Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

More on Age Bias and Texting

One of my blog correspondents has been raving enthusiastically about the diversity of employees at her new inside sales job, where the manager of the department has loaded the team with people of a myriad of ages and ethnicities. These differences of backgrounds and cultures has created a very strong team that seems to be energizing everyone, and she says it’s elevating the concepts of Best Practices and team communication to a high level, as the inside reps bring their diverse experiences into the dialogue as to how best present and sell the solutions the company offers. Some of the most effective and efficient teams that have gone through our inside sales training courses have had this type of diversity, too. 

A while back, I blogged about concerns over age bias in inside sales teams, and this past week, the San Jose Mercury had a front page article describing a lawsuit that’s now moving forward against a major Silicon Valley company because of an alleged age-bias issue. The worker is claiming, among other things, that he was told he was not a good “cultural fit,” a term I’ve heard used several times in the past year as an excuse for not hiring an experienced inside sales rep. In each case, the rep was an exceptional one, was very successful in previous inside sales roles, and would have been a formidable contributor to the success of the company. This will be an interesting case to watch, as the concept affects, or will potentially effect, virtually everyone reading this post. 

So what’s texting got to do with this? Texting has become a standard method of communicating, especially among younger inside sales reps, and recently I blogged about using mobile phones in creative ways to engage prospects and customers. If you’re a texter, be careful about assuming that your prospects are actually receiving your texts, if you choose to communicate that way. Recently, someone texted my landline, so assumed I got the message. I didn’t because it was on a landline. My colleague Trish Bertuzzi is fond of saying the inside sales business is not the “pen pals” business, and there’s still no better way of communicating information over distances, where KPIs (key performance indicators) dictate large numbers of qualified prospects and sales. So if you do like to text your prospects, ensure that they like communicating that way, and that they’re using mobile devices and will be amenable to receiving them and responding to you.

Salesforce 101: a cautionary tale on successfully implementing a CRM

Salesforce.com is a CRM database tool that's become the standard for many companies' inside sales teams, and I've seen it used many times when I coach team members during my inside sales training courses. It's powerful, but like most robust tools, it needs to be tweaked for the characteristics of the team using it, based on use cases. Generally, I encourage my clients to either have a dedicated Saleforce.com expert on staff, or utilize a consultant to assist in making the best use of the CRM.

One of my blog correspondents is going nuts over how her company has implemented Salesforce, and she's made a very cogent, if impassioned, statement about how it's not working as well as it should at her company.  What triggered her correspondence to me was the ongoing discussion on the blog based on my KPI (Key Performance Indicators) post. She's got a litany of concerns, including some that relate to intra-company politics, but basically what she's dealing with is a sales process that's not working as well as it could. She wants to remain anonymous, which is why I'm telling the story here, and it's not listed as a blog response.

I'm posting it here, because she addresses issues that I've been hearing a lot over the past few months. I'll let her tell it in her own words. If you can relate to her issues, you'll know you're not alone. And if you don't have similar problems, congratulate your CRM expert for doing a great job.

Here's what she has to say:

"Data Quality 101. I've been burned by the company buying a bunch (7000+) of "leads" from somewhere & loading them into Salesforce.

"The alleged quality was questionable. For a 10% sample of my patch I kept statistics on: address, phone, URL, description & contact. Boiled down to taking an AVERAGE of 7 minutes to bring a single Account record up to callable quality. So I'm doing DATA ENTRY, while I'm paid on sales. Would you have any idea if there's a mechanism or accessory for Salesforce that quarantines incoming 'leads' into a pending status before accepting them a valid?

"One of my big, first clues to Salesforce was their introductory training video... where at one point they go out of their way to emphasize the importance of using "good naming standards/conventions" when choosing a opportunity name.  So if one time it's called BCBS MA & another time Blue Cross/Blue Shield Massachusetts & another time BlueCross/BlueShield Mass... duh you'll get results all over the place. Guess what?  Busy salespeople are NOT typists.  They'll make up whatever name makes sense to them at the moment.

