How Inside Sales Teams Go From Good to Great Using Advanced Selling Tactics

Call times, lead quality and quantity to sales cadence, these are all factors which ultimately affect your closing rates. But how do you find the short-list of factors that truly makes a difference to your bottom line? Is volume of calls as important as, say, timing of your call efforts? Growing a winning sales team takes some well-picked key performance indicators. And nothing is more important than optimizing your lead development process.

Gabe Larson, Vice President of InsideSales Labs, spoke with Kerry Cunningham, Senior Research Director at Sirius Decisions, about what makes a sales team go from good to great in a 30 minute webinar.

Optimizing Lead Development Can Improve Your Bottom Line

SiriusDecisions uses the eight factor model of lead development to help organizations improve their revenue results. Over the years, they have helped many companies drive intelligent growth for their B2B organizations using extensive research and the lead development model.

Companies use lead development to connect with prospects early in the buying process to qualify leads and find sales opportunities that executives can act upon. It consists partly of lead generation and partly lead nurturing.

“First, let’s define what we mean. Inside sales is a function where we’ve got people on the brunt actually closing deals, right? Then there’s an awful lot of people on the phone who are doing things like lead qualifications, taking leads from marketing and qualifying those. Or they are doing outbound prospecting, handling chats, handling other electronic forms of communication. […] I think everything we talk about is going apply equally well to all,” said Kerry, in the XANT webinar hosted by Gabe Larsen.

The most effective lead development organizations will optimize around eight key disciplines that comprise the lead development function, says Kerry. “We work with our clients on is this way of structuring our thinking around the function of lead development. This is the eight-factor model of lead development. […] We break down this function into the eight key sub-disciplines that we say are critical to master to really optimize,” shows Cunningham.

The Eight Factor Lead Development Model

In order to optimize, companies need to look at these eight factors for lead development, shows SiriusDevelopment:

1. Company Culture: Culture is about how we impact sales representatives’ behavior and the things that we recognize and reward people for. Build a culture centered on great conversations with customers and prospects and you can’t go wrong.
2. Job Design: Having clear goals for a job will impact how sales reps can perform at the very highest levels.
3. Paying Sales Reps Variable Compensation: Payments are done poorly in most sales organizations, shows Kerry Cunningham. For best results, you need to make sure this strategy is buttoned up.
4. Measurement: Are we measuring things that actually matter? Metrics should account for the reasons why some reps are more productive than others. Pure activity metrics don’t cut it anymore.
5. Skill development: Once you have a well designed job, you can have the most qualified person in the position. Skill development and professional growth is essential for best business results.
6. Supporting Sales Reps: Companies need to provide optimal support on a daily basis, to make sure sales reps are successful.
7. Targets: You can build an excellent sales organization, however if you point them at the wrong targets, you will have poor results.
8. Management: The management layer needs to make sure that execution is on time and on point. They also need make changes if execution is not up standards.

 

 

How to Really Measure to Increase Sales Performance

To learn more about these eight factors of lead development, watch the webinar brought you by InsideSales and SiriusDecisions, and find out:

• How to measure sales rep’s activity in order to effectively drive productivity;
• How to find if the culture of your organization supports great conversations;
• Why sales compensation is done poorly in 80% of companies.