Posted by Geoff Alexander on Sat, Sep 27, 2008 @ 03:44 PM
Just about the most progressive, professional, and lucrative road to success in selling is the path that takes the enterprise prospect through the return-on-investment (ROI) process, as it relates to what your product or service will bring his or her company. My Closing on Return on Investment Data with Enterprise Prospects whitepaper provides a template for selling successfully by using important - but often hidden - financial and business data that the prospect will give you, but only if you know how to ask for it. These data will tell you how to sell, what business factors are involved "behind the scenes," open up sales objections before they occur, and give you important information you'll later need for price negotiation. There's a lifetime worth of hard-hitting sales techniques in this 5 page document which you can read in 5 minutes, and begin using effectively today! Apply the techniques in the Whitepaper, and you'll:
- Increase sales to other prospects within the enterprise
- Better negotiate the final sales price of your solution
- Accelerate the sales process for faster approval
- Uncover potentially damaging sales objections sooner
These techniques come right from our sales courses, and are a key to strategic sales, whether you're in inside sales or direct sales. This whitepaper is free, so go to our whitepaper page and download it today, so you can enhance your closing skills, and add these sales secrets to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Wed, Sep 24, 2008 @ 03:48 AM
Probably the least valuable and over-used question asked by salespeople is "Who's the decision-maker? The person to whom you're speaking will invariably reply "I am," which, in enterprise decisions, is not true. So the question is essentially worthless. And so is its cousin, "Are you the decision-maker?," in which the prospect will respond "yes," but will really be thinking "no, I just wash the floors here, what's this salesperson thinking?!"
So here's what our inside sales training courses teach reps to do, and how to fix it. Virtually all decisions made for large purchases are made by a group of individuals, so you need to reformat your question to get the right data. Instead, ask "Tell me about the decision process" (OK, it's a statement, not a question), which will prompt your prospect to tell you how the decision is being made. Your prospect may give you names, titles, or roles in the process, and you've got to know all of this, so you'll want to probe further to "fill in the blanks." You'll need to know the names of the individuals, their titles, and the roles they'll occupy in the process of determining a solution. At that point, you should build an org chart with boxes and lines, and ensure that you know where the lines lead, upward to the CEO's office. And yes, especially in high-dollar sales, every CXO will generally have to discuss the transaction with the CEO or CFO, even if just to keep him or her in the loop.
Of course, there's a difference in the decision process and the sign-off process, so you'll also want to ask "How does the sign-off process work once a solution has been determined?" This is especially critical in technical sales, and contacting members of the decision team early in the sales cycle will help you to pre-determine the sales objections you'll be facing. Asking professional decision tree questions will increase sales by getting information to you more efficiently and effectively. All reps that consistently exceed their sales quotas do this. Add them to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Fri, Sep 19, 2008 @ 11:27 PM
Have you ever received a Request for Proposal (RFP) or Request for Quotation (RFQ) that came from a Purchasing Agent (or Buyer) from a company with which you're not familiar? If so, do you do all the hard work to complete the request, then follow up with the buyer, or do you call first? And if you do call, do you start with the Buyer? This was an interesting question posed on Mike Kreppein's Inquisix blog, and I'm going to answer it here. If you use my sales techniques to address this issue, you either will stand a very good chance of getting the business, or won't bother wasting your time responding to an RFP that you can't win. The RFP may be legitimate, or you may be in a situation in which your competition has already gotten the business, and the Buyer is using your response to gain ammunition to lower the price he or she will pay to your competitor. I used to be a Purchasing Agent myself, and spun the wheels of endless numbers of salespeople before I became a salesperson myself. I'm going to show you how NOT to get scammed, using the same techniques I teach in my negotiation training courses. When you get an inbound RFP, immediately go to your sales database, and see if there has ever been previous contact with your company. If you have previous historical contacts, begin by calling the contact with the highest title on the list, and begin your call by asking if he or she has generated an RFP. By asking this question, you'll be opening the discussion to determine what solutions are being discussed, and if a final decision has been made.
If there are no same-company contacts in your database, begin by calling high, usually to the CXO whose responsibility falls within the solution you offer. Mention that you've gotten an RFP from the company, and you need to get a few answers before you respond. In most cases, you'll be referred down to someone at the Director level who is generating the initiative.
Why not start with the Purchasing Agent? Because, in most cases, unless you're dealing in commodities like pork bellies or sorghum, the Buyer can't give you the business. Only the corporate sponsor can.