"Surfing the Salesforce site last night was not enlightening.  ‘Data Quality' seems to be no more complex than de-duplicating.  Basic challenge... when the CEO puffs up his chest ‘We're using Salesforce...' which means we're way cool, this essentially slams the door on the question, ‘...yes, but HOW well are we using it?' Another non-unique challenge... the freshly appointed Salesforce administrator took it as personal insult to imply that just perhaps everything in Salesforce wasn't 100% up to snuff.  How dare you challenge my manhood!  I just do not understand why people get so tied up in their shorts over common stuff like this... admit it, knuckle down & fix it & get on to selling."

Geoff here again. So there you have it, some pretty frustrating words from an inside sales rep trying to motor through a challenging situation. Lots of my readers are management people at startups, just beginning to put together an inside sales team. If you're in this category, put some serious thought into pre-tweaking your CRM to get in inline with your KPIs, and try making a few calls yourself as a use case to ensure that your system is set up to optimize the successful work of your reps. Add this to your Best Management Playbook.

World’s most challenging telesales environment? Bet you can’t top this!

Part of what makes delivering inside sales training courses interesting is discussing the tough challenges with which each team is faced. Sometimes the working environment itself is an issue, but if you think your working conditions are challenging, you'll love today's post.

Last week I visited a client in Bangkok, and his office is near the corner of Rama IV and Silom roads. If you've been reading or seeing the world press reports, you've heard about the huge protests and Thai military deployment. This is all happening outside my client's door. On Thursday, three M79 grenades were launched from an adjacent area. All of them exploded, one of them no more than 100 feet from my client's front door. Those are tough working conditions!

My client's building has been shuttered, the Sala Daeng skytrain station which most of my client's employees access when coming to work has been damaged by a grenade and is now occupied by government troops. Public transportation to and from that station does not currently exist. Telesales people are working from their homes using a duplicate CRM, but now there's a concern that because the building's power was shut off during these 95 degree-plus days, internal IT systems may not be found to be operable when the power returns.

So my client gets my vote for having the most challenging telesales working environment I've seen this year. Would you agree? People from many countries read my telesales tips blog, so if any of you have an unusually challenging inside sales working environment story, write back and tell us about it!

Speed interviewing: is this dodgy hiring technique based on speed-dating?

This blog was begun as a way to share some of the best practices in inside sales techniques that we discuss in my telesales training courses, but has evolved to encompass inside sales management techniques and practices as well. Last week's post on the concept of yearly commission checks prompted both blog responses and a number of telephone calls. One of the most interesting communications I've received about the whole process of interviewing came from Barbara, who emailed the following story about an uncomfortable interview experience she went through with a well-known high technology company. I'm reprinting it here because many inside sales executives and managers are readers of this blog, and I'm sure they'll want to avoid having interview candidates feel as badly about their companies as this candidate feels about the company she just interviewed with. Multiply that number by 20, as that is the number of people that were "mass-interviewed" that day. At the end of Barbara's story, I'll have some specific recommendations for things to avoid when interviewing someone.

About the candidate: Barbara has 10 years successful experience as both an inside and field-based sales rep selling hardware solutions. The company she interviewed with sells both hardware and software, and Barbara was interested in an inside sales position. Here's her story:

"I, along with at least 10 other candidates, was brought in at 8:15 am on the morning of the interview. The in-house recruiter finally came down stairs about 8:35 to bring all of us up to a conference room on another floor. We were all in business suits. I was told there would be  another session starting at 11:15 am, more candidates, with the same format.

"We all sat around for another 15 or so minutes, tension building, until the director of the sales group for which, if hired, we'd be working, came in and gave a 10 minute summary of what was happening and introduced the "interview team" of probably 7 other people. One by one our names were called (not quite like the Registry of Motor vehicles, but close) and we were escorted into individual conference rooms for the first of our 30 minute interviews. I was last.

