Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

Critical Steps in training your in-house Inside Sales team

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This week I’m delivering a presentation to the American Teleservices Association under the topic of Call Center Training: Trends, Techniques, and Tools. All of what I’ll be discussing comes directly from what I teach in my inside sales training courses, and it’s important enough that I’m including the ideas I’ll be discussing here in this week’s blog post. 

It’s in outline form, but all of you Inside Sales Directors and Managers will find enough data in it to compare it with how you’re training your team now. This training process has made thousands of reps successful, so take a look: 

You’ll want to train your inside sales team on the following 6 focus areas:

1) Pre-call research skills
2) Contact skills
3) Qualification and Questioning skills
4) Closing skills
5) Understanding and developing organizational structures
6) Objection handling

Defining the 6 most critical training focus areas 

1) Pre-call research skills
a) Prior same-company contacts in your CRM
b) The prospect company’s website
c) Prerequisite: ensure your reps all have their own LinkedIn profiles, and have added their customers and colleagues as contacts to their own LI profiles
c) Look at your prospect’s LinkedIn profile. Check for interesting background info as well as people in common
d) Prospect website, Hoovers or OneSource, if necessary to find the proper executive
e) Do reaserach in three minutes or fewer, so you can make your call KPIs

2) Contact skills

a) Have a concrete sales objective prior to making the call
b) Call High whenever possible
c) Use appropriate opening language to the title of the individual you’re addressing (Admins, execs, etc) 

3) Qualification and Questioning skills

a) Determine which questions must be asked to fully qualify the prospect. Included would be Timeframe, Requirements, Size of opportunity, Decision process, Budget

4) Closing skills

5) Understanding and developing organizational structures

6) Objection handling

Reinforce your training continually by:

1) Role playing through mock telephone calls
2) Side-by side, in booth coaching during actual telephone calls

Three of the most common issues I deal with in training

1) Failure to establish a valid call objective
2) Inability to call high
3) Lack of understanding of the prospect’s business, and how he or she will gauge the ROI of my proposed solution 

So there’s a précis of the model. Successful training programs are both an art and a science, and this model presents many of the most important scientific elements. Now you’ve just got to add the art. Add this model to your Best Management Playbook.