Sales Prospecting Perspectives

By the time you have finished reading this, there will have been 37,349 new profile pictures on Facebook, 3,400 new connections added to your network, 15,654 publicly +1’s,8,700 new viral videos and approximately 1.2 million tweets. (**Editor’s Note: These numbers are completely fictional and used for dramatic emphasis, but I imagine that real numbers are similar.) Interesting things will be shared and pinned, blogs will be written and the amount of clout I carry will be graded on a daily basis. Randy Moss will be able to hold his own interview session, and have it broadcast online as if it’s the 6:00 news.

This is a question that I have had to answer/strategize on for every teleprospecting program that I have been a part of here at AG Salesworks.   Over the 8+ years I have run a number of programs for organizations that provide a solution focused on Security, from email encryption, SSO and IAM solutions, to Network Security solutions.  Reflecting on this experience I have found that this question is one that is extremely important when running a program that is focused on finding actionable sales opportunities for a Security solution.   

I’ve been lucky enough to have been managing wireless networking projects here at AG since 2005. Early on it seemed that every other person we reached out had an active project to either install WLAN in their corporate offices or had a plan to upgrade throughout their entire campus. At the time we had a couple of things working in our favor. First of all the economic climate was simply in a better place than it is today, so it seemed that budget generally tended to be available or could have been easily allocated. Secondly, wireless was still somewhat of a fresh concept at the time and it seemed that every employee or student had the expectation that it should be available in the workplace and on campus.

With the hospital industry being a sub sector of one of the largest industries in the U.S. (the Healthcare industry), it’s no surprise that your inside teleprospecting team is calling, or will be calling, into hospitals at some point to uncover potential opportunities. Speaking from experience, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome when calling into hospitals. The biggest challenge for me was always figuring out which hospitals were part of which larger Corporate Health Systems. With this in mind, I reached out to our Inside Sales Reps about their experiences when calling into the industry. I received an overwhelming amount of responses and it became pretty clear very quickly as to how popular targeting this industry is, which gave me more of a reason to blog today about how to overcome common obstacles when calling into healthcare.

So you wanna start prospecting into the mining industry, huh (no pun intended)? Well, you came to the right place. Grab yourself something to drink and have a seat, because do I have a story for you.

About a year ago I competed in one of those 10-13 mile obstacle course geared towards testing the participants’ physical and mental limits. A buddy of mine had asked me to do it with him and I thought, “Hey I’m in good shape. I run, cross train, lift weights …. no problem.” I was fairly confident that I was going to finish pretty easily and then I’d probably hang out and drink beers while the out of shape slobs struggled to get through the course, crying until they eventually quit. Pansies.

Just read a great blog by Bob Terson entitled, "What is your word worth" .  I could not agree more that honesty and integrity are the cornerstones of success in business and in life.  The following paragraph in Bob’s Book, Selling Fearlessly: A Master Salesman’s Secrets for the One-Call-Close Salesperson sums it up nicely.

As a manger of client operations part of my responsibility is to help train our business development reps. In one of our classes, Qualification Training, we go through the process involved in a Teleprospecting call and the qualifying information that needs to be attained. Anyone who has been in sales knows that in order to convert a particular conversation to a “qualified lead” you need to uncover their pains and needs, budget, decision making process and time estimate for closing. Here are a few tips from this training session that I feel have been particularly helpful, not for me, but other members of our team as well:

I have always really loved calling into/managing projects related to the Pharmaceutical Industry. The reason why, to be quite honest, is that this industry seems to grow more and more every day, and prospects tend to want to spend money to be the best option out there (and frankly from what I have seen, they have the money to do it ). Typically, prospects within this industry are open to hearing more about how they can run their operations more efficiently and effectively to get their drugs and other products to market faster. Based on my experience, here are my top three tips to ensure a successful teleprospecting campaign for the Pharmaceutical Industry:

Tis the season for football fanatics and Super Bowl Sunday is upon us!  I can almost smell the chili and Buffalo wings now.  In preparing to write my blog for this week I was inspired by a blog by our own Laney Pilpel emphasizing the importance of not settling for average performance.  I got to thinking about the performance of the individual versus the performance of a team here at AG.  To most, inside sales can seem like an individual “sport” like tennis or golf.  But here at AG what is cultivated is much more of a team vibe much like well…football!  Our Directors and Managers do a great job keeping us motivated but also as inside sales reps motivate each other.  Just like in a huddle before a big game we motivate and strategize with one another as to how we will reach our goals and succeed.