Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

5 tips when making the transition from a BtoC to a BtoB inside sales rep

  

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In the past few weeks, I’ve trained and coached several dozen sales development and telesales reps. All my business is Business to Business, but lately, a number of reps coming from a former Business-to-Consumer inside sales job have joined the teams of my business-to-business clients. A few of them have been struggling with changing their conversational patterns from those they learned calling people at home to become more professional when calling into a business environment. If you’re (or someone on your team) is in that category, here are some common issues I’ve found, and ways to fix them: 

1) Asking permission to speak doesn’t work. Starting the call with “Is this a good time to talk” doesn’t sound consultative, and is an invitation to the prospect to terminate the call (everyone’s busy). Instead, begin your call by telling the prospect who you are, what you do, and what you want, an opening statement that should be in alignment with your call objective. 

2) “How are you today? (HAYT)” should never be used to begin a cold call, and most of the time, not on warm calls either. BtoB prospects are extremely resistant to call that sound like the BtoC calls they get at home, and those calls almost invariably begin with HAYT. Instead, use the formula in #1 above for a more compelling opening. 

3) You have great research tools for BtoB calling. Use them. In BtoC, you probably don’t know a whole lot about the person you’re calling. But in BtoB you do. For one example, you should always visit the website of your prospect company before you call, because you can determine, by looking at the prospect’s business, just how your offering could fit, and you can make direct reference to what you see on the website. You can also find the names and titles of the company’s executives, business initiatives, and often, quotes from them regarding where they’re evolving the business. Become efficient at extrapolating this data quickly (3 minutes or fewer), so you can make your call volume. 

4) Your CRM database is your best friend. Keep it fed. The CRM is the backbone of every inside sales department in the BtoB world, and often BtoC reps, used to transactional one-off business, aren’t familiar with the importance of logging every conversation into the database. As a result, many transitional reps can’t remember exactly what was discussed in the last conversation. And previous conversations are usually the jump-off points on return outbound calls. One rep with whom I worked recently used his email log instead of inputting data into the CRM. As a result, he had to go through a series of emails just to remember what was on the table. It took him nearly 10 minutes of research time to figure it out, whereas if he’d had it in his CRM, he would have had the information in seconds. 

5) Don’t type your notes while talking. When you do, you miss lots of important ROI (return on investment) clues that prospects tend to mention almost parenthetically. Instead, actively listen, ask open ended questions (“Tell me more about that”), and engage in a conversation, rather than working on your stenographic skills. You’ll engage the prospect better that way, and sound more consultative. 

BtoB is a world away from BtoC, especially where phone sales is concerned. So if you’re making that transition, add these 5 tips to your Best Practices Playbook.