Ken Krogue

The message of this post is pretty simple: Managers and reps should never schedule vacations during the last business week of the month.

I’m sure some of you—most likely front-line sales reps—growled a little bit at hearing that.

On the surface it sounds harsh, right? Companies don’t control our lives; we should have the freedom to go on vacation when we wish, shouldn’t we? This is the United States of America, free country, and all that, right?

In principle yes.

In the real world of professional sales?

Not on your life.

The last two to three business days of the month are crucial for sales teams. Not because it’s necessarily “crucial” for the people doing the selling, but because in many cases, it’s crucial for potential buyers.

Whether it’s real or simply imagination, the end of a month pulls on buyers’ psychological strings.

Many budgets run on end-of-month or end-of-quarter schedules. Department productivity goals are clearly in focus, and decision-makers want to, well, make decisions.

When the calendar turns, we don’t want to leave old problems unfinished. Old problems are stale, dull, rehashed.

We want to “gear up” for the next month, tackle new problems and fresh ideas.

And like it or not, sales reps need to be around to take advantage of it.

Whether it sounds disingenuous, whether it feels like a “mercenary” tactic, there’s a reason that sales reps need to be in the office on the last day of the month, because C-Level decision-makers want to make decisions, and mid-level managers want to impress the C-levels.

The bottom line? The last week of the month, money is floating through the air, and deals are begging to be closed.

I learned an awesome phone skill from one of our lead gen reps at the office this morning. Travis Turner is a lead generation superstar, and I mean that in every sense. He’s been with our company close to three years, solely in a lead generation calling capacity.

On average, Travis makes between 200 and 300 calls every single day he works. No, I’m not kidding. Every single day for three years. And he’s nowhere close to being burnt out by it, because A. he’s very, very good at it, and B. our dialer system automates and reduces the normal headaches of phone dialing so much that making 250 calls in eight hours simply isn’t an onerous task.

The tip he taught us was this:

When you get to a decision maker’s voicemail, rather than waiting the 20-30 seconds for the message to play, “Hi this is Bob/Jill, VP of Blah blah at Company X, I’m not here, leave me a message and I’ll get back with you,” press either a 1, 0, or # on your phone, and skip straight to the “beep” to leave your message, saving you 10-30 seconds per voice message call—and when you’re making 200 calls day, that’s 30-100 minutes of time you’re simply not wasting.

If you want to see an interview with Travis, go here:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7806015&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

A few months ago, I talked a little bit about the question, “Is leaving a voice message an effective marketing or sales strategy?”

The answer is a definite yes—it’s very effective, especially when it’s combined with other modes of contact, email, calling, faxing.

I wanted to follow-up with another small set of tips for creating good B2B marketing and sales emails.

1. The day of the “awesome marketing email” is pretty well gone. Remember those days when the Internet was still new, and you’d get a pretty email with pictures, and colors, and swirls? At the time it was cool. Now we’ve been trained to tune them out, because we know that it’s “corporate.” Unless it’s from an email list that we actively subscribe to, we generally ignore the corporate stuff.
2. The day of the simple, targeted email is here. Keep it short, keep it simple, stupid. If you’re going to template-ize your emails, make them look like they just came from your desk, like it’s something you whipped up in three minutes. “Hey this is Dave, just following up on some info you requested. Feel free to call me, or shoot me an email back.” Done. The End. Believe it or not, we’ve even found that strategically placing a small typo in the body of the email gives the impression that it was a “personal” email, not a junket, and can increase response rates.
3. If you’re using a sales or lead management CRM (if you’re not, you should be), strategically include some small bit of information from their file. Most systems will merge data fields from the CRM directly into the body of the email. “Hey, I see you came across us at our booth at (insert XYZ Trade Show from the CRM data here).”
4. Remember, the goal of an email is not to sell your product on the spot. The goal is to get the decision-maker to respond.

First of all, let me be up front and say that Trish Bertuzzi is a colleague and a friend of mine, so take that for what it’s worth.

That being said, her company, The Bridge Group, Inc., recently released a fascinating research study on the state of inside sales organizations in 2010.

