Rather than avoiding black cats and cowering in fear from triskaidekaphobia, the team at InsideSales.com decided to spend some time on Friday, May 13 at the Food & Care Coalition offices in Provo, Utah. Ten InsideSales.com volunteers worked and cleaned the kitchen, and served meals to Coalition patrons.
Robb Young, Director of Operations stated afterwards, “This was so much fun and they [the Coalition] were extremely grateful for our time and effort serving their facility. We will be participating in more of these service projects throughout the year and we encourage employees to come and participate. This is a great way for us to contribute to our community and help those that are less fortunate.”
The Food & Care Coalition was founded in 1986, and incorporated as a 501c(3) non-profit organization in 1988. Since that time, the Friends of the Coalition has expanded its operations from meals and clothing to providing community workshops, job training for patrons, an in-house dental clinic, and more.
By the end of 2011, the Coalition hopes to complete its new live-in residence facility for Utah County at-risk populations, and establish new training opportunities […]
A few months back, I mentioned that we had started on the process of doing a project for a local Utah non-profit, the Center for Women and Children in Crisis (see their Web site here).
And last week, we put the “rubber to the road” and actually did it.
We feel extremely blessed to have had the opportunity to participate in this project. InsideSales.com CEO Dave Elkington and I have made a specific commitment to finding opportunities like this, and giving back to the community, particularly to at-need and at-risk groups.
If any of you have knowledge of other opportunities like this one, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Call in to the company, and ask to talk to me directly about a charitable work opportunity.
It’s pretty simple: In three and a half years doing client services in the sales software space, here’s the Top Five Things I’ve found that will kill even the most promising sales automation purchase.
1. The true value of the system is never made apparent.
Forcing people to use new software or systems is certainly a management right, but an effective sales tool must appeal to the reps by solving immediate pains, and by making it easier for them to stay organized and keep promises to their customers and co-workers.
It has to provide better sales intelligence (data), improve speed and efficiency (automation), or heighten overall employee impact (training and process development), or employees simply tune out . . . .
Sales Time Waster #15: Failure Can Produce Longer-Lasting Lessons than Success
13 September 2010 — Steve Watts
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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 . . . . ”
Inside Sales Tip: Treat a Sales Appointment Like a Corporate Meeting, Part II
20 August 2010 — Steve Watts
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In yesterday’s blog post, we discussed the idea of considering a sales appointment as an extension of a regular corporate meeting. We looked at understanding the type of meeting you should engage in and the purpose for it, and the first of two critical components, having an agenda.
Today’s post will cover the need for a meeting to have an effective referee, and the culture you should establish for your sales appointments with your prospects.
In Review:
Part I
1. Decide whether an appointment is about alignment or creation.
2.1. “A meeting has two critical components: [one of them is] an agenda.”
Part II
First, let’s be clear: the onus always falls on you, the sales rep, to be the referee of a meeting, because you control the flow of information . . . .
The Kellogg Survey that was done by Dr. James Oldroyd in 2007 showed a statistically higher close rate for companies that break apart their sales model into specialties.
Internally at Inside Sales.com we have several specialties in our sales and lead generation departments:
Lead Research
Website Auditor
Lead Response (Fronter)
Lead Qualification (Appointment Setter)
Small Account Closers (Account Executive)
Large Account Closers (Senior Account Executive)
A company that leaves their inside sales reps to find and close their own leads follow what Dr. Oldroyd called a Generalist Model. Even in the early survey by Kellogg there was a close rate that was 7% higher for companies with a specialist model over a generalist model.
As we have perfected our own internal processes we have found the difference to be much higher.
You don’t need to start as complex we have done.
We recommend that you start by separating the Appointment Setters from Closers; just two positions. In fact, we have roles, not just positions. Some positions carry several roles.
Appointment Setters focus on quantity of calls and appointments set. Each of our Appointment Setters averages 350 calls a day and sets 4-5 appointments each day.
Our Closers focus on quality of calls and specifically on accounts closed. We just had a record month […]
Inside Sales isn’t Just a Department Anymore, it’s the Fastest Growing Industry in all of Sales and Marketing
27 February 2010 — Ken Krogue
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Five years and four months ago on Monday I officially started working at InsideSales.com. Actually it was called Sales Team Automation at the time. We were still a few weeks away from buying the InsideSales.com domain from a guy who needed money just before Christmas in 2004.
We paid three thousand dollars. Now it is arguably our single greatest asset.
We had the website up by the first week of January, and the first day we generated 8 leads, now we get 50 a day. Back then you typed in “Inside Sales” to Google and you found us and 10,000 companies trying to hire inside sales reps. There may have been a lot more but I stopped scrolling through the pages to see how many.
Now there is more, much more.
I used to be concerned when I noticed that we have several competitors mimicking our every move and driving adword costs up, then I realized that is the best thing that could be happening; Inside Sales is becoming an industry… it is an industry.
American Association of Inside Sales Professionals
We just became a Member and a major sponsor of […]
Inside Sales Top Method for Lead Generation in 2009 according to Forrester and MarketingProfs
8 February 2010 — Ken Krogue
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Laura Ramos is perhaps the most recognized expert in lead generation research for B2B. She is a Vice President and Principal Analyst for Forrester.
Laura has been studying what she calls the “Marketing Effectiveness Index” which are the most effective methods used by B2B businesses to generate leads since early in 2006.
She uses responses from surveys to give grades from 1 to 5, with 5 the highest, for different methods of lead generation. Click here to see a chart of her results for the last three years.
Another study for 2010 is coming out soon, but her most recent rankings in 2009 are as follows:
Inside Sales / Telemarketing
Executive Events
Trade Shows
Webinars
Email Marketing
Search Marketing
Direct Mail
Video, Podcasts, etc.
Blogs
Other Web 2.0
The big news in 2009 was that Inside Sales surpassed Executive Events and Email Marketing moved ahead of Search. Trade Shows hung strong even with significant cutbacks in corporate travel budgets.
The rankings for 2008 were:
Executive Events
Inside Sales
Search Marketing
Trade Shows
Webinars
Email Marketing
Direct Mail
Video, Podcasts, etc.
Blogs
Other Web 2.0
Inside Sales is “remote sales,” or professional sales done remotely. This definition insinuates that the majority of all sales is becoming Inside Sales.
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 […]
