Bumped into a blog from Pacifica Group that had an excellent discussion of information that should be considered when starting an inside sales initiative.
A few items include:
Very informative for companies that do teleprospecting on a regular basis.
Bad businesses die. Period. If there’s ever an axiom that has held true throughout the ages, it’s that one. No matter how unique, how revolutionary, how needed, you simply cannot be a bad business and expect people to continue to pay you. Bad service, bad products, bad delivery, bad fulfillment, all of it—every last element—will kill you. The competition will either catch up, or buy you out.
Especially now that the Internet has changed the rules of customer service. Businesses used to be able to get away with the occasional, or even frequent bad habit, because, well, people didn’t have as many choices. Now they do. If they don’t like you, they can go across town, or even across states without ever leaving their living room sofa. If you suck (for lack of a more descriptive word), and suck consistently, people find out, and usually sooner than later.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are always a few great companies that set themselves apart from their competition. In every sector and industry, whether it be a handful or just a single company, there are always organizations that consistently outperform their counterparts in their given fields.
This is especially evident in the over-used yet still eminently applicable corollary of professional sports. There are always a half-dozen or so franchises that seem to be in the upper half of the standings year-in and year-out. The Yankees. The Cowboys. The Celtics. Sports brand names that through time have come to be linked with success. Sure, they go through rough patches now and then, but overall their performance tends to remain consistent. Seasons come and go, but they’re almost always in the playoff hunt, they seem to hire good coaches, and they’re consistently putting themselves in positions to succeed.
But between the range of “truly bad” and “truly great” companies runs an entire gamut of mediocre. From “just good enough to not slide off the face of the earth,” to “almost great but not quite getting over the hump,” there are hundreds of thousands of small- to mid-sized businesses trying to make the leap. The hardest part of being stuck here? No matter where you fall in the spectrum of mediocrity, the effect is essentially the same—you’re holding yourselves back from success. For whatever reason, from that painful, expensive-to-fix flaw in your production system, to your poor management of customer service, to that lone supplier that keeps missing shipping deadlines, you’re being railroaded from your destination.
Now, here’s the catch—you can be profitable by being mediocre. Really. You don’t have to please the world; in fact, like a lot of things, you really only have to do “just enough” to survive. And quite frankly, a lot of managers and CEOs are okay with that. As long as they’re getting paid, as long as things are “okay,” they’re fine with mediocrity, and if you’re one of those types of people/companies/management teams, well, then, don’t ever change. Or at least, only change enough to not become a bad company, because as we said before, bad companies die. Mediocre ones can stay in business, bad ones can’t, so you at least have to be progressive enough to not slip into the “bad” category.
But is that what your customers really want? If the shoe was on the other foot, would you really want to hang your hat on an organization whose motto was “We’re #57!” or “Aiming for mediocrity, one day at a time”? What is it, then, that sets apart the truly great from the merely good or mediocre?
Regardless of organization, it typically comes down to three things:
Talent
Leadership
Innovation
That’s it. There’s no “special sauce,” no magic formula. It doesn’t take market projections or demographics. It simply takes dedication to the ideal of meeting the needs of your customers, and then allocating the resources to do it.
All three are required. You can’t have just one, or even two of the three. Without even one of the three, the other two are meaningless. Talent and leadership without innovation means your core product is good, but you’re left in the dark the second the market changes. Talent and innovation without leadership means you’ve got the best products and services, but can’t ever execute on delivering more than a handful of them—organizational needs are unmet. Leadership and innovation without talent means your products and services are inferior to the competition, regardless of how well organized and compelling your business model is. Without the right talent, the competition is always going to be doing it better, cheaper, or both, because they have the right people producing for them.
Again, the sports world analogy applies. In NFL football, teams stockpile talent any way they can—draft, free agency, trade. Owners hire the best coaches they can for organization and motivation. Game day preparation requires constant innovation. Running a five-year-old, or even one-year-old offense and defense is a formula for defeat. Other teams are far too driven to remain static. That doesn’t mean teams abandon their core principles. It simply means that they find new wrinkles from year-to-year, even game-to-game.
