broadcast, and have a minimum level of outside distractions.
Have you ever considered just how much time, money and energy we dedicate to having a “maximized TV watching experience”? If the “medium is the message,” based on its use conditions, the message of the TV medium is that it’s a big deal. An investment. An experience compelling enough for us to plan our living arrangements around its very existence.
And here’s the kicker:
A sales phone call is no different. . . . .
4 Sales Tips for Making Contact and Avoiding “Prospect Badgering”
12 August 2010 — Steve Watts
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One of sales reps’ most common questions is, “How many dials does it really take to make contact with a decision-maker, and how do I know when I’ve reached my limit of “pleasant persistence” and am now merely angering the prospect?”
By the numbers, every piece of sales research we’ve ever done indicates that it takes between 6 and 8 call attempts to reach a decision-maker (though this number generally goes down if you’re mixing in other media like email and voice messaging at the same time).
However, our research also shows that most sales reps only make 1.7 call attempts to reach a new prospect (far below the statistical mean to actually make contact), that they overestimate the total number of calls they’ve made (most reps think they’ve made far more call attempts than they really have), and that they rarely combine all three of the major “contactable” media—phone, voice message, and email—to produce the best results . . . .
Take a look at this list of anecdotes of people making egregious blunders on sales phone calls (thanks to Trish Bertuzzi at The Bridge Group for the link).
Aside from the sheer hilarity of some of these ingenious ways to screw up a sales call, I noticed a surprising trend:
Even in this incredibly small sample, the caller often still closed the sale, in many cases because of the “screw up,” rather than in spite of it.
Why? Because the blunder showed the prospect that the caller was human.
Now obviously I’m not suggesting that sales reps make a social faux pas on every call to increase sales. But it does demonstrate that all of us, in every profession and vocation, respond to something real, something relatable.
We don’t like talking to automatons. We don’t like getting “pitched.” Insincerity is about as valuable as a useless management meeting . . . .
The web has disrupted everything we know about sales and marketing. Even the time-honored practice of cold-calling has fallen by the wayside, and face-to-face selling, advertising, yellow pages, and direct mail are limping along. But in return, the Internet is opening up the greatest opportunities ever available for sales organizations who learn it’s secrets.
InsideSales.com was originally founded to generate cost effective leads through outbound cold-calling technology. We were the first web-based sales tracking Lead Management CRM system with fully integrated dialers and voice messaging tools … and though far ahead of the competition, we were obsolete before we launched.
Why? Because we thought we were building the ultimate system for cold-calling, and cold calling had already become obsolete, we just didn’t know it.
At the end of 2004 my partner Dave Elkington and I had developed nearly two dozen telephony ‘Power Tools’ like automatic dialers that we embedded within online CRM solutions and we were getting crazy productivity increases helping our clients with cold calling. Our sales were picking up and things were going well. So much so, that we decided to pull together a test to see just what we really could do.
We had already built a sales team of ‘closers’ that worked […]
