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Category Archives: Inside Sales
The Social Selling Catch-22
Like sports, travel, and Justin Bieber, Anchorman provides a nearly unmatched wealth of metaphors applicable to the sales industry (and I’m only half-kidding about Bieber. Hate the music, but give the kid some props—he definitely understands his target audience and their needs).
With salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff making it the entire focus of Dreamforce 2011, “social selling” is, in the immortal words of Ron Burgundy, “kind of a big deal” these days. In a world where attention spans are short, having an edge in connecting with prospects makes every step of the sales process easier and faster. Professional sales reps–particularly inside sales reps who sell remotely–seemingly can’t afford NOT to be connected to the various social platforms.
Inside sales expert Ken Krogue notes that a LinkedIn invitation with the exact same content as a marketing-generated email is 8x more effective at getting responses than the email by itself. Hubspot reports that companies that blog get 55% more Web traffic, 70% more leads, and 57% of organizations have acquired a customer through an interaction on their blog. In addition, companies with an active Twitter account get 2x as many sales leads, and organizations with 1000+ followers get 6x more traffic.
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Leave a comment Inside Sales versus Outside Sales
(This is my response to an article written by David P. Wallace of The Wallace Management Group) David, I like the table approach you have used to try and illustrate the situations by which you decide to use inside sales
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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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B2B, Demand Generation, and “Getting Real” With Social Media
Working for a strictly B2B sales company (caveat: many of our clients sell direct to consumers, but we ourselves really only target businesses), I’m constantly evaluating the differences between B2B and B2C selling — as well as the similarities as
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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 Research – Departments Keep Growing Because It’s a Win-Win-Win
There’s been a lot of talk ever since our 2009 InfoUSA study revealed that the inside sales industry was projected to grow at 7.5% per year over the next five years, while outside sales industry jobs is stagnating at 0.5% growth.
bNet Business’s Geoffrey James even sounded off on the topic, questioning the reasons behind the slow obsolescence of outside sales when the sales process and buying cycle have become even more “touch” intensive and complex.
In my mind, however, the trend is significant, but hardly inexplicable. The Web has made one of sales’ primary functions—distributing information to prospects—a much different activity than before. Even for complex purchases, there’s a wealth of information about available products and services, and the average prospect has significantly less of a need to rely on a sales rep to provide actionable information . . . .
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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 Metrics – Bridge Group’s SaaS Sales Survey Shows Orgs Take Their Own Medicine
It hasn’t been released to the public yet, but Inside sales metrics gurus The Bridge Group, Inc. just finished their “2010 Inside Sales for SaaS Companies” report, and they kindly sent me an advance copy. I’m not going to reveal
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B2B Sales and Marketing “Cultural Alignment” Part 3
In two previous posts, we’ve identified that: Sales and marketing come from different “cultural” perspectives. Sales is results-oriented, marketing is human-interest driven. In B2B, the needs of sales—i.e., getting good sales leads—overrides marketing’s impetus for branding and market research. The
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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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