In the end, the choice is not between existence or non-existence. Continued existence or bankruptcy are simply a collective result of all of the other decisions. The real choice is between underwhelming mediocrity or greatness. And it is a choice. Choosing not to choose is still a choice, it’s simply a choice for the status quo. Passive acceptance of existing modes of thinking, existing modes of operation, is a choice to accept the results you are already getting. The conscious choice to change is the only way to ultimately increase success.
Sales, as we all know, is both an art and science. Organizations spend thousands, if not millions of dollars a year in sales training, marketing, and technology to stay ahead of the game. However, when it’s all said and done, there’s only three actual ways to increase bottom line sales—and no, it doesn’t involve the Mafia, voodoo, or Britney Spears. Regardless of which tools, technologies, processes, training, or marketing are used, sales organizations can only improve performance by doing one (or all) of the following:
Improve the company’s sales close rate.
It’s nothing fancy, just convince more of your prospects that you’re the right fit. This element is not about increasing the number of prospects, it’s about getting better at closing the ones you already have. In many cases this involves sales training; but frequently includes technology systems like CRM and SFA (sales force automation). The most popular tool for this end of the sales spectrum is hosted CRM champion Salesforce.com. CRM and sales force automation tools like Salesforce provide the ability to manage tasks and events, information, pipelines, and sales opportunities to effectively improve close rates, and it’s been proven to work. Statistically speaking, well-designed CRM and SFA show a 17 percent return on investment (per CSO Insights).
Increase the total dollar value per close.
In other words, close bigger deals. This is one aspect that technology doesn’t really help with. If your product is good enough, compelling enough, and your sales reps are skilled enough, then you are likely to see bigger deals, but otherwise there’s no magic technology wand that can make this happen.
Increase the total number of prospects.
It makes sense, doesn’t it, that if I increase my number of prospects, all other things being equal, I’ll get an increase in sales. How do we increase prospects? We either have to generate more leads and qualify them (marketing), or we have to get better at qualifying the leads we already get (lead management). Strangely, this is one of the most overlooked aspects of sales and marketing in the entire business world. Dick Lee, founder of sales consulting firm High Yield Methods compares poor lead management to “shooting yourself in the foot with a pistol, then getting out the automatic assault rifle to do it right”. Proper lead management can literally multiply revenues by 25, 50, 100, 200 percent. So what are you doing about it?
Well, if you’re already using Salesforce.com to address item one, and item two isn’t really technology dependent, how do you address item three? One simple solution, that has inexplicably fallen out of vogue, is to do timely, relevant phone calling. Why? Because it’s proven that active phone calling, when done in conjunction with voice mail and email, creates a marketing synergy that boosts response rates five to ten times over doing just phone calling, email, or voice messaging alone. All sales reps understand this intuitively; few have the patience, time, or tools to reap the benefits.
The answer? The Salesforce.com PowerDialer™, developed by InsideSales.com, Inc. The PowerDialer™ is an automated telephone dialer for sales agents that integrates directly to your Salesforce.com system that triples the number of phone calls an agent can make in the same given amount of time. Contact, call back, and conversion ratios are dramatically boosted by using automated voice messaging and email to stay in contact with your prospects at the click of a button. The InsideSales.com PowerDialer for Salesforce.com has been proven to increase total prospects by 50 to 300 percent—effectively doubling, even tripling total sales revenues. What would an increase of even 25 percent more qualified prospects do to your bottom line?
For a demonstration and more information, visit visit http://www.insidesales.com/salesforce-tools.php and see what a PowerDialer™ can do for you.
Now, lean in real close because I don’t want to say this too loudly: you will be 100 times more likely to reach your web-captured leads if you call them back in the first 5 minutes than you will after just 30 minutes! Oops, I got a little excited there and it looks like everyone probably heard that but I couldn’t help it–it truly is something to shout about. I mean, consider the possibility of having a power dialer with integrated CRM–a CRM chock full of power tools for automating and streamlining the processes that bog down your B2B sales force! If you are capturing leads from web forms, did you know that you are literally throwing half of them out the (figurative) window by letting them sit in a database or inbox for a day or more?
