Selling is a pretty demanding job with plenty of challenges, no days are the same and nothing is straightforward but if one manages to navigate correctly is very rewarding too.
Recent technological advances also help a lot to manage the activity easily and effectively but can also be very confusing and overwhelming at the same time.
Inside sales are the type of sales that become a more and more common thing in modern scenarios. Inside sales professionals face a unique set of challenges in their day-to-day activities.
These obstacles are inherent to the very processes of inside sales, so sales managers and representatives must learn to recognize these potential problems and manage to overcome that.
“The key to mastering any kind of sales is switching statements about you – how great you are, and what you do – to statements about them.”
Jeffrey Gitomer
We ran a survey for inside sales professionals and experts to identify the single biggest challenge they feel about Inside sales.
Here we are discussing the one most common answer we got from experts – lead generation or getting new meetings booked.
Getting meetings booked with new leads is a continuous process and probably one of the most important steps in overall sales.
The process of sales starts with lead generation but in the sales lifecycle, every step should be taken care of by managing each step effectively, otherwise affecting the next cycle of the sale.
To make it easier we break this into 3 parts of pre-work –
1. Build Foundation
To start with qualified lead generation to get meetings booked one should define a niche and unique proposition for their business first.
This can be done by answering a few questions:
- Which industry they are working in?
- What is the target market segment?
- Who would be the ideal prospect for your business?
- Why someone would pay for your product or services?
- The demographic, psychographics, and technographic of the clients
- The biggest pain point of the prospect.
- The fears, and frustrations the prospect is having in his job
- and more (We defined work includes 20 to 30 parameters for Ideal Client Profile)…
These questions can be divided into more sub-question to find out the most valuable prospect like job title, job description, goal priorities, and more.
2. Prepare Message
To build a system for outreach one has to prepare a message which you want to convey to your prospect. The message should not be about what is your service and product but should be more about your prospect.
This message should reflect how much you understand their business, their problems, and their pain points. It should empathize with them and then introduce your product/services.
After that you have to define the frequency and sequencing of the message, it depends very much on the industry environment, prospects’ job profile, and industry average sales cycle duration.
One needs to dig deeper and deeper to master all these steps and to know much more skills to improve their expertise in the field of sales.
3. Start Reaching Out
To reach out to the audience, there are 3 prominent channels that exist and perform the best.
A social media platform that is suited for sales is LinkedIn. E-mail which remains one of the best performings always and finally the good old phone that is a must to engage the audience and create a personal connection.
In this blog, we will cover the one that is most relevant today to find the ideal prospect and make connections, LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the spot where business people from leadership positions to mid-senior professionals rely on their networking, industry news, and inspiration. Studies show LinkedIn has close 660 million users already on the platform with the highest decision makers.
How your profile is seen by others can make a big difference for success on LinkedIn. So the first thing that sales professionals should do, to make the best of LinkedIn is to start working on their own profiles.
Below are the fields that one should optimize –
- Image: Put your nice, professional-looking headshot with a high-quality photo.
- Background image: Here you can put some images that symbolize your industry or your work.
- Headline: Follow this template for your headline [TITLE],[COMPANY NAME], WE HELP [CUSTOMER PROFILE][BENEFIT] [HOW]
- Summary: Here you can help yourself, your work and what you do to help your prospect
- Call to action: This will indicate the mode of preference by which one can contact you
- Work experience: Always try to emphasize the experience which is most relevant to your current work.
Once you are done with your LinkedIn profile, you can easily find connections by searching on LinkedIn and connecting to them with messaging. You can download our e-book on this here
Now that you have a message, and social profile, 2nd part of this blog is about how to start making connections and work on the measurements.
Read more about here at Inside sales challenge Part 2
In our 2-Day Workshop to Create B2B Client Surge, we train business owners, and inside sales professionals about how to overcome common sales challenges and start getting consistent client appointments. This include on Day 1,
- Ideal Prospect Profile
- Unique Selling Proposition
- Scripts and templates for connection and messages
- LinkedIn Messaging & Sales Navigator
- E-Mail Messaging
- Building qualified leads database (Options that include technology solutions)
- Tele script to open calls
- Objections handling with the best possible answers and factors influencing sales results
- Sales qualifiers
- Automation (How to automate the inside sales process to reduce 50% effort & get 4X bookings)
Want to fix your sales challenges and start growing today?
Contact GrowthAspire or call GrowthAspire Expert today at 968-645-6168
