There was a time when the success of your inside organization was the loud buzz you could hear from 6am until about 2pm in the afternoon (PST) which validated your team was working hard. You’d walk down the sales aisles and hear that loud hum accented with bells, whistles, balloons and cackling sounds from team members high fiving each other after a successful call.
Today most call centers or inside sales organization sound very different. It’s not the phone you hear but keyboards clicking, texting and instant messaging. Call activity is at an all-time low these days, not because your people are not on the phones but because prospects no longer want to be bothered by phone.
Sales managers are busy trying to increase call volumes in search of greater productivity- (remember they were once reps and the reason they got promoted was because of the loud buzz they created years ago). But they must take a step back and adjust their “activity” expectations and realize the Sales 2.0 world that are working in today. Prospects today consider the phone a rude interruption, barely respond to your email and prefer to research and buy a solution on their own instead of being held in a qualification headlock.
Instead of putting your sales team on plan for low call volume, managers must learn to listen to new sales productivity tools and create metrics to best support and reinforce these tools. This requires you to upgrade your listening expectations and tune in to the following:
1. Can you hear me now? Replace your talk time with keyboard time.
2. Content is king- remember the reps you hired because they could talk? now they must learn how to write because content is king. Each week, team members must organize strong email templates and strategize on target list building and messaging to their prospects
3. Become part of the conversation- the days of sitting by phones and waiting for them to ring are gone, get your people trained on using social networking tools (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, as starters) and listen for the live conversation feed.
4. Tools knowledge- reward your reps who take the time to learn how to master and sell with their tools.
5. Targeted outbound- Call blitzes are a waste of time if they are not targeted. Reps must invest in organizing their target list and creating specific messages for their list.
6. Educate executives- I know you were just minding your own business when your boss walked in and asked you why no one is on the phones? Inside sales has been misunderstood long enough and right when you think you understand them, the rules change.