Will you be offending the Buyer? Not if you do your job well, and stay consultative. When I was a Purchasing Agent myself, I routinely sent out RFPs when I needed to grind down my prime vendor on pricing. I used to drive those poor salespeople through hoops, and none of them ever bothered calling my Program Manager (who made most of the real decisions). If they had, there's a very good chance they could have swayed the Program Manager to change the decision, provided they had superior solutions.
Only start your sales process with the Purchasing Agent if you've exhausted the techniques I've described above. And then begin you call by telling the Buyer that you need to talk with one of the sponsors of the RFP in order to craft an adequate response. I've told buyers that there are technical questions I need to have answered before I can craft a response, otherwise I might be proposing the wrong solution. I've had good success with this technique, but I guarantee that the Purchasing Agent will not refer you if the final vendor decision has already been made. And that's why it's so important to call the other people in the company first.
And if you do get a Purchasing Agent angry at you for what you've done, simply state that your company always talks with sponsors before filling out RFPs, and you do this to prevent selling a solution to the company that will prove inadequate. Believe me, this works, because I've been the Purchasing Agent.
Use these techniques to take control of each and every RFP situation, talk to the people that are really making the decision, and be wary of taking your valuable time in responding to spurious RFPs. Add them to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Sep 16, 2008 @ 11:06 PM
A couple of weeks ago, I ran a statistical analysis of many of the inside sales reps I've trained over the years, and 60 of them (that we could track) went on to become sales managers and executives. I'm sure there are many more. So how did they do it? It goes without saying that they became proficient in the telesales skills we teach, but they brought a lot more into it, too. A great example is Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk, a company that provides software professionals on a contract basis. Gary attended my class as an inside sales rep for Pure Software, rapidly rose through the ranks, and ended up running the Pure (later Rational Software) inside sales team.
I asked Gary what were the 5 most important things he did to get to the CEO level, and his answers are below. But first I want to tell you what he did prior to becoming an inside sales rep. Gary's first job out of college was matching buyers and sellers of precision metal products. There were manufacturers that had capacity to make metal widgets and manufacturers that needed parts made, and he helped to match them up. He ultimately got into the business of manufacturing himself and built a manufacturing business by purchasing machinery and hiring talent to make parts directly for buyers. Gary ultimately sold the factory and the entire book of business to one of his larger suppliers and moved to high technology, which was a more thriving industry in the early 90's. And that's when he arrived at Pure Software as an inside sales rep. Right out of college, Gary had decided he was going to be an entrepreneur and he used high tech telesales as a jump-off point that ultimately led him to becoming a high tech sales CEO.
Here's what Gary says are the five most important elements that made him successful:
1. Old fashioned hard work. I learned early on that frequency and competency would produce results and there is no substitute for actually doing the work.
2. Surround yourself with quality team members with the right personal characteristics. It is hard to teach personal characteristics and important that you build a quality team or you will certainly face challenges later.
3. Balance. Family and exercise are important to me and regardless of your passion outside of work, it is important to have balance and fun at work.
4. Passion for what you are doing. If you are going to put so much into your career, it may as well be doing something you enjoy... having passion for your business is key.
5. Continue to learn. My desire to grow and develop both professionally and personally enable me to continue to learn on a daily basis. When you feel like you have learned all there is to learn in a job, it is time to take on more responsibility or move on to a steeper learning curve.
OK, Geoff Alexander here again. If I can distill Gary's success message into keywords, here's what I'd use: hard work, emphasis on quality, balance, passion, and learning. Maybe you don't have a family, and you don't exercise (see #3, above.) But balance indicates that you've got something important in your life away from business. Just about all successful people do. And the reason Gary's message is so important is that there's no one reading this blog post that can't emulate Gary's success him or herself. 60 people who've taken my inside sales courses already have. If you're not applying these principles, why not start today, and you can be on the sales executive track, too? Add them to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Sun, Sep 14, 2008 @ 05:38 PM
Ethics aren't something commonly taught in sales training classes, but I think it's important for all reps to consider them. Notwithstanding written agreements, keeping to verbal agreements is an important key to ethical selling. I'm convinced that keeping one's word is an important concept in adopting sales as a profession. Sometimes being honest may result in small losses, but over your career, you'll realize big gains. I'll tell you a couple of short stories from my own sales career that underscore this point.