"The in-house recruiter made small talk until the person I was supposed to interview with arrived about 10 minutes later. It started off badly, because the first person I interviewed with had no clue about the industry I came from or how we go to market. He proceeded to grill me asking what CIO, CEO and every other high level IT executives I knew. I told him I dealt with hardware people and he became angrier. Then we started role playing. He told me I had no inside sales experience and wondered why I was there. I told him I did, and that I was already interviewing for senior management, director VP roles. I totally threw him off. We started to role play. I had to set up a call, and close him He just didn't get it, or me, or my background, or how to interview candidates. We ended our "hostile" chat with him saying, because of my hardware background, "If you are willing to give me 200% then we will ‘take a chance' and bring you on." He asked for references, my reply was to check my LinkedIn profile (my references are there) and he was very put off by that as well.

"The second guy I interviewed with was so desperate for someone who knew even a little about hardware and how a system worked, that about five minutes into the conversation he said "we need you" and "I'm going to put my recommendation in to hire you." He asked me zero interview questions. He briefly scanned my resume, made a comment about how good it was that I was well familiar with a certain microprocessor, then repeated himself on how I had such a great background, and how he would strongly recommend me for a role with the company. He told me he was asked to interview candidates early yesterday morning and that all the people interviewing were given questions to ask the candidates.

"The 3rd person I interviewed with was the inside sales manager. She asked me a few questions, then we started a role play where I set up a cold call. She asked me how I felt about making 50-100 calls a day and I said it was no problem, but felt quality of quantity is what really mattered. She ended the interview.

"At the end of the 3rd interview I walked back into the conference room and the in-house recruiter was standing there, more small chat. I felt I performed well and was still quite dumbfounded about the whole process. We made small talk, and she told me to "call me next week." At that point I knew I did not get the job. I was also not escorted down to the lobby. Not one of the people I interviewed with handed me a business card or any company collateral. The only common thread was that they all asked me why I wanted to work for the company. The following week, I got a two liner email declining me as a candidate and a thank you."

So there's Barbara's story. My guess is that with the exception of the inside sales manager, none of the people doing the interviewing knew prior to one day earlier that they would be interviewing inside sales candidates. If they received questions to ask during the interviews, they certainly didn't follow them.

Putting a bunch of candidates in a room and "speed interviewing" them may not make the eventual "winner" feel very good about wanting to accrue any longevity with the company. Professionalism starts at the top, and issuing a "cattle call," not giving out business cards, and not even bothering to walk the candidate to the door sends loads of messages about how the company operates, not only to candidates, but to everyone who works at the company. I imagine this company's attrition rate is significant.

Putting together a list of Best Practices often consists of listing poor practices and resolving not to do things that way. If you're a hiring manager, insist on treating every candidate that walks through your doors the same way you'd like to be treated when you yourself are engaged in interviewing with a company with whom you'd like to work. If you do, you'll have great candidates wanting to work for you, and your attrition rate will be lower, too.

Those of us who work in a high tech environment do so for a number of reasons, which generally include a high level of professionalism, easy access to management, and a philosophy of focusing on solutions rather than problems. Taking the "high road" in interviewing practices gives a company the best shot at hiring effective individuals that will reciprocate with the same degree of professionalism they were shown in the initial interview. And I'm trusting that Barbara's interview process was an industry anomaly, rather than an emerging trend.

3 Tips to increase Channel Sales… try thinking out of the box

This past week I met with a prospect that had a fairly common sales dilemma. His telesales team sells both directly and through a reseller channel. They are compensated on both types of sales.  Channel sales had been subpar, and in our discussions about our inside sales training courses, he wanted some ideas on improving the way his inside sales team works with the Channel. Being an "out of the box" thinker is always helpful in sales, and you have to be that way with the Channel, too. By doing so, you can get a jump on your competitors, and they may never figure out how you did it.

