Now obviously I’m a big believer in the power of technology to transform inside sales and marketing processes. When I started 20 years ago as a sales manager at then Franklin Quest (now Franklin-Covey), the coolest technology on the market at the time was a fax machine.

Now we have CRM, dialers, sales force automation, automated email and drip campaigns, iPhones in every pocket, streaming video, the Web, SEO and PPC, blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn . . . .

But the fact is, the longer I stay in this business, the more I realize that in many cases, when a company uses technology to help them solve a problem, the most valuable part of the process isn’t the technology—it’s the reexamination of the process itself.

Sure, new technologies can make dazzling improvements to productivity, but it’s the insight gained by really focusing on the problem that often becomes the most valuable asset of change.

Sales consultant Dick Lee has a fabulous article that partially addresses this issue, stating that throwing technology at a problem without redesigning the process and attitudes surrounding its use is a near sure-bet failure.

So why are we so hesitant to address process?

• Because it’s uncomfortable.
• Because we have to actually change.
• Because it means we have to admit that we may have been wrong in the past.
• Because a lot of people have invested a lot of time, energy, and money into developing the current process.
• Because in some cases, changing a process means employees’ reputations are at stake.

As much as I want it to be true—because it’d mean my company would make a whole lot more money—simply throwing technology at a problem doesn’t inherently solve it. Confusing a technology problem with a process problem leads to costly, sometimes fatal mistakes.

So the next time you get pitched by a technology vendor with something that’s going to “revolutionize” your company, don’t necessarily be skeptical. Just make sure that you couldn’t solve the same problem by simply talking to Bob or Jill down in production, and making a clear, definable process change.

At InsideSales.com, we go out of our way to try and have specific, workable processes in place to make sure that we’re not letting stuff fall through the cracks (and you quickly learn that there’s cracks you didn’t even know existed for stuff to fall through). In that regard I think we’re doing pretty well—in fact, in some cases we may try and “over-process” our work flow, but that’s another story.

In any case, as our implementation team walked us through a workshop this morning, they outlined approximately five stages that a closed sale goes through before a client is considered “street ready” with our product. And at each point in the process, the discussion invariably turned to the needs of:

1. What had already been communicated in the previous step,
2. What needed to be communicated at the moment,
3. And what needed to be communicated in the future to complete the next step of the process.

That, in essence, was the crux of the meeting. Getting the right info to the right people.

Here we are, one of the leading sales and marketing software vendors, who specialize in high velocity, deep impact data management—and we still had gaps in our process that our employees had to bridge.

Now that’s not to say that our Lead Response Management tools don’t work, or that every business on the planet can’t make a significant impact on their success with them. Without the tools, we’d be dead; we’d have no hope at all of successfully managing our business and sales. But it reminded me that even with some of the best data management tools on the market, unless our own processes are robust and flexible, and our people are committed to providing a top-tier customer experience, we’re not going to continue to have success.

The people inside our process have to leverage the tools, or else it ends up wasting time.

And if you’re my company, 80+ percent of the issues we face in keeping our clients happy and productive with our products hinges on critical communications.

It’s an interesting challenge to think about.

The marketing department almost always wants the sales department to report results, link campaigns to toll free number and track the search engine keywords that bring in the most sales but it rarely happens. However, knowing the sources of your successes and failures will help you streamline your marketing and ultimately tap your most profitable sources of prospects and profits.

Very few companies track a lead from capture to conclusion or interview prospects and customers to find out why they do or do not buy. However, a sales team that fails to track why it wins or loses each sale is like a sports team that refuses to watch film of its competition before a game to prepare and then film of the actual game to improve for future wins: real progress is impossible unless it takes the time to learn from past successes and failures.

Best Practices: This time-waster covers nearly every area of the lead management and sales processes but it is also very simple to eliminate. The key is to start simple: pick 5 to 10 Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) to track for 30 days. Once you have a baseline to work with, begin making changes and tracking them to see how they affect performance and profits.

You can begin be picking the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) such as:

Internet-based Leads

Counts: Impressions, Clicks, Leads, Prospects, Customers

Ratios: Impressions to Clicks, Clicks to Leads, Leads to Prospects, Prospects to Closes.

Cost per: Click, Lead, Prospect, Customer

Cold-Calling Leads

Counts: Dials, Contacts, Presentations, 1^st Appointments Set, 1^st Appointments Held, Demonstrations, Proposals, Closes

Ratios: Contacts per Dial, Closes per Proposal, etc.

Cost per: Dial, Contact, Demo, Close

Revenue

New Revenue per month, Revenue lost per month, Average Revenue per Account, Average Revenue per Sales Rep.

Ranking and Dispositions (from surveys)

Top 10 reasons why: people click on your site/ad, people bought, people didn’t buy, people called your support team, people quit your service.

Top 20 Accounts

Top Sales Representatives

Many reps recorded unimportant information. We recommend recording information that:

• Provides a memory link back to the discussion;
• Records action items with associated date and time information;
• Clearly notes elements of a needs analysis or qualification. 

Rather than re-typing information sent to the customer in the notes, simply link the actual emails, faxes, and proposals to the customer record in the database. Not only will you have a copy of the actual document, you will drastically reduce the amount of time spent in note-taking.

Best Practice: Invest in the systems that allow sales reps to tie copies of information sent to the customer directly to the customer record. Encourage the reps to practice typing notes and linking information throughout the phone conversation to reduce time spent after the conversation taking notes by as much as 75%.

Rather than waste time between calls with these repetitive tasks, automate the process with templates. Create a flow chart for your typical sales processes and find the places where e-mails, faxes, mailers, proposal and other typical media are needed. Create a template for each one, provide them to your sales representatives and watch the sales process for 30 days. Analyze which templates worked and which ones didn’t, refine the process more and you reduce your wasted time by 50% and cut the time spent on each sales process by as much as 80%!

