I have been consulting businesses on inside sales strategy for over a decade now and in these many years of my career, I have dealt with a lot of such companies who though have implemented it into their business process, have minimal understanding about what it takes to make inside sales a success. Therefore, they have ended up making such sabotaging mistakes that have either broken down the entire business or have brought them to a point where they had to scrap out the whole team and build it from scratch again.
Summing it up from what I and my team of inside sales consultants at BusinessMojos have dealt with, here are a few Inside Sales mistakes that businesses commonly make while implementing inside sales strategies:
Mistake 1: Lack of Involvement, Monitoring & Appreciation
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is ignoring the importance of appropriate involvement in the sales process, neglecting the essence of monitoring it at individual level and not taking time to appreciate good work.
Lack of involvement in process by business entrepreneurs usually affects the business in a major way.
- Things go hay-wired due to no monitoring,
- Gradually, the confusion spreads across the team and negativity becomes more viral
- Reps eventually get influenced by each other in terms of non-performance, dishonesty and lack of enthusiasm, and
- Finally everyone starts under-performing.
In the long run, this turns out to be infectious that eventually scars the whole process, thereby making it impossible to change the behavior. In worst case scenarios, this becomes a reason where entrepreneurs decide to scrap out the whole team and start from scratch again which is not only risky but also incurs huge loss on the business.
I am definitely not trying to scare you by any means, but I have experienced such incidences across various industries, in both small to large sized companies.
Solution:
In terms of solution, we as inside sales consultants, usually advice businesses to take the following steps from the day 1.
- Taking mock calls with reps, on one-on-one basis to improve their business understanding and make them proactive
- Analyze performance reports at individual as well as team level and take measures to scale performance and remove lags
For small to medium sized companies, we advice that business owners should themselves get involved in monitoring the sales process; and in large sized companies, the sales heads must take the charge to make the team proactive.
Mistake 2: Lack of a well-defined inside sales process
A. Fussy and Unproductive sales process
The second most essential and basic mistakes made by businesses is not having a clear inside sales process. Quick adoption of inside sales to keep up with the trend and resultant lack of expertise usually make the process fussy and unproductive.
Solution:
We as a inside sales consultant business advice entrepreneurs to approach inside sales process as a science with a well laid out strategy in place implemented with the best practices and with pre-established KPIs; all this with appropriate monitoring at individual level.
Therefore, we spend weeks holding discussions with the company’s stake holders and making them understand the importance of:
- Understanding the business objectives;
- Determining road maps to achieve the goals;
- Taking measure to analyze and scale performance;
- Improve agility and aggressiveness;
- Monitoring and training individuals/reps to perform better;
- Optimizing the approach based on the outcomes;
- Measuring established KPIs on the go;
These are significant steps towards establishing a robust inside sales process; moving ahead, which may ensure business success.
B. Improper Positioning
It is sometimes funny when we hear multiple positioning of a single business offering from individuals working as a team in the same organization.
Lack of a defined process usually directly affects the understanding of the business vision and positioning among sales reps. We do not blame the reps for this, neither its the fault of the owners; it happens only because of the lag in communication. Confusion builds up in the team and as I stated above, it makes the process fussy.
Nothing can be more damaging than improper positioning; it steadily eats up the business like a mite infestation. Thus, it is of utmost importance that your sales reps understand the vision, objectives and business offerings the way you do.
Solution:
The only way to diminish this infestation is to address it from its roots. Thus, we recommend entrepreneurs to first understand their business objectives and visions; and then inculcate the same understanding into the reps and bring them to the same page.
When we consultant businesses on this issue, we hold one-on-one sessions first with the business owners and co-founders and then with the reps on individual level and finally with the team as a whole to assess the business understanding and positioning.
C. Improper Campaign Closures
Measuring out of what we have generally seen, there are three basic aspects involved in improper campaign closures that may dramatically affect the inside sales success.
Aspect 1: Closing It Too Early:
One of the most common mistakes made by businesses in inside sales is closing a campaign at its initial stages of outreach, just because it brought in more negative responses (or no response at all) than positive ones.
