Recently, I was a member of a team in charge of figuring out how to pick up leads that weren’t being touched, much less converted . It was a good problem to have, but still a problem.
Our outside team was focused on bringing in new, enterprise-sized accounts and their thinking wasn’t flawed: close fewer big accounts and hit quota faster than multiple, smaller deals. The issue was we were leaving behind a massive market of untapped opportunities.
The solution led us to build an inside sales division that would qualify, and then tee-up appointments for the outside squad.
Here’s where we started:
Build a detailed run-book covering: hiring, on-boarding and training, performance metrics and reviews, promotions, scripts, incremental team scale strategy, list building, lead prioritization, management techniques and marketing templates.
- Hire folks with experience that demonstrated they had the right skillset. Usually this looked like someone who had a proven track record of selling door-to-door, B2B products like copiers.
- Redevelop Salesforce.com to both incorporate this new sales channel and align with outside sales, account managers and marketing team.
- Mine, scrub and organize the pool of untouched leads in Salesforce.com.
- Train team on “Smart Calling” – educated communications that add value to the prospect.
A career development plan was established so that those wanting it could potentially move into an outside position. We had created a pool of talent that no longer required us to pay recruiter fees and since they had been vetted, the turnover was dramatically reduced.
What we ended up with:
Within 12 months, this sales team crushed our expectations by creating over 10 million in opportunities and increased new logos by 21%.