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Category Archives: Inside Sales Best Practices
Real Lead Generation Means Speed and Persistence—But Mostly It Means Doing It
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on this blog, mostly because I’ve been knee-deep in doing research, and working with a couple of clients. But I’ve decided to post today to talk specifically about one particular experience talking to a client about how much the InsideSales.com system had made a difference in their sales performance.
SEO business optimization experts OrangeSoda improved individual sales rep performance 300%, and started seeing three times the monthly number of account closes.
But just as much as the productivity gains (which I was naturally gratified to hear about), something else stuck out to me, which was that even before they started using the InsideSales.com system, they were doing a lot of things right. They had a good system in place to acquire leads and close sales. They had a great management team that had developed a scalable, repeatable process.
The problem was they simply hadn’t fully learned yet that most sales are won and lost at the top of the sales funnel, not the bottom. It’s not that their pipeline was non-existent or stagnant. They simply weren’t getting the results they could have been because they hadn’t put enough focus on the lead qualification process . . . .
View Comments (2) Optimal Metrics for Lead Generation
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
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Lead Generation is Part of the Sales Department, Not Marketing
Occasionally we get asked by a new client implementing our sales management system, “So we’ve got our lead generation team set up and ready to go, but who should they be reporting to? The marketing people think it’s them, but
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Sales Metrics Not Just About Measuring Productivity, but Creating Motivation
Most managers will tell you that the primary reason to use good sales metrics and sales management tools is to improve performance.
Good processes and metrics, the old idea states, makes it easier to track productivity, accountability, and reward reps accountable for the work they do.
What’s not talked about as often, however, is the idea that having clear, consistent sales metrics also acts as a motivational force.
When sales and lead generation teams have to work with goals that are unclear and poorly defined, it leads to a psychology of paralysis. Time and effort are precious commodities in a sales organization, especially when agents have to constantly reevaluate and prioritize their activities. Sales reps simply don’t have the time to work on “stuff” that isn’t going to produce a real benefit for them and the organization.
But without clearly stated goals, reps are forced to guess what the most important use of their time is at any given point. Should they take that appointment, or get back on the phone? Is this product demo really going to be worth it, or should they be re-contacting that deal that got put on hold last month, but had a lot of potential?
Without a clear indication of how any given action is going to help a sales rep maximize their time (and ultimately the company’s), it leads to frustration and apathy, and most reps in this situation react by going with their gut instinct of what’s going to make them more money, regardless of whether it’s good for the company or prospect.
Good metrics and processes allow managers to be more effective, but don’t forget that a rep who doesn’t know how to get maximum reward is rarely going to give maximum effort.
Sales Best Practices – Outsource Infrastructure, Not People
Businesses of all sizes have more options than ever when it comes to outsourcing basic services to save time and costs.
IT. Payroll. Shipping. Point-of-sale. Credit checks. Credit card processing. Legal.
I bring this up because at some point, a lot of companies ask the same question about their sales organization: “Can we outsource this?”
The reasons for asking are pretty compelling. For businesses without a lot of experience, building a fully-realized sales team—one that’s aligned with company goals, product, and marketing initiatives—is at best a challenge. At worst it’s Mission: Impossible.
The problem is so pervasive that at least once a month we get a prospect who expresses disappointment that we AREN’T an outsourced sales prospecting company (“Oh, you mean you just sell the product and consulting, you don’t actually make the sales calls? Shoot.”) . . . .
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Sales 2.0, Seamless Service, and Sweatshirts
One of the most common themes of the Sales 2.0 Movement has been the need for the upcoming generation of corporate sales people to be a value-add, not a value-drain to their prospects. Several weeks ago I quoted Selling Power‘s Gerhardt Gschwandtner about how technology isn’t just shifting the power structure into the prospect’s hands, it’s “displacing” the existing selling process entirely.
And a great blog article today by marketing experts Brains on Fire brought some perspective on one of the ways a sales rep can move in the direction of being a value-add instead of the alternative:
In the blog article, author Robbin Phillips demonstrates the concept with a story about a hotel, a round of golf, and a missing sweatshirt . . . .
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Sales Time Waster #15: Failure Can Produce Longer-Lasting Lessons than Success
Ken Krogue has been a force in the sales and sales management industries his entire career, having been president of inside sales at Franklin-Covey, founder of inbound call center service provider inContact (formerly UCN), and now President and CMO of InsideSales.com.
His “15 Time wasters of Inside Sales and Marketing” whitepaper presents outstanding advice for planning strategic sales initiatives, and today I wanted to focus some attention specifically on Time Waster #15—Not Knowing Your Wins and Losses.
We preach heavily to sales and marketing teams that understanding why a sale is lost can be just as valuable as knowing why you won—and a research study released August 24th by the Academy of Management Journal backs this up.
Quoting from the study, Science Daily states,
“While success is surely sweeter than failure, it seems failure is a far better teacher, and organizations that fail spectacularly often flourish more in the long run . . . . ”
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CRM and Customer Service – Dump the “Rule Zero” Fallacy
I had a conversation last week with one of our support reps that demonstrated with perfect clarity what I call the “Rule Zero Fallacy.”
If you’re a board game or card game enthusiast, inevitably you’ve run across a rule in a game somewhere that you simply didn’t like. And whether it’s pinochle, Rook, Ticket to Ride, or the Settlers of Catan, players usually create a replacement rule, or modify it to better suit their tastes. In some circles this type of “house ruling” is called “Rule Zero,” meaning, “No rule is ever broken because I can fix it.”
The problem is, “Rule Zero” is a fallacy, a contradiction in terms. The fact that you were willing to take the time to fix it yourself (and are generally satisfied with the result) doesn’t change the fact that it needed fixing to begin with.
But back to our real point:
A support agent came to me last week about a client who wanted to access a feature in one of our systems. Due to an admittedly poor interface design for this particular feature, getting access to it was problematic. It took navigating through a number of screens, hunting through the right links, and inputting some user-defined data . . . .
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“The Medium is the Message” Redux – The Targeted Sales Email
Yesterday we looked at how the communication medium of the telephone constrains the process and effectiveness of how we make contact on a sales call.
Today I thought we’d briefly follow-up and take a look at one of the other ubiquitous sales communication media—The Targeted Email. Understanding the “message” of the email medium can help reps write better email content, and reach more contacts.
In spite of the fact that hundreds of millions of them get sent every single day, we occasionally forget that an email is still, in its purest sense, a written document.
This is important, because a written medium carries a much different “sense” than other forms of media. It can be seen, referenced, re-scanned, reinterpreted at will, as long as it is front of the reader. Written text is generally perceived as more formal than other modes of communication. We naturally assume that it carries more weight—as long as it’s worth our time to begin with . . . .
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Sales Call Tactics – The Medium Controls the Message
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. . . . .
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