In 2007, MIT researchers found a link between amount of time til callback and success in a. reaching the lead, and b. qualifying that lead. As I said, 100 times more likely to reach the person in the first 5 minutes, but an astounding 21 times more likely to qualify that lead if they are called in 5 rather than 30 minutes! I must apologize for all the exclamation points, it’s terribly unprofessional, but I’m a little excited. Efficiency of both time and money are two of my very most favorite things and this concept just reeks of both of them: you are saving money with every lead you don’t waste, and saving time by only having to call them once (most of the time).
If you want to read the complete report of the MIT Study you can go here, because there are a lot more things to learn. They were able to figure out the best day and time for reaching people, as well as the statistics on reaching a lead on repeated attempts (I’ll give you a hint: the more you nag the less responsive they are…).
I hope you’re as excited about this news as I am, and please feel free to leave comments. (Unless you’re a can of spam, cuz I have enough of that already.)
I am surprised to discover that I am fascinated by some of this stuff I’m learning at my new job. I would not have thought that dialers would be so interesting. Did you know that there are different kinds of dialers? And that is why sometimes when you get called by a telemarketer there is no one there. I hate that…so much worse than just talking to them for a minute and finding out if I want what they got, ya know?? Anyway, I guess that kind of dialer is called a predictive dialer. It actually dials several numbers at once, and it does this before the phone rep is even on the line, and basically blindsides them with calls, relentlessly. That doesn’t sound like a fun job at all, by the way. And no wonder they sometimes sound a little disoriented when you answer! This dialer just pounds through the numbers, losing a lot of them along the way because so many of the calls are placed and then the dialer hangs up on them before they’re answered.
Another kind of dialer is called a power dialer and it seems a bit more sophisticated–like it could have cocktails with visiting diplomats, or whatever. Haha! But when compared to the predictive dialer, it is more refined, truly. It allows the phone rep to choose when to place a call. This dialer calls one number at a time, and it’s still pretty time efficient but it doesn’t waste leads or waste people’s time.
Leads are the lifeblood of many sales-driven businesses, and yet they neglect to properly nurture their leads, letting many possible sales wither away—or worse, end up in the hands of a competitor. There is a 5-part strategy to respond to leads with efficiency and care and will effortlessly keep you in contact with leads for as long as it takes to resolve their need.
Immediate Response is the first and arguably most important aspect of this strategy. Yes, I said, “immediate”. Does this sound impossible? Well, it’s not. If you’re using a web form to capture contact information there is an easy way to make it work and it could vastly increase your sales. A recent MIT study proved that the sooner a lead is contacted, the higher the success rate. In 2007, Dr. James Oldroyd sought to find the best time to call leads, and the best day. The results were shocking: the odds of contacting leads called back within the first 5 minutes were 100 times higher than at 30 minutes, and the odds of qualifying that lead were 21 times higher for the same time frame! So, yes—respond immediately and you are well on your way to making that sale! Optimal Response is another part of the strategy. This is an action-oriented method of keeping on top of your leads and plays more of a supporting role in the Lead Response Drama—it is used for balancing all requests for information. The idea behind it is that not every call in the sales process must be made immediately, just that first one. The imperative is to respond wisely: if it is not an urgent matter and you call immediately, you appear over-eager, or if it’s a question they’ll need answered within a certain time frame you’ll respond accordingly.Continual Response is the third piece of the puzzle. It is the process of managing an unanswered first call over a period of two weeks. During that time, this tool juggles the time of day and day of week to make a perfect blend of when to call. The average salesman calls a lead 4-5 times, and then gives up. With this system he is nearly twice as likely to make contact before running out of attempts. Some leads are up to $50 each, and only 45% of them are contacted but with this system we see a remarkable 87% contact rate!Consistent Response is for contacts that are interested but not ready to purchase or who simply need more time. In these cases it is vital to stay in touch with them over a period of up to two years. This portion of the Response Management strategy includes logic: the software will use various media sources to communicate with the lead including fax, email, and phone calls. It is fully interactive and is designed in such a way that it will adjust its attempts based on the reaction of the lead.Presence Response is the segment of the response process that is responsible for managing trigger events. This is linked back to the first step, Immediate Response: in this case, you call immediately after they fill out the form as well, with the intent of taking full advantage of the presence in their mind of the problem they’re trying to solve and the “top of mind awareness”. If you have sought a solution to a problem or information about a product or service on the internet, then you have probably filled out a web form. Imagine how you would react if you received a call with an answer to your question or a solution to your problem within the hour? It would be so much more relevant and so much more useful. With this system, leads are constantly being managed at the proper level of attention.
