I have been selling for many years. As the VP of Sales at InsideSales.com, I do not usually give demos of our PowerDialer for SalesForce software. Today, however, I took the opportunity to present to Brian Geery, Interim VP of Sales at Sustainable Minds and a managing partner at Sales Productivity Architects. Brian was a referral from a friend and sales expert, Trish Bertuzzi of the BridgeGroup. I have been evaluating what InsideSales.com can do to improve our game and increase our sales growth in 2012. I figured that doing the demo would not only clear my mind, but also get me close to our product and a prospect.
My demonstration was not as polished as one of my best salespeople, but it lasted the standard 45 minutes, and it covered in content and form, what a standard demo would include. It was also received favorably with the prospect requesting a formal proposal. It is good to know that an old dog still can do a few tricks!
At its conclusion, Brian offered a personal critique. Simply stated, “The demo was good, however, I think you could sell more, faster, if your demonstration was less about what your software does and more about how it solves my problems.” Brian was exactly right!
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 […]
What to Look For in a Sales Dialer – One (Very Smart) Man’s Response
5 November 2010 — Steve Watts
2 Comments
Inside sales entrepreneur Ken Krogue recently responded to a comment on his blog, asking what the key principles, or key concepts should be when looking for a dialer system to improve sales performance and productivity.
His response was short, but insightful, so with his permission I’m re-posting it here.
Question: Other than cost, what features are important while using a hosted dialer?
Ken’s Answer:
That’s an interesting question. On the surface the basic concept is the same for all of them–make more calls and make better use of agent time.
The differences really depend on . . . .
Hosted Call Centers Bringing Customer Service Back to U.S. Soil
31 August 2010 — Steve Watts
0 Comments
NPR recently ran a fascinating news article on the the return of call center outsourcing back to the U.S. through distributed, home-based service reps.
And for once, it was nice to see that something we’ve been evangelizing for a while now is coming to fruition: that hosted telephony and call center services increasingly provide value for companies who want to save costs on customer service and support, but want to keep reps based in the U.S.
The article states that the primary reason for the shift back from international call center outsourcing to U.S. domestic is very simple: it increases customer satisfaction, leading to longer-term customer loyalty and higher sales . . . .
4 Sales Tips for Making Contact and Avoiding “Prospect Badgering”
12 August 2010 — Steve Watts
0 Comments
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 . . . .
Inside Sales: Two Hidden Metrics of Prospecting That are Hurting Your Sales
14 July 2010 — Steve Watts
2 Comments
Most of the common marketing and sales and metrics—click-throughs, impressions, sales cycle, revenue per deal—don’t really need an explanation. But there are two metrics where a lot of companies we’ve worked with have holes in their sales process.
How soon after a new Web lead comes in does a sales rep make the first contact attempt, and how long after it came in did they actually make contact? Every single piece of data we’ve ever researched shows that for Web-generated leads, immediate response is crucial . . . .
Here it is live! In Part 1 of this post I mentioned that people don’t believe us when we tell them our Lead-Gen reps can make 300-500 dials a day or 85 dials an hour without burning out.
I just interviewed Travis Turner and asked him several questions about his role here in Lead-Gen.
You need to click into this post to see the video…
I told them that our Lead-Gen reps make 85 dials an hour and 300 a day, every day. Now of course we have to drink our own Kool-Aid and use our own technologies in-house. Several didn’t believe me. Some have expressed concerns that we are running a sweat shop.
Last week I wrote about what you can do to get the most out of your Auto Dialer. Look forward to me highlighting in the future different kinds of dialers, and what you can expect from them. This week .
What’s the best kind of Dialer for you? Part 1
Several varieties of dialers exist. Click-to-call, auto dialers, ratio, and predictive dialers have each been available and used by remote sales businesses for decades. These dialers were developed by companies who wanted to be able to churn through thousands of leads a day while identifying the easiest sales. Over time advancements in dialer technology has led to a more refined and customer focused alternative. This alternative is the power dialer.
Power dialers still meet the fundamental goal of all dialers – they help sales representatives call more leads each day. An average rep can call two or three times the amount of leads in a day using a power dialer than he could call dialing manually. While this number is lower than with some other kinds of dialers, its impressive enough to justify the investment in such software.
Power dialers go beyond increasing […]
Auto Dialers are staples in the industry. What other software solutions allow you to get the most out of your Auto Dialer?