I probably got the "out of the box" concept from my grandfather. He came out of Russia after the revolution, through Siberia, to Harbin, China, onward to Mexico, and then up to the U.S. Some of the creative ways he survived aren't fit to convey in a business blog. But when he came to San Francisco, he bought a house, and one of my earliest memories if of his kitchen. He painted a beautiful Chinese landscape on the entire eastern wall of the kitchen, because he wanted it decorative, and he wanted it to be his (it may still be there, if you know the person who lives on the corner of  Hugo and Arguello streets in the Golden Gate Park panhandle, and they've been wondering about their kitchen mural, let me know). He did things his way, rarely listened to anyone about anything, but continually found new ways to solve old problems.  In business, I believe that creative thinkers are that way because they want to develop something new, and there's a certain pride of ownership in knowing they got there first. The annals of American entrepreneurship are loaded with tales of the successes of people that made a creative 180 and "accidentally on purpose" made a lot of money and changed an industry.

Many salespeople don't think creatively enough when they work with channel sales partners. They hand them leads, forget about them, and wonder why channel sales numbers are down. Here are some tips for turning this around and getting your channel to increase sales for your product or solution.

1) Call the CEO of your channel company and ask what you can do to help him or her drive more business. Notice I didn't say "ask what you can do to sell more of my product." Your channel company cares more about overall profitability than in just selling your product, because they often have a bunch of other products, too. You need mindshare more than anything else, and in discussing his or her business, you'll probably be the one principal sales rep this year that will show genuine concern for his or her profitability. When I was in sales, one of my channel principals, whose business was partly based on providing engineering consultants as an outsource solution, told me that his outsource business had been crummy. I told him that since I was making tons of calls into his territory, I could ask a question to each of my prospects as to whether they ever used contract programmers. I got my channel partner some business that way, and guess what? My product sales through that channel partner grew exponentially in the ensuing months. Calling high and taking my channel partner's interests to heart were the two keys to getting my channel partner to sell more of my products.

2) Call each of your channel partner sales reps on a regular basis to help him or her make a sale. If you've got a handful, there's no reason you can't call them all once a week. Maybe a call to one of his or her prospects from the manufacturer will make a sale, so why not ask if you can call that prospect and help out. Ensure the rep that you won't let the prospect "go direct" and buy from the manufacturer, and you'll help close the sale for him or her. Sometimes channel partners are unwilling to do this because they're afraid the principal will steal the sale from them. Convince them you won't take away their business, and build trust. I guarantee that you'll be brought into more of their deals, and each of you will have better sales numbers as a result.

3) Create a "virtual channel" by developing your own personal sales channel, right from your desk. Let me give you a "tecchie" example from my own world to explain this concept. I used to sell a software debugger for programmers writing in C language. Before my prospects bought a debugger, they had to have a C complier. There was one C compiler vendor that had bought some of our debuggers for their own use. So I called the sales director of that company, and suggested that I could help them sell compilers to companies that were in Analysis phase, and hadn't bought any software development tools yet. They'd need both compilers and debuggers. The director and I reached a gentleman's agreement that we'd help each other out, and he'd ask his own reps to chat up our debugger. This turned out to be a great relationship. It wasn't formal, wasn't written on paper, but forged a great relationship that was profitable for each of us, and helped my sales territory tremendously. So if you know of a non-competitive vendor that sells to the same people you do, and he or she makes a great product, why not turn that vendor into an ally? This will give you additional "feet on the street," and increase your sales.

So there are three great ways to work with the Channel. Far too many reps view the channel as competition, which is absurd when they're getting comped on both types of sales. It's all about team communication, and in such cases, the Channel is part of your team. I've given you some doable ways to solidify important business contacts within your channel structure. If you sell directly and through a Channel as well, add these ideas to your Best Practices Playbook.