Of the several varieties of dialers, power dialers are the most refined and the most customer-friendly. For a call center whose goal is to churn through thousands of numbers a day, this may not be the best tool for the job. However, if a business hopes to foster deeper customer relations, to make calls to senior management, or to live by a quality-over-quantity motto, then a power dialer is the luxury vehicle required for that purpose.
A power dialer is the first step toward streamlining the entire process of making business-to-business calls. This dialer automates a significant amount of the process by managing the list of numbers and dialing, which allows for up to 30% increased productivity over manual dialing. Although predictive dialers automate the entire process, the power dialer is superior for several reasons.
Top on that list is that with a power dialer, each customer is called individually and treated with dignity, unlike the cattle-herding attempts of predictive or ratio dialers. Even though the power dialer is technically less efficient than its faster-paced counterparts, it still results in a substantial increase in productivity.
By allowing each lead the space in which to be processed there is drastically reduced waste—more leads are closed, and fewer are lost to the ghost in the machine that is a predictive dialer. By taking this approach, a solid return on investment is produced and even smaller call centers are able to operate at a fraction of the cost.
With predictive dialers there is a problem with the phone system getting ahead of the phone rep—calls will be placed, and answered, but the lead is in effect left hanging, while waiting for the caller to respond. Very often this results in a hang up from the lead’s side and generally cultivates a high level of annoyance from those on the receiving end. This is not a practice that any company would want to be involved with if it is trying to build a relationship with a future client, customer, or associate. Because a power dialer puts the control in the hands of the caller, that never happens.
Power dialers are a solid investment for any company, but especially for a business-to- business call center. They boost productivity, keep lead costs down, and help maintain smooth customer relations.
It’s a matter of history now–the denizens of academia and punditry have deemed the late ’90s technology boom the official “Dot Com” era. You remember, it was only yesterday. The Web was going to be the savior of business, the end-all and be-all of sales and marketing. No more hunting for leads, they could now come to you, pre-qualified and ready to buy. Cold calling was going to be a thing of the past, every company would now be saddled with a Utopia of organic growth from its own personal Eden–the company website. Sales organizations could just sit back and watch the revenue roll in. If cash was ever going to grow on trees, the World Wide Web was the acorn, all a business had to do was water it occasionally and just get out of the way.
As it turned out, the situation proved to be just the opposite. Over the past ten years sales have become more difficult, buyers more resistant to traditional sales techniques. It turns out that potential buyers who pre-qualify themselves have just as much chance of passing you by as choosing you to begin with. We now have to pay search engines to get advertised on their sites; letting potential customers find us organically is just too risky. Why should they have to click through three pages of results to get to your company’s website when the guy who paid to have his show up first is probably going to get the first click?
As we all know, search engine optimization is its own industry now; it’s not uncommon for a business to spend thousands of dollars a month in Web marketing. Being the first result on a Google search is bankable revenue; like traditional TV advertising, no one would do it if SEO didn’t get results.
With all of this in mind you’d think sales organizations in today’s environment would treat their precious few Web leads like solid gold. Think about it–when your company gets a Web lead it means that somebody
A. Took the time to look up your company, likely sifting through a list of search engine results to get there;
B. Is at the very least open to the idea of purchasing your product or surface;
C. Actually typed their personal information into a web form, hoping against hope that their information was not going to be sold off to the highest bidder; and most importantly,
D. If you contact that lead within minutes of receiving it, he or she is likely still sitting at their computer surfing the Web, practically begging you to interrupt their moment of Internet reverie with a well-designed, targeted presentation.