Early in my sales career, I sold photocopiers for Gordon Adams at Modern Office Machines. Copiers were a tough sell, because feature-wise, they were all pretty similar. In some cases our competitors were selling the exact same unit with a different brand badge. One day, I made a sale to a large company, shook hands, picked up the check, and arranged delivery of the machine. Two days later, my contact at the company reneged. The company had decided to go with a competitor, and wanted their check returned. I told the company that I would only return the check in a meeting with the CEO, and my contact agreed, because it was the only way she was going to get the money back. I now had to go in and ask Gordon for the money back. I told him the story, and he said: "You know, in my day, people's word meant something. When you shook hands and agreed, people didn't go back on their word." Gordon was an old-fashioned businessman, a gentleman rancher who wore big silver belt buckles and drove a 5-wheeler. The changing mores in the Silicon Valley clearly disturbed him, but he drafted a check for me. So I met with the CEO of my customer company. As I returned his check, I asked him "If your company can't live by its word, do you feel comfortable knowing that you've set a precedent for which both your customers and even your own salespeople can renege on agreements at the drop of a hat?" He told me he didn't care, that was business. I told him that no matter what company I was working for in the future, I'd never do business with him or any of his companies ever again. And I didn't. And I also told myself that if there was anyone that I could learn something from, it was my boss, Gordon Adams. He had old-fashioned honest principles, and I've tried to be like him ever since.
Here's an example of how honesty can pay off in ways you'd never imagine. Way before I worked for Gordon, I'd gotten out of college and interviewed for a job as a procurement officer. I was great at buying, had done it for two companies, and I loved to negotiate. The fellow that interviewed me loved me, but his boss didn't. They offered the job ---which I dearly wanted and paid a great salary --- to another candidate. Well, I needed to work, and there was an ad in the paper I'd been looking at, for a job I thought was plum crazy. It was to work as a salesperson at a dating service, for commission only. Totally out of curiosity, I interviewed, because I thought it was bizarre: salespeople sold the clients, then "rated" them on looks and intelligence. I couldn't believe my ears! Not only that, but as a former procurement officer, I didn't really like salespeople, and here I was interviewing for a sales position. I aced the interview, and Bob at the dating service wanted to hire me on the spot, but I wanted to take a day, call up the company I'd interviewed with before, and see if they'd changed their minds. They hadn't, so I told Bob I'd take the dating service job, and would start in two days. The next day, the procurement company called me back, said their first candidate had declined the job, now they were offering it to me. Sadly, I told them that I'd given word that I'd start another job, and had to decline their offer. Frankly, the decision I'd made wasn't easy, giving up a well-paying salaried position for a commission-only risk, but I'd given my word, and stuck with it. So I went to work for the dating service. And unbelievably, I closed 80% of my prospects. As it turned out, I was a born salesperson, and didn't even know it! Our customers were lots of great people of both genders, smart and with nice personalities who didn't particularly like going to bars to meet people. We increased their social contacts tremendously, and made a lot of nice people very happy. After several months I left, because I had closed just about everybody, had maxed-out my earning potential, and there was no upward movement in this small company. I soon got a job selling technology, and my sales career was underway. It wouldn't have been if I'd gone back on my word.
The last story is one I've never told in my inside sales training courses, but I think it's important as my own testimonial as to how keeping one's word can lead to life-changing events.
Business ethics aren't something frequently discussed around the water-cooler, but they probably should be. We live and die on our own good names, and it's difficult to live down a poor reputation. Taking the high road and keeping to one's word in tough situations should become second nature to every salesperson. Put this near the top in your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Wed, Sep 10, 2008 @ 02:01 PM
Special note: Since this post was written, I've developed a great model for deriving metrics that makes logical sense, and can be easily customized for any company. Read it by clicking here.
Many inside sales reps today are measured on Key Performance Indicators (KPI), among which are Dials Per Day. Ken, one of our blog subscribers, mentions that he's being tasked with 50 dials per day, and asks how he can manage to call high, ask great qualification questions, and still make 50 dials in a given day. Additionally, he's mandated to get back to every inbound voicemail or lead call within one hour. Sounds tough, so let's dig in. I'll analyse it, and tell you how you can succeed through it
In an eight hour work day, a rep can realistically be expected to be on the phone six hours of that time. The rest is spent on paperwork, proposals, and in-house communications. There is also a burn-out factor that every rep experiences by being on the phone for all eight hours. Even I couldn't do it.