5 questions to ask before considering sales training as a solution to substandard performance

First in a 3 part series on sales training theory

In the 20 or so years we've been in the telesales training business, we've turned down a significant number of potential training situations. The main reason? We didn't think training was the solution for the client's problem, and we knew it just wouldn't work, because other things needed to be fixed first. Today's post is about saving you money if you're thinking of hiring any company to train your team, or doing it yourself with internal resources. Lack of superior performance can be a training issue, but not always. So before you consider sales training as a solution to poor performance, ask yourself the following questions to determine if you've correctly analyzed your sales situation:

1) Product. Do you have a significant underperforming product issue? If so, it's probably all over the web, and prospects love to talk. This "bad rap" will stop calls from being taken by prospects, and voicemails and emails being ineffective. Possible solutions: fix the product or consider dropping it from your product mix.

2) Compensation. Are your reps being compensated for the wrong behavior? For example, dual commission structures, in which reps are paid better on some products than others will virtually guarantee less activity on lesser compensated solutions. A common case is when inside salespeople are paid less for turning over a lead to the field than when selling it themselves, which will result in fewer leads going to the field. Another situation commonly found is when business development teams are being comped for the number of raw leads being sent to the field, qualified or not! For salespeople, compensation drives behavior, so consider changing your comp plan if they're being paid for behaviors not conducive to your company's profit picture.

3) Business processes. Is your inside team burdened with unnecessary paperwork or non telesales-related duties? If so, this could be affecting their efficiency. We see this mostly in non-centralized sales environments where individual sales reps report to Regional managers and work away from headquarters.  Sometimes these reps are charged with generating proposals for the entire regional team, which is one issue we commonly find that takes telephone time away from inside sales reps. Solutions to this vary depending on the company and situation. If you think this may be the case, consider asking each of your reps to log their duties for one week, then compile your answers to see if there's a common thread.

4) Intra-company conflict. Is your team getting "mixed messages?" Calling high is a prime example. You want your inside team to feel comfortable talking to upper level executives at major accounts, but if they're being told by others in the sales organization to avoid calling into accounts beyond a certain size for no intelligent sales-related reason, you're losing business, and your inside team's sales numbers will suffer. This is just one example of an internal roadblock that can damage the efficiency of an inside sales group.

5) Motivation and Personnel Churn. Does your team really want to work in your company and be in sales? One classic example is when a company converted their customer service reps to salespeople. The problem? They didn't want to be in sales and found it distasteful to ask for the order. They really wanted to be customer service people again, and their ears were not open to sales training. We've seen many situations where people converted to sales jobs and loved it, but it's not always the case. In the case of poor performance, it's always a great idea to ask the rep if he or she really embraces Sales as a career. Some companies have a terrible problem with inside sales personnel continually leaving the company, and they're rightly concerned with having to deliver the same training over and over throughout the year for replacement reps. Personnel churn sometimes results from underpaying reps, but often results from individual motivational issues as well. These are best covered by superior interviewing processes, but beware of "personality tests," which have little value in determining the potential effectiveness of a sales rep.

I've touched on product issues, business processes, intra-company edicts, compensation, and motivational issues that you'll want to ensure are handled or discussed before you take the financial step to train your team. Superior sales training is an essential way to get your team performing at optimum level, but you'll want to make sure you have a firm foundation in place before you do it. Add pre-training analysis to your Best Management playbook.

When you become too old to work in Inside Sales… or is it just ageism?

One of the inherent beauties of selling or qualifying over the phone is that since no one can see us, hiring practices have been egalitarian, for the most part. In my telesales training courses diverse workforces have been the norm, and the resulting cross-pollination of ideas and experiences has resulted in smarter workforces. But in the past six months, I've been made aware of several outstanding inside sales candidates that were told they weren't hired because they "didn't fit in." And that was the sole reason given that they weren't hired. It had nothing to do with lack of professionalism or poor work stats. But these individuals were all over 40 years old, and the postings ran the gamut from Rep to Director.