Does your organization think like this? Do you think like this? If you don’t, you are killing, literally, killing your sales organization’s chances of taking their performance to the next level. Does your company treat your best leads—leads that come directly from the company Web site—the same way they would a run-of-the-mill business card casually palmed at a business convention?
Ask yourself, “What’s our company’s average response time to new leads coming off of the Web?” If you’re like most organizations, it’s probably anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. It probably gets sent in some form (email, spreadsheet) to a sales manager, who may or may not let it sit for several hours before he passes it on to a sales rep, who may or may not let it sit for several more hours (or days) before finally pulling it out and making a phone call.
Now suppose the sales rep doesn’t make contact immediately. How many times do they call back? Three? Four? Five? Industry wisdom says if your sales reps don’t hit a new lead a minimum of seven times that they’re likely not even going to make one initial contact. If they don’t make that contact after five attempts, do they have a planned, consistent way of recycling the lead? Every tossed-out lead is literally money in the trash, especially if they come from the Web.
Let me be up front–I work for a company who provides hosted CRM services. I also happen to work for the only hosted CRM product in the world that integrates automated power dialing directly into the system. My point is not to get you to visit InsideSales.com, although we’d certainly appreciate the opportunity to do business with you. The point is, if you’re not hitting your new Web leads within minutes after the request arrives you are costing your business money. Period.
It’s a proven fact that when used properly even a basic CRM product–I’m talking bare-bones, no frills, run of the mill CRM–can increase sales from 10 to 15 percent. Now imagine coupling that with a product that could automatically connect an available agent by phone to a new lead, send a targeted marketing email, and add the lead to an automated marketing campaign that would continue to hit the lead daily for the next two weeks? What if you could double or triple the number of leads you qualify each week or each month simply by taking advantage of technology programmed to act the instant a new lead arrives off the Web?
This is not an advertising piece, though I can say with pride that InsideSales.com is the only product I know of that combines all of these options. The real point is that organizations who don’t take advantage of these opportunities are losing money. If you spend more than $1,000 a month in Web marketing, are you getting the most from your dollars spent? If your new Web leads are sitting longer than an hour, it might be time to reevaluate your process.
We have seen a growing trend among failed CRM implementation - over-complication.
It takes a company a fair amount of maturity to recognize that they need to purchase a CRM application. Reasons for this include admission that things need to get better, that existing systems are not working, etc. So generally, the CEO, sales manager, or IT director will begin the search for a new CRM.
This is an interesting process. For the CEO, he or she will be looking for a system that does not require a large capital outlay, but can demonstrate the needed ROI - simply put, they are looking for immediate improvement at a reasonable cost. The sales manager will often look for a system to improve his team’s performance, and is purchasable within their defined budget. The IT director will select a product that they can control. The selection process is a little like dating. They are looking for a product that has the features they want, at the price needed, with a company they trust. Personalities of the sales rep selling the product and the potential customer must also mesh. When all of these things come into alignment, a purchase is made.
From the day of the purchase, there is a count down that starts. This count down time the time from purchase to where a CRM is providing the needed ROI to justify the expense. Every customer has a time in their head that they have determined is ‘too much’ (this is a time frame that is sold as feature during the sales process, thus expectations are set for the customer). It is up to the CRM provider and the team in the customer side to get the system performing in that time.
This is where the problem begins. CRM applications can do many things in many different ways. Companies need different functionality. In order to provide a robust application that has the features that most companies will need, the application will need to provide a significant amount if functionality that most other companies don’t need. The mistake occurs when a company purchases a new CRM system, defines their needs, begins implementing their defined needs, and then sees all of the additional functionality provided in the system that are not needed based on the original scope of the project. The implementation’s needs begin to grow based on the abilities on the system even though there is not a pre-defined need for that functionality. This slows down the process of implementation, and worse, delivers an end solution that is too complex and with features, processes, and requirements that the users are unfamiliar with.
