STRUGGLING WITH YOUR OUTBOUND SALES PROCESS?

Are you building an inside sales team and struggling with your outbound sales process, training, and onboarding?

Consider hiring us short-term to jump in and assist you with strategy, outreach, messaging, positioning, and front-line tactics.

The U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, combined with research by InsideSales.com, indicates that 750,000 net new inside sales jobs will be added from 2013 to 2023 — nearly three times the job creation rate compared to that of traditional field sales.

The effort and legwork required to schedule sales meetings are exhausting and take time. Connecting with the right prospect is hard. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack and it’s what salespeople dislike most about their job. So they just don’t do it. (Kind of like flossing your teeth!)

What are they doing wrong? We’ll find out. We’ll visit your team on location and thoroughly analyze your current sales prospecting system. Then we’ll leave you with an actionable plan designed to get results fast. Connect 5000 will help your sales team:

  • Better articulate your value proposition via positioning and messaging (What problems do you solve exactly?)
  • Precisely define your target audience (If everyone is a target, no one’s a target.)
  • Quickly determine which decision maker deals with certain pain points and stands to lose the most without a solution.
  • Clearly engage and communicate what pain, problems, and challenges your service or product solves.
  • Put together an effective outbound sale prospecting strategy in place with transparency and accountability.

Generating More Than Enough Qualified Leads BUT No Subsequent Meetings, Optimized Sales Process, Or Solid Close Ratio?

We can help you in these areas too. Many companies have abundant leads to follow up but optimizing the sales process after the first initial meeting is the challenge. Many marketing and inside sales teams are fine and don’t need to be improved. Following up with the sales prospect after the first contact may be a pain point and needs to be improved. Your sales leader may be spread too thin or simply doesn’t have the time to coach and mentor the sales staff. Instead of winging it, the sales teams need a consistent sales process to follow up on leads that marketing generates for them.

Challenges you may be facing:

Nurturing prospect from start to finish (Are you asking the prospect to marry you after the first date?)

Getting subsequent meetings (What’s the next step? Who are the stakeholders? Timeframe? Magic Question: Mr. Prospect, are you willing to work with me on a calendar basis? Real prospects put your salespeople on their calendars for the next step.)

Follow-up emails, voicemails, and calls for prospects at various buying stages

Asking open-ended questions to further uncover pain to further the sales process (Dig into pain, problems, and challenges and remind prospects of it!)

Putting sales notes in CRM and documenting it (The dullest pen is mightier than the strongest memory.)

Time management (Management and accountability tools to ensure your team is keeping their sales pipeline full.)

Generating more proposals and improving close ratio (How are you tracking sales metrics? Number of proposals generated? Close rate for the total number of leads? Close rate for proposals given?)

Quick Case Study: An $8M software company in Torrance, California, targeted professional engineering and architecture firms worldwide. They primarily sold their software, support, and training with an inside sales team scattered across the country. They didn’t need Connect 5000’s help in setting up sales meetings with their sales team. The challenge was that they had too many leads per month. They received an average of 1,200 leads per month and couldn’t keep up. A great problem to have. The company was in the midst of moving offices which consumed the CEO’s time. He asked us to come aboard as the Acting Director of Sales. The sales team didn’t have any sales processes or systems in place to handle all these leads. For example, we posed as secret shopper and filled out their “Contact Us” form. We did this multiple times and it took 3 to 7 business days for reps to get back to us. That’s an eternity for an inbound lead.

When it comes to following up on inbound leads, sometimes you won’t reach the prospect on the first attempt. Connect 5000 put together a systematic plan to follow up on the leads with a variety of phone calls and emails. The reps didn’t have voicemail or talking points in place. They were simply winging it. The follow-up emails and days apart to attempt to reach the prospect were inconsistent across the board. A few months later, after some coaching and structure were put in place, every qualified inbound lead was responded to in less than a day. The sales team struggled internally with asking qualifying questions once they caught a prospect live. We put a talk track together to help the reps better qualify the leads and move them through the sales pipeline.

The result: Later that fall, the company, which never had a million-dollar month in its history, had 2 consecutive million-dollar revenue months in a row. The next month, the company moved into its new offices with a systematic sales process and plan in place and continue to add additional revenue and employees.

Another Quick Case Study: A $3.2M background screening company in the greater Kansas City metro targeted churches, non-profits, and small to mid-sized companies nationwide. They primarily sold their service and support with an inside sales team and had tremendous success the past 5 years, averaging 24% growth, year over year. In the process, they landed a few $200,000/year clients. One of the realities of sales is that no client stays with you forever. Sales reps have to constantly fill their funnel with new prospects day in and day out. As you can guess, the company lost both large clients after a year and realized they needed the plan to go primarily after large companies that spend 5 to 6 figures a year in background checks. Their sales process was inconsistent and varied from each rep on how to penetrate large companies.

The result: After putting some accountability, transparency, and an active outbound sales prospecting strategy in place consistently targeting mid-sized to enterprise companies, the company is in a solid position to land between $3.8M – $4.3M in revenue on a very conservative sales forecast for the future. Making the strategic choice to target larger companies instead of smaller companies multiplies revenue instead of simple addition.

If your company doesn’t have an effective outbound sales strategy in place, please contact us at 913-481-8941.