In every case, the individual was interviewed at a company with a predominantly younger inside sales force, and came away with the feeling that management at these companies was more concerned that the new hire could party and socialize at the same level with younger workers than with what it takes to get the job done and over-perform in quota-oriented activities.

We're getting a good reputation in this blog for dealing with issues no one wants to discuss, and age discrimination is an uncomfortable topic for many. Human Resources departments are well aware of discrimination laws, but companies work around them with the "not fitting in" clause, which is not falsifiable. I'm going to give you two stories that underscore my point, but before I do, let's set up the argument.

Here are some reasons not to practice age discrimination in hiring:

1) If you're a younger manager or exec enforcing age discrimination at your company, it will eventually affect you as well. You may get succeeded by a younger person, or laid off because of your age. And you won't be able to prove it, because your company has a process in place for successfully removing older people without overtly violating discrimination laws.

2) We're not talking about the palliative crowd here. People over 35 have generally acquired great work habits, are intelligent conversationalists, and are focused on making themselves (and the company) money. They tend to be less "entitled" and accept authority more readily than many younger people.

3) Your younger inside sales reps can learn a lot from them. If they have a sales concern, they may readily go to a more experienced rep for advice than a manager, as they may feel they want to fix the problem before management becomes aware of it. This additional level of expertise provides for quicker inculcation of Best Practices, and can open up intelligent dialogue throughout the entire inside sales team.

Here's one story about an experienced inside sales rep I'd like to share with you. I trained an inside sales team in Florida that had one rep who was noticeably older than her colleagues. I would guess she was in her sixties. I always ask my participants what their passion in life is. When it was this woman's turn, she said it was flying Stearman aerobatic aircraft. She was a stunt pilot who still was doing air shows, and was probably the most focused rep in the room. In coaching sessions, she was far and away the best of the group. In follow-up discussions with management, we had serious discussions about how to find more people like her, and I would have recommended her to any of my client companies in a second.

The second story is perhaps a bit more poignant, but goes to the heart of the issue. In the early 1980s, I was putting myself through college driving a taxi in Boston. We had a number of black drivers in our company (probably half of whom were African).  There were also a number of steady customers calling for cabs that specified they didn't want a black driver. So the argument went one way that the company should send white drivers in those situations, because if they didn't, the customers would refuse to ride with the black driver, call the competition, and we'd lose the business forever. The contrary argument ran that by refusing to send black drivers, we were perpetuating discrimination, and it would never end if we didn't draw the line somewhere and say "no more." The second argument won. None of us wanted to live in a discriminatory world.

This post is primarily directed to sales managers and executives that can change the policy of age discrimination by recognizing that having experienced reps on the team makes the whole team better, then  showing leadership by taking the position that neither you nor the company will stand for it.  Discrimination in any form is odious, and pre-selecting out great reps because they may not join in on the Friday afternoon paintball tournament is just plain silly. Building a great inside sales team is all about talent and ability, and not about homogeneity. So please strongly consider adding real personnel diversity to your Best Management Playbook. You'll have a more effective and powerful company if you do.

6 Tips for using LinkedIn to increase sales now

I'd imagine most readers of my blog have at least developed a profile on the business networking website LinkedIn. But if you're not using it as an important part of your daily sales process, you could be losing sales. If you work a territory, you'd be surprised at how many of your prospects will know customers of yours. In the past we all found this out by accident, guesswork, and careful questioning. Today, the LinkedIn tool does a lot of it for us.

In my telesales training classes, I cover several of the free online Sales 2.0 tools that are becoming increasingly more important, and I'm coming to think LinkedIn (LI) is the best. Let me give you one real world example of how it can be used "out of the box," then discuss what you can do to ensure that you're working at optimum with LI.