Ironically, the solution is very simple; start small, master it, then add more!
There are many types of dialers on the market and each has their place and purpose. I am writing this to help people understand the differences and hopefully help people choose the correct systems for their business needs.
There are the following types of dialers:
Predictive Dialer – A predictive dialer is used to call consumers at home, not businesses. It works as follows. The manager will load a list of names into the dialer and start the dialer based on a desired abandonment rate. The way the predictive dialer work is it will call a contact’s phone number. If the contact picks up, it will then connect the agent to the contact. If the dialer detects an answering machine, it will leave a pre-recorded message and then move on to the next call. If it gets a bad number or busy number it notes it in the contact management system and then moves on. An abandonment is defined as a hang-up from the contact before they hear anything. This can occur of the software is not quick enough to connect the agent and the contact after the contact picks up, or if there are no agents available. In the scenario that there are no agents available, the system play a message asking a contact to wait until and agent is available, this avoids the abandonment status. Currently in the United States, it is not legal to have more than a 3% abandonment ratio. A good predictive dialer will keep you just below this number. Anything lower means that the dialer is not aggressive enough and you have sales reps waiting for calls. Anything over this is against the law; the penalties are very expensive. The dialer uses a simple algorithm to define how many lines to call out at any give time. Good predictive dialers will adjust the outbound call rate based on short term trends.
There are trick and techniques that make this more effective. However, this type of dialer is very frustrating to people, and can be detected by contacts when they pick the phone up (there is the delay as the software detects whether it’s a live person, finds the next available agent and patches it through to that agent). People often hang up on the dialer when they hear this. This kind of dialer is still used heavily, especially overseas. Though less and less in the US.
Ratio Dialer – A ratio dialer is also used to call consumers at home. It is purpose and approach is almost exactly the same as the predictive dialer. However, instead of an algorithm defining the number of outbound call and any given time, the ratio dialer will call based on a predetermined ratio to agents. This means that a manager can determine how many outbound calls to make at any given time based on the number the choose times the number of available (not on a call and available to take a call) agents. So, a 2:1 ratio would mean that for every available agent, the dialer will make 2 outbound calls.
There are no controls that prevent a ratio dialer from exceeding legal abandonment ratios. It relies solely on the sales manager’s management and monitoring of the system. The ratio dialer also has the same delay in connecting to the agent and as such has similar reaction from contacts.
Message Lay Down – A message lay down dialer is a voice message broadcast tool. A sales rep or manager can record a message, select a list of contacts to call and play the message to, and then start it. When the contact picks up after being called, the system simply plays the message and hangs up. If it gets an answering machine, it can play a different message, or the same one as is played to the live connect. It will report back to the contact management tool the results of every call.
This dialer is not often effective when used to call people that do not know you or your product. However, when used to call a “friendly” list of contacts (i.e. Customers, opt-in lists, employees, etc) it can be extremely effective.
Message Lay down with Connect – The message lay down with connect capability is the same as the message lay down with a option of the contact to press a number on their phone and then connect to a live person. For example, a message can state – “InsideSales.com has rolled out a new message lay down product, press 1 to talk to a sales representative and learn more”. Additionally, it offer the option through a push of a different number to have information email, or to be removed from a call list.
This type of dialer is also extremely effective of calling opt-in list.
Power Dialer – The power dialer (also called preview dialer) is more often used to call businesses (though recently is being used to call consumers to avoid the delay experienced with predictive and ratio dialers). The way a power dialer works is a sales rep will connect to the phone system, and then begin calling contact from a defined list or criteria. The major difference between a power dialer and a predictive dialer is the with the power dialer, the sales rep will always hear the contacts phone ringing. This means that the sales rep hears the contact answer and the contact will not experience any delay because the rep is already on the phone.
The advantages of the power dialer are that the rep does not need to dial the phone, can leave prerecorded messages when they hear an answering machine, will have prepared emails and faxes that can be send without having to go anywhere else. The main time saver is that the rep does not need to go any where else when dialing.
I hope this is helpful to people. Please let me know if you have any questions or have found any in-accuracies.
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