Businesses tend to close down campaign on the basis of negative responses without even assessing significant campaign elements like the positioning, message, offers, etc. They ignore the importance of testing (A/B testing of elements) the campaigns and rush in to close it down; causing injustice not only to the campaigns’ possible opportunities but also to the reps involved.
Imagine the possibility of getting a million dollar business from your next set of outreach campaign. But because you never gave it a try, you wouldn’t ever get to know what you missed out due to the sudden closure.
So, we would advice to give a fair try by optimizing and testing various elements involved in each of your campaign. Take decisions run by data and give enough time to each campaign to show results.
Aspect 2: No Closure At All:
When I say give it a fair try, I definitely mean keeping a time barrier to it. As I mentioned above, make data-driven decisions regarding continuation or closure of campaigns. If you find that your campaigns do not perform even after you have appropriate follow up and tested all possible elements of the campaign for optimization, it is time that you close it before anymore time or effort is wasted.
I know its tricky, to understand when is the right time to close and when not. But trust me when I say, appropriate data analysis would do the trick and you would just know what to do next. Also, agility and aggressiveness in inside sales process would save you a lot of your time and effort.
Aspect 3: Sudden Change or Addition of Campaigns
We have seen companies get driven away by campaign performance and tend to initiate multiple campaigns at a time. Not that we say its wrong to run multiple campaigns, but if you do so make sure you have a tight grip over each of your campaigns.
When you aggressively take up a new campaign while you are in the middle of executing an existing full-fledged outreach campaign that is generating favorable response, there is a higher chance of losing control and focus from both leading to confusion and biases among your sales employees.
We usually do not recommend running multiple campaigns; you know how it is said, “Too may cooks, spoil the broth”. But even if one decides to do, we recommend them to
- Pay equal attention to both/all,
- Take control of the campaigns and
- Establish an appropriate tracking of the same
- Give appropriate break times to each campaigns
- Optimize and test campaign elements on the go.
Finally;
No matter how you plan about your campaign closures, make sure you bring it to a logical end every time. For Example: if you run an outreach campaign to 1000 technology businesses, make sure you have atleast reached out to all of them ones, approach positive and neutral responses properly and given enough opportunity to each account with the campaign by optimizing various elements of it from time to time.
3. Not Setting Up Ground Rules / Anchor From Day 1
Most of you would agree when I say, it’s not easy. But believe me, all the above can only be achieved when you set up the anchor from day 1.
- Improve agility and make the process aggressive.
- Show involvement and interest
- Take control of the campaigns and the business process
- Get proper reports about the sales teams performance
- Enable them with the right tools and training
- Use technology wisely
- Keep your reps motivated
- Set and improve KPI’s regularly
- Follow the best practices of inside sales
- Remember quality always wins over quantity
- Improve accountability among your sales reps
4. Not Using the Right Tools in the Right Way
We all know that sales acceleration tools like the CRM, Marketing Automation, Lead Management systems, etc. are a must-have to ensure inside sales success; and almost all businesses tend to purchase one or the other tool, even before they have a team in place to use it.
There is nothing wrong in it! But what’s more important is to use these tools in the right way. Appropriate training of sales reps on the correct usage of these tools along with social selling strategies (using LinkedIn and Twitter), which is of course an effective trend catching up among inside sales reps across the globe, would be the right methodology to accelerate their performance and enable them to connect with prospects faster.
5. Lack of Regular Training Sessions
Whether you build your inside sales team by hiring experienced reps or freshers, regular training and performance analysis is a must. Trust me, when I say, there is no statement such as ‘Enough of Training’!
Not routine, but make it a culture among your sales team to have training sessions regularly, daily stand-up meetings, weekly mock-calls and you as an entrepreneur, also get involved in the same. Few activities that would benefit are:
- Discussions over business hurdles, negative responses, drop in the sales cycle, customer experiences, buying cycles, etc.;
- Appreciation of good work and establishing milestones on the go; and
- Sharing trends, sales approaches or methodology;
Mistakes are inevitable especially in a budding business, but what’s more important is to find out the most efficient solution to overcome those mistakes at the earliest. We at BusinessMojos hear such dilemmas regularly, and we absolutely love it when businesses tell us their story. If you too are facing such hurdles, reach us; we will be happy to help!
