Inside Sales is hard but the following 5 enemies of inside sales productivity makes it even tougher:
1. Not making enough calls
Do you really love standing on 2 different boats, No right?
That why, callers shouldn’t be asked to build lists to call on. Eventually making calls and list building will down your productivity. Doing these activities one after other on a typical office day is simply time consuming, distracting and unproductive.
Good data always gives a boost to your reach out efforts, so keeping a list builder or procuring a quality list is a step in the right direction. Because when callers build point of contact lists, they fail to do more of the most vital thing, i.e. dialing and interacting with a prospect.
When list building and calling is aligned perfectly an inside side sales professional can hit the right note with a great potential customer. Can you picture the odds when; a cold caller cum list builder calling at the right time so as to connect with the right point of contact.
I know your answer would be very thin and you are exactly right there!
To add to the above statement, making an inside sales rep a jack of all trades makes an inside sales caller complacent. Because the above quota based system makes sales reps evaluate their performance based on KPIs from 2 different areas which aren’t appropriate to judge performance.
Thus, the true metrics of inside sales caller productivity such as no. of quality interaction, no. of leads in pipeline and number of meetings get overshadowed.
2. Stale data or inaccurate data sets
Precise marketing list with right companies and point of contact empowers the inside sales reps. An out-of-date or incorrect B2B market research list is a sniper rifle with a broken sight.
So, unqualified records such a wrong point of contact, incomplete fields in a data set, a company that has closed its operation or link that doesn’t work etc. Considering criteria like Industry , revenue, title levels , departments, geography, year of founding, industry sub category etc. make it easy for list builders to cherry pick best fit organizations to contact. An ideal company or point of contact profile can be filtered by using these filtering criteria. This in turn makes targeting using this data easier.
When callers constantly find wrong records, wrong phone numbers or disqualifiable companies their work day became stressful and less productive. Thus, they start to procrastinate.
3. Sales briefcase not ready
A sales briefcase should include email templates, voicemail recordings, sales pitch documents, case studies, rebuttal documents. All these documents should be placed on an easily accessible location like inside sales folder on cloud.
Sales representatives like ants plucked out of a trail, get really frustrated if they don’t find the right document for the right situation. Use apps that make follow up using emails easy like InsideSales.com, Toutapp and Sidekick.
Predictive phrasing technology and custom templates that fit particular scenarios such as follow up messages or company introductions can make email creation a walk in the park.
Another best time saving practice is to setup all templates in CRM, so you could easily access those when you require it.
4. Generic call discussions
It’s not just about making 150 calls a day.
Though making 150 calls a day sounds great it doesn’t mean a caller could meet the quota. But you do it because more dialed numbers means more chances to perfect your calling. Thus, next time an opportunity to connect comes, you would be ready to close the deal.
This being the case, how do you make sure you give your best at a particular interactions?
Inside sales connection rates are touching meager 7-8 percentage, this means your prospects are not entertained by the book sales pitches. You’re not helping yourself by sounding like a teleprompting robot. But if you really want to sound like one, sound natural like very intelligent and well informed bot.
Laying some groundwork by researching and learning about your right point of contact makes you someone interesting to converse with. Because, by just sounding like usual suspects who call busy decision makers at most inappropriate times, you aren’t creating a message that sticks.
This being the case, try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Develop an interaction game plan for each call, this gives yourself headroom present your case better. Because, when you get an opportunity to speak to prospect, you shouldn’t be leaving anything to chance. Then you don’t have to worry what next, make a plan B and C for more flexibility.
Customize your pitch adding relevant information you found about your prospect.
As an inside sale rep you need to develop an eye for details such as achievements, announcements and news about your right point of contact. They should look out for content pieces authored by or mentioning your point of contacts. This sort of research will help give recognition were its due, but make sure that you don’t overdo it.
In the above scenario you need to depend a lot on fresh information coming from social channels. Thus being skillful with social selling using LinkedIn and Twitter becomes very important.
Such research helps you to easily break the ice and find rapport with person on other end of the line. This research also helps you to refine by integrating relevant information about you target thus making your pitch engaging.
5. Lack of automation
Using excel to do lead management in place of a CRM solution sounds pretty cavemanish! Even in the era of Freemium apps, many companies are still stuck in excel era.
Multiple excels are disorienting and time killing. To save time get your manger to sign up for a free CRM and move your data there. Streamlining and simplification of sales process by leveraging the power of CRM or lead management tool is essential for confusion free inside sales process.
But some organizations overdo automation, they set up different asynchronous sales and marketing productivity tools. These act as separate silos of data, for instance: every time a call is about to happen a sales rep dials using a dialer like Skype it updates the call log. After the interaction the sales rep uses a mail client like Outlook to send out follow-up mails to prospect they have talked with. Then they updates call status and comments, lead status etc. in CRM. So if so many tools exist separately it will slow you done
Best case scenario is sync your dialer, email client, marketing automation system into your CRM, make it one stop inside sales information access center. Else, you can get CRM solution with all these functionality inbuilt. High priority should be given to reduce the manual effort needed to get a process running. For instance a cold caller should be able to log-in to CRM and see pertinent data about a prospect, then connect with him/her using a dialer with least amount of clicks. Even the post call updates such as marking the lead status, keying in additional info and filling up call comments etc., will become easy to record if you use a CRM.
Missing follow ups is one of the biggest revenue dampeners in Sales profession. Sometimes you need be relentless to get a meeting, so use a CRM to generate new events, schedule responses based on lead status and level of engagement.
Leaving out empty fields in a CRM is like taking out milestones from a highway. So, filling out meeting reports, comments and recommendation or even empty fields will help you broaden your perspective on the target.
These are some simple hacks this could make inside sales person’s day at the office more fruitful and fulfilling.
