on sales teams who are office based. Inside sales are now the primary
sales channel to handle inbound leads and the engine that drives social
selling. These sales reps have more responsibility and power in the
selling process than ever before. So ask yourself, ‘is my company’s
inside sales team being utilized to their full potential?’ If not,
listen up because whether they are on the phones, sending emails or
relationship building through social media, following these tips will
help you tactfully and strategically increase the impact, effectiveness,
success of your inside sales organization.
Tip 1 – Get the Right Tools
If your inside sales teams are tasked with making outbound calls, ask
yourself ‘how long did it take them to source this data?’ Does it take
up most of their time and energy just identifying relevant prospects?
This process is often tedious and less productive in terms of selling.
Software and tools that exist today can dramatically increase the
effectiveness of your sales team. With automated lead generation
software/tools, the rough work is done for you. It tailors its prospect
generation to your specific criteria and provides you with a continuous
flow of your most relevant and influential leads with detailed
information. Automated lead generation significantly reduces the time
you spend simply identifying prospects because this technology produces a
continuous supply of custom profiles and contact information based on
social data. It makes converting leads faster and easier than ever
before. This means you can maximize the inside sales teams time by
getting them to focus their energy on outbound calling and social
selling.
Tip 2 – Respond Immediately
The most effective way of getting a prospect to engage with your
business is if your sales people contact them immediately after their
web submission. Research has revealed that a lead that is contacted
within five minutes is 100x more likely to answer than if a sales rep
were to respond after a half hour. As well as that, the qualification
rate is 21x greater if a prospect is called back immediately.
Interestingly enough, waiting 30 minutes or more will drastically
decrease these chances of getting a qualified lead to answer a phone
call, or any lead for that matter. So sales teams must act fast and
contact those leads immediately.
Tip 3 – Know your Ratios
Playing the ratio game implies driving a higher rate of success with
the lists, offers and context in which you sell. A smart selling
strategy involves taking note of how many calls it takes to have a
conversation with a prospect, and monitor how many conversations it
takes to arrange an appointment or even make a sale. They are aware of
which day and time of day is best to call. They track which industries
have the highest success rates. Knowing your ratios gives inside sales
reps meaningful insight, ultimately improving their consistency of
production.
- Collect Useful Information from Every Call:
Making the most of each phone conversations by asking leads when the
most convenient time to contact them is can save sales reps a lot of
wasted time. - What Time of Day is Best?
– This may seem obvious but it’s important to know that calling at
certain times of day can generally improve your contact rates.
Contacting a lead between 8:00 and 9:00am or 4:00 and 5:00pm has proved
to be the best time to reach them. Lunch time is the worst time to make
contact. Make sure your sales team takes into account the different time
zones for each lead they contact. - Which Days of the Week to Call?
– Just as significant as the time of day, the day of the week also
plays a role in contact ratios. Getting a hold of prospects can be
difficult but Wednesdays and Thursdays proved to be the best days for
contacting sales leads. Unsurprisingly, Mondays are not great. Tuesdays
happen to be the worst.
Tip 4 – Know When to Stop Calling
As well as the ratio game, inside sales is also a numbers game.
Results are driven by volume. But the top inside sales reps understand
that ringing 100 leads 10 times each will be more successful than
ringing 20 leads 50 times each. They play the volume game but they play
it intelligently. They know when to stop ringing.
Once they know their ratios, sales reps are able to pinpoint that
sweet spot where they have the highest chance of closing a deal or
arranging an appointment. Once that range is discovered, they can manage
their database around it. When 20 leads accept or reject a sales
proposal, they are quickly replaced with a new batch of 20 leads so they
can get more prospects through the cycle.
Tip 5 – Creates a Sense of Urgency
You can be sure that within every sales interaction, prospects will
ask themselves ‘what’s in it for me?’ As a sales manager, you don’t want
your reps to make a call only to ask for something. When they engage
with prospects, whether it be over the phone, through email, or in a
social networking group, they need to be offered something of value.
Something that creates a sense of urgency in the buyers mind. Something
that solves an issue. Something that enlightens them. For free. No
strings attached. This is a tactful way of ‘breaking the ice’ with each
lead they interact with and also establishes inside sales reps as
credible and likable figures to do business with.
A focused Inside sales rep always makes sure that the solutions they
are describing are relevant to challenges the prospect is currently
facing. When presenting prospects with a solution to their business
problems, a successful inside sales rep always makes sure to stress how
their product/service has helped many others within the prospect’s
industry to overcome these issues. This cleverly increases the prospects
interest or desire by giving their product/service credibility, while
also decreasing their sales reluctance.
Tip 6 – Don’t Sound like a Salesperson
Your leads hear sales pitches constantly. They get phone calls all
day every day from different companies trying to sell them something.
Make sure your inside sales team keep this in mind every time they dial
their number and modify their approach accordingly.
Receiving repetitive calls from sales reps can leave buyers reluctant
to answer, making it difficult to get a hold of prospects in the first
place. In fact, it is costly in terms of wasting time. Knowing that they
are on the phone with a salesperson often makes prospects a little
defensive and guarded.
The only way to resolve this issue is if your callers don’t sound
like a sales person. They want to approach the conversation like two
business people having a conversation as oppose to a sales rep rallying
out a speech. As tough as this may sound, the way a sales person
approaches the conversation can mean the difference between closing a
deal and a lead anxiously trying to hang up the phone. So make sure each
seller does a little research into who their prospect is before they
call, discover their interests, the company they work for, etc. This
snippets of information can be used as an ice breaker to get the
conversation flowing. It makes your sellers seem more relatable,
trustworthy and worth listening to.
Tip 7 – Know How to Respond to Objections
This inside sales tip can create an immediate improvement in your
sales teams confidence on the phones and selling success. Sales reps
must train themselves to respond strategically to objections. Your sales
team are inevitably going to face objections to their offers more often
than not. This rejection is the part of sales that cold callers dread
most. Over and over, they will hear:
‘Now is just not a good time’
‘I’m not interested in buying anything’
‘Why are you calling me?’
‘Just send me your information and I’ll get back to you.’
In order to improve their chances of making a sale, as well as make
cold calling a lot easier, tell them to make a list of all possible
objections they can think of. Then, tell them to prepare the perfect
response for each objection to turn the conversation around.
A successful inside sales rep contemplates over why a prospect would
accept an offer or arrange a meeting and analyzes why prospects would
reject their offer. Like tracking ratios, it is important to track these
trends. By understanding what buyers need and what buyers are put off
by, sales reps can adjust their selling strategy by highlighting the how
their product/service will benefit buyers, and prepare strategic
answers to overcome objections to their offer. Clever sales reps will
analyze weakness in each response, and overcome any holes in their
position.
So there are my 7 useful tips that every inside sales rep can benefit
from. Granted, embracing these few ideas involves some sales training
for your inside sales team, but they are ideas worth investing your time
and energy in. You won’t increase your sales revenue by having your
sales team work harder, they just need to work smarter.
Get an Inside View on Sales
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