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Category Archives: Inside Sales Tips
Inside Sales Tip: 7 Slump-Busting Ways to Get Your Mojo Back
Everyone goes through sales slumps. If you haven’t yet, you’re either too new to the profession . . . . or you just haven’t been doing it long enough.
We’ve got some sharp sales reps here at InsideSales.com, so I thought I’d talk to them about what they do to get out of their personal pipeline woes.
- Separate the real opportunities from the fluff: “When I hit a slow period, sometimes I’ll throw some stuff overboard and just start over. When your pipeline sucks, it means you’re wasting time chasing stuff you can’t really close. Focus on generating better deals instead of chasing garbage.” — R.J. Tracy
- Focus on “touch” quality, in addition to quantity: “Our software [the InsideSales.com Lead Response Management Suite] has built-in safeguards to make sure we do enough follow-up, but let’s be honest, not all follow-up activity is created equal. A call is a call, as far as your numbers are concerned, but being ready and engaged . . . .
View Comments (1) Sales Tip: Combatting Price Cutting and the Real Value of a Sale
What’s the real value of what you sell? Of your expertise? The reality is, it doesn’t actually matter what the “real value” is. What matters is, what’s the absolute, bottom-line, no-questions-asked lowest possible price you will ever sell your products
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Inside Sales Tip: For Lead Routing, Skill-based Trumps Regional and Ad-Hoc
Saw that lead metrics guru Trish Bertuzzi posted an answer to question on Quora talking about the most appropriate way to do sales lead routing. And I thought I’d quickly chime in. In the actual Quora question, the person asks,
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Sales Tip: Confidence vs. Intellectual Laziness
A couple of years ago we hired what we thought was going to be a stellar sales rep. He appeared to be smart, well-spoken, and had the individual charisma that we thought was going to make him a star. So
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B2B Technology Sales Tip – What’s Your 2nd (or 3rd) “Pitch?”
You and your company have done everything right up to this point. The marketing team created a compelling, targeted set of material that caught the attention of a potential buyer. They found your Web site and grabbed some information—a couple
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Over-management of Reps Doesn’t Improve Quota
Real quick: Found an interesting research analysis by CSO Insight’s Barry Trailer that showed that sales rep quota attainment actually goes up when the ratio of reps to managers goes up. In other words, sometimes we need to avoid the
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Analytics, CRM, and “Sales Prevention”
Ran into a great blog by Bob Apollo (@bobapollo on Twitter) on the Inflexion-Point Blog this morning that really got my wheels turning, entitled “Is your CRM system a sales prevention system?” Since one of my company’s biggest products is
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Technology Tools (Besides CRM and Dialers) For Better Sales Performance
When people ask us the best technologies to use to get more leverage for their sales teams, our first response (purely out of self-interest, obviously) is, “A lead management CRM and a dialer.”
After laughing a bit at our shameless self-promotion, a lot of them will follow-up by asking, “Anything else?”
It’s not a comprehensive list by any stretch, but here are a few things our own sales team uses to increase their productivity.
- Docusign for e-document digital signatures http://www.docusign.com
We discovered a while ago that paperwork is a huge time-waster for most sales organizations (see Ken Krogue’s “15 Time-Wasters of Inside Sales and Marketing” for details) . . . .
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Inside Sales Tips – No Vacations the Last Week of the Month
The message of this post is pretty simple: Managers and reps should never schedule vacations during the last business week of the month. I’m sure some of you—most likely front-line sales reps—growled a little bit at hearing that. On the
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Inside Sales Tips – Skip to the Beep
I learned an awesome phone skill from one of our lead gen reps at the office this morning. Travis Turner is a lead generation superstar, and I mean that in every sense. He’s been with our company close to three
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