Case Study: A network solutions provider

One of my sales training customers had been trying for months to get into a large prospect, to no avail. In a coaching session, we determined that he'd call a CIO at the company, someone that wasn't in the lead database. We found that person's name on Hoover's. Before he called that exec, he checked out his LinkedIn profile. Guess what! He knew one of our company's regional managers while that manager was employed in a previous company, working another territory. My rep made a quick call to the out-of-territory Regional Manager, and found out that he'd had a great relationship with that CIO. My rep was then able to make the call, and had a conversation. Without LinkedIn, the CIO might never have taken the call.

So let's investigate how to get LinkedIn working at optimum for you. Here are 6 great ways to get going for you right now:

1) Make sure your profile is as good as you can get it, detailing your professional background and successful accomplishments. These is essentially your résumé, and believe me, your prospects will occasionally look at it to get an idea of who you are before they trust you enough to buy from you. Additionally, if you're ever looking for another inside sales position, your potential new company will look at your LI profile before they bother with your actual résumé. Don't gloss over this important step.

2) Send a LinkedIn invitation to professional people colleagues you know well, or with whom you've had a business relationship, so you can link together. These would include your fellow Inside and Field salespeople, and all sales management within your company.

3) Call your customers that you have a working relationship with, have a conversation, then tell them you'd like to LinkIn to them. The best time to do this is right after the conversation. Caution! If you don't call first, they may perceive you as being too pushy, and won't accept the invitation. Besides, by calling them, you may also find other opportunities within his or her company that you didn't know about. If so, you've increased your sales.

4) When your invitation has been accepted, take a look at your invitee's connections. They may include people working at a company that you're trying to work with. If so, consider whether it might be worth calling your contact and asking how well he or she knows that person. If that's the case, you may get a reference!

5) When making a first time call to a prospect, especially to an exec or manager, take 30 seconds up from to check out his or her LI profile. You may discover you have mutual business associates or interests. Those can prove to be the best ice-breakers you'll ever have (see Case Study above).

6) This one's just a quick cautionary tip. Invitations from unknowns don't often result in links, and can be perceived as LinkedIn spam. Only invite people you really know. I get invitations from people I've never talked to, and I won't LinkIn to them. Most others won't either. There are other social networking sites that are great for popularity contests, but LinkedIn isn't: it's a business tool. If there's someone you'd like to know and LinkIn to, please call and say hello first.

I always check out someone's LI profile now before I call him or her. It takes hardly any time at all, and it's a great ice-breaker to spend thirty seconds or so at the beginning the call to talk about mutual acquaintances or interests.  So if you're not doing all of this right now, start today. It's a great way to communicate better with your prospects, and you'll increase sales, too. And add using LinkedIn effectively and efficiently to your Best Practices Playbook.

Want to get hired? Then drop the fishy handshake!

Success can be measured in a number of different ways. This year we can another great year in the telesales training business, but I measured our success in another way this year, too. We helped a whole bunch of people get hired.

Inside Sales Execs and Reps that have taken my courses know I'll always help them when they're looking. We even helped place several people that weren't involved in my classes, because they had stellar referrals from people that did. The secret is we're not a recruitment firm, and don't charge anything for placement calls, so companies will always talk to me.

We went beyond just making calls, reviewing and occasionally fine-tuning résumés, getting them to have more robust profiles on LinkedIn, you name it, we did it. The high tech telesales world is skewed when great people aren't working. Reps who have never been under quota were laid off this year. Sales execs with proven track records went months without a position. The last couple of months have been pretty successful for us, in terms of getting great people placed.

I told you that story so I can tell this one. All of the above I did by telephone. But several weeks ago I attended a conference, and met a young man, an associate of a friend of mine. When I shook hands with him, it was like shaking an eel, it was that limp and fishy. It gave me a cold shudder, and for the life of me, I can't remember anything he said. But I do remember that handshake!