So if we take Ken's 50 dials, that amounts to 8.33 dials every hour, based on that six hour call day. If Ken actually has a conversation on every call, each call could only last 7.2 minutes. Furthermore, each of those calls would require at least 2 minutes of post-call data entry, lowering call time to 5.2 minutes. Even on a cold call, a rep should take two preliminary minutes to review the account being called, from a quick visit to the prospect's website to see what his or her company sells, to reviewing notes of past conversations on a warm call. Now our time per call has been lowered to 3.2 minutes, not enough time to fully qualify much of anything. Now we know that 7 people aren't actually going to answer the phone each hour. But if half of them do, and we take 15 minutes to fully qualify the prospect and two minutes for data entry, 34 minutes have elapsed and we have only 26 minutes left for the 6 dials we have left in order to meet the metrics. We have to hope, for Ken's sake, that he doesn't reach anyone in those 6 dials, or his metrics are shot.
Now that we've debunked the real-world reality of a 50 dials per day KPI, let's ask ourselves why management is enforcing this metric, and see what we can do to change it. Typically, this metric is enforced when the revenue numbers are down and call reports show that the reps are making fewer than 20 or so dials per day. Management knows that even great reps won't meet the metric, but does it in order to get reps out of lazy habits. It does tend to get call volume up, but can have a disastrous counter-effect of increasing the length of the sales cycle because leads aren't qualified (or disqualified) as well and efficiently as they should be.
My old boss Perry Lynne had an effective way of measuring metrics. He asked each rep to log every dial per hour, and also list "lost sales," where the prospect had already bought from a competitor. He then compared the dials metric to the top rep's sales numbers (often that was me). That gave him an idea of how many dials it would take to make optimum sales numbers. Perry could have taken the top rep's dials, doubled it, set a metric, and assumed that sales would double. But he didn't because, in my case, he knew I was qualifying the heck out of every opportunity, and he didn't want to run the risk of monkeying with success. There is both an art and a science to selling. The science involves metrics, but the art involves qualifying. This nexus represents the challenge that inside sales management has to deal with every day.
So how can Ken perform as well as possible within the framework of tough metrics? Here are a few ideas. Not perfect, but as perfect as I can get it, within Ken's boundaries:
1) Spend no more than 2 minutes reviewing the prospect's website and/or previous notes before the call.
2) On inbound sales leads from lower-level prospects, call high instead. You may reach an administrative assistant, but he or she can get you through to someone high enough that it's a better call than starting low. Your sale will progress faster there, and let her transfer you, because the call will be coming from an exec's office, the other party can see that on the phone display, and chances are he or she will pick up your call instead of ignoring it than if you dial cold, which sometimes happens. If he or she doesn't refer you, go back to the original lead, and call that person. That's 2 dials right there.
3) You've got to qualify or disqualify the prospect really fast. Use these six qualification question types we teach in our telesales training courses to ensure that you've gotten everything, and don't forget to get your prospect's official title right up front, so you'll know how valuable your information really is:
a) Timeframe: When do you have to have a solution on board?
b) Requirements: What does your ideal solution look like?
c) Business/Consequences: Tell me a little about your business, how the solution will positively affect your bottom line, and describe the consequences of not moving forward with it.
d) Scope: How many people/departments/lines of business will need this solution?
e) Decision Tree: How does the decision process work for getting the solution on board?
f) Budget: Is the solution budgeted? If not, what is the process for establishing a budget?
In a perfect world, you'd want to get the prospect to elaborate on all of those questions, and a good rep like Ken will probably do it anyway. If he does, his metrics will go down, but he'll increase sales, and overshoot his quota. He and his company will make a lot of money. And I don't think his manager will give him too much grief for not hitting the metrics.
Being the top earner in your department always gives you leeway with management. In a future blog post, I'll elaborate on the questioning methodology in item #3 above, because it works every time, and it's fast. Add it to your Best Practices playbook. And good luck with the metrics.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Sep 09, 2008 @ 01:19 AM
During the process of designing our customized telesales skills courses, I always interview all of the reps that will be in the class. I ask how they conduct the sales process, what's working for them, and what isn't. There are five behaviors that I see constantly, and each will increase the time it takes to make the sale or prevent the sale from occurring. They all inhibit sales performance. Let's discuss them, and how to fix them. Ho many of these sound familiar?
1) Failing to select the right individual with whom to begin the sales process. Many reps begin by calling a lower-level person at the prospect company, rather than starting by calling high. Here's probably the most common example from the IT world: You get an inbound lead from a Network Administrator interested in your network security solution. Instead of beginning your sales process there, you should instead start at the CIO's office to determine if there is an initiative in place to adopt your type of solution.