For example, it took an average of 45 minutes to prepare a proposal in our own office.  We took the time to create a template for the proposal process and cut the average time down to 2 minutes.

Best Practice: Look at the standard emails that go out, create a template library, use a database that merges personal prospect and product information, and send them with a click of a button. Get rid of expensive and time-consuming mailers and go electronic.

• Leads generated on a website sit in the webmaster’s box until she checks it.
• The webmaster checks her box once each day and sends any accumulated leads to the sales manager’s box until he checks it.
• The sales manager checks his box once each day. He sorts the leads and sends them to the appropriate sales rep.
• The sales rep types the lead information into a tracking system—a spreadsheet or contact manager—before calling the lead. After making 4 or 5 attempts to contact the lead, she moves on to other leads.

The process from lead capture to first contact attempt often takes between 48 and 72 hours. The time to first contact can often be as long as two weeks—plenty of time for the prospect to forget your company or sign up with your competition.  Lead management is nearly as important as sales yet it is often the most overlooked process.

Why?

The lead management process is often where the marketing department hands off the leads it generated to the sales department. Leads are often lost in this “gray area” and neither department wants to take responsibility: marketing blames sales for failing to follow-up and sales blames marketing for sending them unqualified leads.

Another failure in most lead management processes is found in the lack of automation. Leads are routed through a slow pipeline that could easily be replaced by technology and reduce the time between lead generation and first contact from days to minutes.

Best Practice: Effective lead management includes such disciplines as:

• Lead Capture
• Lead Routing
• Lead Response Management
• Lead Qualification Skills
• Lead Tracking
• Lead Reporting
• Lead Source Analysis

Create a clear process for each aspect of lead management. Invest time in the process and money in the systems to leverage the ability to quickly and effectively qualify and sort leads and you will find hidden increases in productivity.

A 17% increase in sales is a great return on a relatively small investment. While analyzing and designing an effective sales process is not difficult, implementing it can be. Sales reps who prefer their “home-grown” approach may fight the process and actually hurt overall productivity. An effective customer relationship management system must appeal to the sales reps by solving immediate pains and by making it easier for them to stay organized and keep promises to their customers and co-workers.

A typical Sales Process usually involves the following steps:

• Introduction
• Qualification
• Demonstration
• Proposal
• Overcome Obstacles
• Closure
• Follow Through 

It is critical to analyze and formalize your sales process. If you don’t feel competent enough to do this on your own, hire one of the many sales consulting firms that are only a few clicks away on a Google search.

Best Practice: Invest the time and money in formalizing your sales management processes and implementing the underlying technology to optimize it for your sales reps.

We recommend a better way.

Sales coaching or mentoring are much higher forms of training. Coaching methodologies employ ongoing, two-way, interactive training and learning and focus on sustained productivity increases through constant repetition and rehearsal.

Sales coaching is similar to sports coaching: the coach doesn’t show up to lecture for a day and then expect his players to win the championship on their own.  A good coach works with his team every day. He watches them during practice and on game day to guide them as individuals and as a team. A sales coach does the same thing. He or she spends time on a regular basis working with sales reps individually and as a team to help them hone their skills and work together better.

Best Practice: Ensure that each sales rep spends 1 to 2 hours each week reviewing and rehearsing sales and lead qualification methodologies with a designated coach or mentor.

Up to 60% of all calls a sales rep makes can go to voicemail or an answering machine, either directly or when routed by a receptionist. If a lead generation rep makes 200 calls in a day and 60% of these calls go to voicemail, he or she could leave 120 voice messages that average about 1 minute long. A single rep could waste 2 hours leaving messages—and that doesn’t include the time spent dialing and being transferred to a decision-maker’s voicemail box!

Most reps don’t make that many calls and don’t bother leaving nearly that many messages, but what if they could?  We have seen call-back ratios that range from less than 1% to as high as 22%. Clearly, there is a potential ROI—but is it worth the gamble?

Recent technology allows a sales rep to prerecord an entire library of voice messages in his own voice. When he is sent to voicemail, he can select an appropriate message to leave with the click of a button before immediately moving on to the next call. Since these digitally recorded .wav files are often recorded over the phone and saved to a CRM or dialer system, they cannot be distinguished from a live call.

In one series of tests using this technology, we saw an average call-back rate of 4.8%–far higher than other forms of direct marketing. What’s more, the prospects never suspected that they had received a pre-recorded message.

Best Practice: Provide voice-messaging technology coupled with dialers to increase your sales’ reps effectiveness without taking any additional time.

Also see our paper on Impression Marketing^TM for more detailed information on effective techniques that use this technology.

As a company that embeds dialers and telephony ‘power tools’ in its CRM software, we were disappointed to find that the actual dialing process is one of the lesser of the time wasters. However, it is still a significant problem. While it is important to reduce the amount of time sales reps spend dialing, it is far more important to keep them busy and on task by giving them enough leads to call and tools to make calling leads easier.

This is especially true in the business to business (B2B) world where selling is so much more complex than selling to consumers. The dialing experience is only a small part of the whole productivity equation but we found that technology could take a lead generation representative from 40 or 50 dials per day to a range of 170 to 210. A normal sales representative with responsibility for the entire sales process can go from 20 to 30 dials to between 70 and 100 dials a day.

In the business to consumer (B2C) world, ratio and predictive dialers significantly overcome the time wasted with waiting for rings, busies, no answers, and bad numbers. Ratio dialers and predictive dialers combined with a lead-management CRM database to keep everything organized can boost sustainable dials to 400 or even 600 per rep per day.

Best Practice: Utilize a hosted dialer and lead response management solution to help your sales reps do 8 hours of work in 2 to 2.5 hours.