Even the shortened, “highlight reel” version on Bridge Group’s blog, found here, shows some keen insights into the direction that companies are going with their sales teams.

A couple of highlights:

• Per-rep quotas are up across the board—but the percentage of reps hitting their quotas is low (40 percent or less).
• The average number of calls to marketing-generated lead has dropped 43 percent. Think there’s any correlation to this and the fact that reps aren’t hitting their quotas? (Our ground-breaking MIT research study has some answers to why fewer phone calls = a bad, bad thing for sales teams.)
• Of the 115 companies surveyed, the average organization’s inside sales team had grown 280 percent since 2007, in terms of total people employed.
• 89% of respondents said outbound phone calling was a primary function of their inside sales teams.

What does it all mean?

Mostly what we’ve been saying for for a little while now, that inside sales is quickly going to become Inside Sales—no longer just an “outlier” sales department whose primary function is lead gen and nurturing, but will be the heart of the 21st century sales team.

This great tip from my friend Steve Richards of Vorsight:

Now for your tip: You have probably heard, “Your call is being answered by Audix,” and if you haven’t, I guarantee your reps have; so the next time you hear that when you’re on someone’s voicemail, “Your call is being answered by Audix,” punch in **6. It will say “enter last name, followed by pound sign.” Put in Richard, that’s my last name, and it will say “Steve Richard, extension 4237,” and it spits the extension number at you. Now that you have that magic 10 digit direct dial number, once we dial that, we have a much high probability of having a live conversation with the senior executive. Hope it helps and good luck!

To learn more about ways to increase your sales training for B2B prospecting check out Vorsight.

Or watch his video:

This one is really cool and was shown to me by Adam from CustomerHook.com.

This is a way to get 3 free embedded backlinks to drive GoogleJuice PageRank to any website you want (which helps you get free leads from Google.)

And every one of your employees can do the same if you want. This doesn’t work with Facebook because Google spyders don’t follow links on Facebook. But LinkedIn does not use the NoFollow tag in links (at least not yet.)

Here’s how:

1- Decide which keywords you want to promote
2- Decide which web URL’s you want the keywords to point to.
3- Go to your own LinkedIn Account and click on your Profile link.
4- Scroll down to the section below ‘Connections’ called ‘Websites’. Notice you can put up to  3 hyperlinks from here.

Your LinkedIn Profile Page Gives you 3 Backlinks for SEO

5- Click one of the [edit] links to the right in this section and this window comes up:

The Website Link Gives you 3 Backlinks

6- Set the first field to ‘Other’.
7- Put the keyword you want in the second field (see I have typed in Inside Sales.)
8- Type in the URL you want (see I am driving a backlink of the Inside Sales keyword to my friends at AA-ISP, the American Association of Inside Sales, they should definitely be on the first page of Google when someone types in ‘Inside Sales’.)

That’s it, easy.

The Kellogg Survey that was done by Dr. James Oldroyd in 2007 showed a statistically higher close rate for companies that break apart their sales model into specialties.

Internally at Inside Sales.com we have several specialties in our sales and lead generation departments:

1. Lead Research
2. Website Auditor
3. Lead Response (Fronter)
4. Lead Qualification (Appointment Setter)
5. Small Account Closers (Account Executive)
6. Large Account Closers (Senior Account Executive)

A company that leaves their inside sales reps to find and close their own leads follow what Dr. Oldroyd called a Generalist Model. Even in the early survey by Kellogg there was a close rate that was 7% higher for companies with a specialist model over a generalist model.

As we have perfected our own internal processes we have found the difference to be much higher.

You don’t need to start as complex we have done.

We recommend that you start by separating the Appointment Setters from Closers; just two positions. In fact, we have roles, not just positions.  Some positions carry several roles.

Appointment Setters focus on quantity of calls and appointments set. Each of our Appointment Setters averages 350 calls a day and sets 4-5 appointments each day.

Our Closers focus on quality of calls and specifically on accounts closed. We just had a record month with 40 accounts closed and the highest new revenue growth by 26.4%. One Closer closed 15 accounts in February; also a new record. We were excited to add 7 new Salesforce accounts in one month. This is done by Specialists.