2) Not using appropriate language in opening the call. If you're starting with a cold call to an exec (see #1 above), don't begin by asking "How are you today?,"or asking if this is a good (or bad) time to talk. Those openings inhibit rapport immediately, and you're not selling consultatively as a peer. Instead, begin by introducing yourself and your company in one sentence, then tell the exec exactly why you're calling (our sales courses can help you with scripting).
3) Not talking enough about the prospect's business. Many reps spend far too much time discussing their own companies, and far too little time talking about the prospect's business. Let's say you're selling software development tools, and your prospect is in the drive train division of a large auto maker. Why not ask to what other divisions their code goes when finished? Do those divisions use devtools too? Ask who would be a good contacts within those divisions. If you don't know what a drive train is to begin with, try Google or Wikipedia. With intricate high tech products, you'll often hear obtuse answers to the question "What are you building?" I always like to ask how their end-users use their product or service, which tends to drive the conversation to layperson's terms, easier to understand than the tech terms prospects sometimes use. Being intelligently ignorant at the beginning of a call is OK, because by asking intelligent questions about the prospect's business, you will soon understand the business reasons a prospect is considering your solution.
4) Not asking enough questions regarding the business problem the prospect is facing for which your product could be a solution. If the prospect is interested, why not ask more about the consequences to his or her company if a solution is not found. The answer will provide important return-on-investment data for you as the sales process progresses. A great way to kick off the discussion is to ask the prospect how his or her product or service makes money for his or her company.
5) Not remembering that people generally only buy for two reasons: Either your solution will help the prospect company to make money, or to stop from losing money. The price for your solution has to look good on the balance sheet. Often, you have to help the prospect to understand the return-on-investment your solution brings to the table, and you can't do it unless you can predict how the conversation will go in the CFO's office when you're not there. Always ask the prospect how he or she thinks your solution will make financial sense for the company. If you can't get these answers from your prospect, you may be calling too low on the decision tree (see #1 above).
If you avoid the mistakes listed here, I guarantee that you'll increase sales. Pass these tips along to your colleagues, and add them to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Fri, Sep 05, 2008 @ 05:18 PM
Many companies are fairly constrained right now in terms if getting budget for inside sales training. This is bad for both managers and reps, but I've got a way for you to put together a free, quick and efficient training program while your company is in the process of figuring out how to get budget for training. It's called Lunch & Learn, and you've probably heard of it, but maybe gotten away from it. If you're a manager, consider adopting this program for your team. If you're a rep without a manager right now (yes, it happens), why not "roll your own" as a great way to cross-pollinate great sales ideas with your colleagues? Here's a super-effective way to do it right:
1) Bring in lunch for the team on Tuesday. On Monday, reps will be making initial weekly calls, following up last week's action items, etc., so it's not a great day for an L&L session.
2) Pick a topic from our blog, and task every rep to read it before Tuesday's lunch. They can read it on Monday night at home, if they wish, and each topic takes no longer than one minute to read.
3) At Tuesday lunch, ask the reps how they feel about the sales concept picked in #2 above, what potential challenges there might be in adopting it, how it would benefit their sales processes, and even particular accounts that would be helped by using it.
4) Come to a general agreement that this "topic of the week" will be used in as many sales calls as possible for the rest of the week. Success stories and challenges will be discussed at the Lunch & Learn on Friday, so it's all going to be reinforced!
5) Have a follow up L&L session on Friday, so the reps will have had three days to use the techniques. Discuss how the techniques worked, share success stories, and share best practices on how others met the challenges of implementing the "technique of the week." Reinforcement of sales principles is the key to making sure people use them, so you'll want to have this follow-up session.
I guarantee that if you do this, even for two weeks out of the month, you will increase sales and team communication will improve, too. It's a great motivator as well, because reps love to talk about successes with their colleagues, but don't have a forum often enough. My telesales training sales courses cover all of the telesales tips you'll find in my blog, but Lunch & Learn is a great way to start using superior telesales skills to start improving right now. Check out the topics in my blog, and pick one today. And add L&L sessions to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Wed, Sep 03, 2008 @ 03:57 PM
While today's post is specifically about selling software development tools to the DoD, anyone selling anything to the DoD can increase sales by utilizing these skills, whether you're an inside sales or a field sales rep. I was very successful selling tools to the DoD when many of my sales colleagues could not, because they couldn't navigate the system well enough, and didn't ask as many good questions as they could have. Much of what I'll discuss today is from the curriculum I teach in my devtools classes. Here are a few tips that can help you to increase sales when you are selling to the Department of Defense and their contractors.
1) Titles are king. Get the title of everyone in the decision structure, so you know how high up the ladder you are, and who will be responsible for making the final decision. There will probably be consultants on board. If so, ask what their roles will be in the decision process.
