Cold Calling and Sales Prospecting: A Day in the Life

Are your sales reps spending their time wisely?

CSO Insights reports that the average sales rep only spends two days a week effectively selling.

The rest of the time, your reps are probably looking for someone to call, writing emails, leaving voicemails and logging call notes.

Cold calling and sales prospecting teams often make these common mistakes that kill productivity:

• Pursuing unqualified leads who will never buy.
• Missing sales opportunities by not paying attention to buying signals.
• Giving lackluster effort thanks to low motivation.

You can address all of these issues by putting the right systems in place. We’ve made this video to walk you through a day in the life of a top-performing sales prospecting rep.

Watch this video to see how Stephen Lang, a sales development representative, spends five days a week selling with the right technology and motivation in a high-velocity inside sales model. 

Call the right leads

Did you know that in some companies sales reps actually spend as much as 40% of their time just looking for someone to call? That’s how you end up with reps only selling two days per week.

To stay focused on the best leads  — those most likely to contact and close —Stephen Lang relies on the power of NeuralView, an intelligent lead scoring and prioritization application. Using advanced learning algorithms, NeuralView makes smart recommendations to get reps on the phone with the right leads at the right time.

NeuralView is even more effective for Stephen to use because its real-time prescriptions are seamlessly injected into the workflow of his PowerDialer.

More than a dialer, and more than an app, PowerDialer is an integrated system that utilizes one-click dialing, prerecorded voice messaging, email, inbound call routing and local caller-id display, and automatically captures data to the rep’s CRM — all to make it easier for reps to contact more leads and close more deals.

Sales teams that use NeuralView to fuel PowerDialer’s lead scoring and prioritization capability increase their efficiency and productivity. Working quietly in the background, this technology prioritizes sales prospecting lists so reps call the opportunities most likely to answer and to close on each dial.

With an application that works directly in their CRM interface, reps like Stephen can see two scores that rank every lead in their pool according to likelihood to contact and likelihood to close.  A Neural Score of 95 tells a rep this is a hot lead. 

NeuralView serves up the best lead or prospect automatically to your reps. It also drives effective lead follow-up.

Increase visibility

Of course, top-performing sales prospecting reps like Stephen Lang still require good management.

Historically, sales leaders have managed their teams by the scoreboard at the end of the period — if the points were there, they were happy, and if not, they fired people.

Business rolled on, but it was tough to determine what plays had been run, how reps had orchestrated their strategy over the course of the period, and how sales leaders could coach them to improve.

After all, lunch meetings are not recorded, golf outings are opaque, and even conference room visits and demos happen far from the watching eyes of management.

Sales acceleration technology changes the game.  Reps and managers can gain insight into the sales game as it unfolds.

As our sales development rep, Stephen Lang, moves through his day, we can see him guide his prospecting activities with the visibility he gains from engagement tracking tools such as:

• Email tracking and engagement notifications
• CRM reports that show historical call results and trends
• Immediate response notifications that alert reps when a prospect fills out a web form requesting more information.

These tools show your reps important buying signals in real time and also give managers a detailed view of all prospecting activities.

Watch the video to see how Stephen Lang uses these powerful technologies to streamline his day. 

Work faster with more focus

While predictive analytics can help reps focus their efforts by targeting the opportunities most likely to convert and close, dialing technology enables reps to work faster with an automated workflow designed to handle follow-up activity, blend inbound and outbound calls, and automatically capture data to CRM.

In some organizations, this functionality empowers reps to log as many as 4,000 more talk hours per year, as reported by Mike McCormick, CMO and VP of Sales at California Casualty.

A top-performing rep, like Stephen, will use all of these weapons each and every day to maximize his or her contact rates and performance.

Stephen trusts his PowerDialer to intelligently prescribe the prospects he should call in the most optimal order, based on scientific probability that they will be available to talk and have the power to make a decision regarding purchase.

While cold calling, if Stephen makes a call that is met by a voicemail prompt, he can simply leave a prerecorded message with the click of a button and instantly move on to his next call.

He sends templated, follow-up emails as he waits for his next connection, and his Vision email tracking technology sends him a notification when one of his prospects opens or forwards an email, clicks on a link, or downloads a pricing sheet.

Improve sales rep motivation

There is a lot of theory and research explaining why the gamification of work increases sales productivity.

PowerStandings, a powerful motivational tool, is built on this theory and research.

Salespeople are good because they love to win.

The problem is, there is a lot of hard work stacked up just this side of success. Getting motivated to do that hard work is a struggle every day. But the rewards are worth it.

Young, hungry sales teams often have more ambition than discipline. Infusing sales prospecting with gamification encourages reps like Stephen to constantly focus their efforts on the right activities and behaviors that lead to sales.  This is why gamification platforms like PowerStandings are so effective.

Public leaderboards displayed on the sales floor make all sales activity metrics more visible and transparent. This visibility drives reps to perform at their best.

Ready for tomorrow

What’s the best thing about Stephen’s day?

It is 100% repeatable.

With the right systems, your reps can achieve top performance every day.

See how it’s done in the video below. 

 

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