Preparation: A Key to Success for Inside Sales and Customer Service

Have you prepared properly for your inside sales project? Whether it's a new assignment for the team or whether you've tasked your customer support personnel with revenue responsibilities beyond up-sells and cross sells, preparation is key of a successful endeavor. 

I was once tasked with the assignment to start an outbound lead generating  team for a small company. On my first day of work, the company owner gave me a list of customers and told me to call them "to see how they are doing". At least I had tons of experience doing similar projects. But how often do we do the same thing to brand new, relatively untrained inside sales personnel?

Let's make sure that we increase our odds of success by doing some planning first. This is important whether you are creating a framework and process for a team of 10 or whether this is your solo show.

Here are some tips for getting started:

• Make sure you know exactly what you want to accomplish. Too many people decide to add inside sales to their business mix and then tell their customer service people to "call and see if you can get them to reorder". 
• Your objective should be well thought out, measurable and specific.
• Break every thing out. No detail is too small. 
• Visualize what you want the results to look like and work back from there. 
• Consider the optimum style of selling. Is this a prospect effort or repeat customer sales? 
• Metrics are important. You can't improve if you don't measure. Consider tracking the following: How many orders will you expect - hourly, daily, weekly? What dollar amount? How many dials per day? How many contacts? What products should be suggested? How much of each do you want to sell? 

Without doing this type of thought process up-front, you will be running a muddled mess within 3 months.Taking the time to prepare thoroughly may push your implimentation date back, it will be worth it in order for the project to succeed. 

Important Metrics for Inside Sales – Part 1

Sales is a numbers games. Now some people will agree, but some people will also disagree. The ones who disagree will spend a lot of time talking about quality of calls and doing appropriate research and I agree with them... to an extent. Skills are all very important. Without a good skill set, without arming yourself beforehand with necessary information about your contact and their organization, you will find it difficult to be successful in sales.

However, neglecting metrics can keep you in a holding pattern. It’s true… if you don’t speak with enough people, you simply can’t get enough sales. The techniques and the research help you make the most of your opportunity, but if you don’t speak with enough people, you won’t get the sales.

Let’s take a look at the basic metrics for an inside sales professional:

First, we want the broadest, rawest data: how many dials are you making within a specified time frame. In any calling assignment you must take the time to carve a specified amount of time to put aside specifically for making phone calls. It’s very easy to put off a calling assignment or put it aside for another time that may not come.

 When managers come to me and want to get skill training for their reps, the first thing I ask is how many dials per hour do the inside sales people make. Often, management cannot give a number – it’s never been measured.  But this is the essential , first number that we need.  Everything else flow from this. 

We must make enough dials to reach enough people.  This can be tough if it is not a primary job responsibility. You may not realize how few calls are made until you begin to measure them. Also, by asking them to keep track, you are raising awareness and accountability of the function – which may raise the number all by itself.

A low dial per hour count is an activity that is fixed through coaching not skills training.  What barriers have you put in the way of making calls? If people are making calls as part of their responsibilities and not their entire job, it is not unusual for people to put off making calls. By keeping tabs on this, you are able to measure how much they are actually performing this activity. 

Often people like to research before making a call. That’s good. What’s not good is when research seems to be the overwhelming activity your inside rep is performing. Did you hire a researcher or a sales person? Remember, although it’s important to be prepared, sometimes people do too much - and sometimes the information is not accurate. Remember your customers’ websites are marketing tools for your customers.  Although it will certainly give you insight into the organization as will other sites giving news about a company, sometimes the information is misleading or just plain wrong. This is why it’s always best to simply pick up the phone. The phrase analysis by paralysis was coined for a reason. 

Increasing your dials is the easier way to increase production.  It does not require any selling behavioral skills training but it may require your inside people to look at the job in a new way.