2) Always ask the name of the project. Much of the time it will be a "black project" and they're not allowed to tell you the name. That's OK, because they'll have an alternate ersatz name that they just use for vendors, and they'll give that to you. The DoD can get pretty confusing at times, and the ersatz project name is one way for you to keep everyone knowing what you're talking about.
3) Ask what other elements in the DoD and defense contractors are involved with the project. Others will be contributing code, developing subsystems, you name it. You'll then want to contact these others to ensure they're all going with your solution, and not talking to your competition. Get contact names and titles from your prime contact. You want everyone on the same page.
4) Graphically chart the decision process by using an org chart. The best I ever saw do this was Pete Tarbox at the Mathworks. To chart one defense contractor's 82 lines of business, he had 4 walls of charts. In fact, his whole job was pretty much to chart this particular contractor, and because of his great work, his company was aware of pretty much every contract for which they had a solution. You don't have to use all four walls like Pete, just keep a paper or electronic graph (like Visio) handy so that you always know where you are with your primary contact as well as every other entity that touches your project and will need your solutions. Reps have lost big sales because they failed to keep track. In technical sales to the DoD, you don't want your competitor doing a better job or charting than you do.
5) Subscribe to a defense journal appropriate to your solution, and make contact with people mentioned in the articles and the authors themselves. They're the experts, and know others making decisions on solutions like yours. They may or may not give you other names, but folks in the DoD come to them for advice, and word on good solutions travels fast in the Defense Department. The best journal I've seen is CrossTalk, a terrific publication if you're selling tools to DoD clients. The website is www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2008/09/index.html You can subscribe there free of charge, and one of the Best Practices articles on this month's page will have some interest for you if you're selling tools. It's at www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2008/09/0809Goertzel.html I've sold millions of dollars of DoD solutions via contacts I made through CrossTalk. If you sell something other than tools, ask your DoD contacts for the name of the publically accessible journal they read. If it's sponsored by the government, it's free, and as a citizen, you can subscribe.
Perhaps the most critical key to remember is that to whomever you're speaking, you're the boss. Your tax dollars pay for the defense industry and its defense journals. It's in your best interest as a citizen to ensure that our country adopt the most effective solution possible. If you don't believe you've got the best solution on the planet, you shouldn't be selling it. But you do, and you can articulate that to anyone from a General to a consultant. Using the five points above, you should now be able to navigate through the Defense world to sell your solution more effectively. Add these to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Sep 01, 2008 @ 02:14 PM
One of the most common complaints I hear from sales reps is the lack of enough incoming leads. I always say that the best salespeople are great marketers, and the best marketers are great salespeople. Here's what I mean, and how you can solve this problem right from your own desk.
Here's a fact of life: Marketing will never provide you with enough leads. There are many variables that go into the marketing mix, and sometimes these lead generation techniques just don't work as well as they should. When they don't, as an inside rep with a quota, you've really got to provide your own. How do you do it? There are many ways, but let me tell you about one that worked for me. It will work for you, too, and as we teach in my telesales training courses, your job is to reinvent what's not working to create a solution that will. Reps with the best sales performance always do.
When I was a sales rep, I sold development tools to engineers, but I'd get leads from marketing that listed consultants as well. Consultants never bought anything from me or any of the other reps, so standard practice was to avoid calling them. Our standard in-house joke was that they were all looking for work, so the leads were perceived as being useless. Often, though, they'd go to work for companies that were real prospects. In other words, they sold consulting services to the same people that I sold tools to. So I took these "dead" leads and started calling a few of them. Yes, they were almost always looking for work. So I started finding them jobs, gratis, by calling my prospects, and asking them if they needed consulting services, after discussing my tools, of course. I started hooking up a lot of people, which enhanced my reputation within the tools industry. The consultants all loved me, and when they landed work, told their clients about me. My sales grew exponentially. By re-examining my concept of a "dead lead" and doing something nice for these consultants, I actually got a number of them "selling" for me.
If you've got a million dollar a year quota, you're essentially a CEO running your own company. Marketing (if you have that function within your company) may never get you the leads you need to overshoot your quota, so you've got to do it yourself. The bottom line here is that if you're not getting enough leads, you've got to generate your own. Superior sales lead generation is a matter of thinking creatively and coming up with your own plan instead of waiting for marketing to do it for you. If you have one that you've found effective, share it on the blog. And add creating your own marketing plan for your territory to your Best Practices playbook.