It wasn't my place to do any on-the-spot mentoring. But I figured that fellow will close a lot of doors before they have a chance to get opened, and until he fixes it, he'll be aced out in the job market. Handshakes aren't trivial in Western countries. People tend to form snap judgments on introductory handshakes. Firm handshakes are the gold standard of introductions. They don't need to be bone-crushers, but they have to have substance. With all the terrific books on interpersonal skills out there, it still surprises me that some people just don't have the handshake bit down yet. While we're for the most part telesales people, we still meet occasional customers and prospects. And we shake hands with our fellow employees all the time.

So here's the bottom line. I'll bet all the readers of my blog have handshaking down to an art. But you probably have friends and colleagues that don't. In this volatile business climate, people need all the help they can get. It's tough enough to get hired if one has all the tools and great recommendations, and a poor handshake could scotch everything. So do a favor for your weak-handshaked friends. You're a friend, so you can tell them. Or you're a manager, and you can do some mentoring. Or even easier yet, point them to this blog post.

What makes a great Inside Sales Manager? Ask Pete Tarbox!

This week, I've had a significant amount of commentary on a number of posts I've written on what makes a superior sales manager. There's been a bunch of traffic on my posts entitled 5 Great Sales Demotivators: Decrease sales by following these practices, and Increase sales by conducting an effective Telesales Employee Performance Appraisal, among others. Earlier this week, Pete Tarbox weighed in on what he feels are traits that are critical in being a successful inside sales manager. Pete's been around long enough to have seen a lot, and I profiled his techniques for selling to the Defense Department in my 5 Critical Tactics when Selling to the Defense Department post.

I like Pete's approach to management excellence so much that I'm producing it verbatim here. What do you think?

Traits of an excellent sales manager:

1. Like a great rep, a great manager listens and asks probing questions before taking action. This is crucial when diagnosing a sales situation.
2. Comes across as truly wanting to help their reps (instead of beat them up). I've encountered a number of VP's who will react in a negative, emotional way before (or without) making sure that they really understand what's going on.
3. Helps their people to build skills by teaching in detail (or getting someone who can, like you) what needs to be done, as opposed to only saying what needs to be done (such as "you need to talk to executives").
4.  In my experience, people who have actually done the job at their company - or are willing to learn in detail what it really takes -  make the best sales managers. I once had a new VP come in and learn NOTHING about our product or market. He thought that he could increase sales by teaching new sales techniques (he never learned what the real problem was, nor did he understand our market). That's an extreme case, but I frequently see VPs hired that come from other markets - and then come in and show a lot of aggression to their sales force. People who are promoted from within are able to better empathize with their reps and translate winning skills.
5.  Do not overload their reps with non-value-add tasks. Forecasting, reporting, tracking all serve a purpose and must be done - but that needs to be balanced with actual selling.
6.  The best also understand how to carve up territories in ways that make sense for their people (provide enough opportunity without providing too much busy work), i.e. when you have 12 multi-divisional accounts and are asked to generate a "quick" overview for a meeting tomorrow... or all of a sudden find yourself in the middle of 5 enterprise upgrades (which may not represent current revenue opportunity but must be successful in order to keep your customers and have future opportunity).
7. Helps to insulate their people from constant change (this is a tough one because things are constantly changing, but it's demotivating to work a bunch of accounts that then get handed out to other people, or to start and stop on an account, and so on).
8. And like all managers - makes it fun to work for them, communicates to their workers the linkage between their activities and the big picture, communicates corporate objectives.

(Geoff here again) Thanks for your perspective, Pete. Managing is never easy, especially when times are tough. In my experience, managers never get enough time sharing best management practices and discussing areas of challenge with one another. But a number of inside sales managers read this blog, and we have some very good posts that managers can read by clicking on the Management Techniques link on the left side of this page. Our telesales management classes are always popular, too.

Pete's thoughts provide some great food for thought, and represent timely discussion points for sales reps and managers alike. Why not add them to your Best Practices Playbook?