Three Tips For the Struggling Inside Sales Rep

Three Tips For the Struggling Inside Sales Rep:from B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify by AJ Armendariz
In case you didn’t catch my debut blog post Best Practices for Hunting Leads, my role at Optify as a member of the inside sales team is to generate new leads for our corporate solutions executives. Using BANT: Budget, Authority, Timing, and Need – the Optify inside sales team and I reach out to prospects and identify an interest, a need, and most important a problem within their business that Optify’s digital marketing solution can solve. Although my role as an inside sales rep isn’t rocket science, or in this case as challenging as the role of a software engineer, there are definitely ups and downs that my team and I go through on a daily and weekly basis.

However, as an inside sales rep for a start-up company in expansion phase, and the son of a successful IT headhunter I know as well as anyone that in business and especially SaaS sales, it’s all about “What have you done for me lately?” Or as I often hear our CEO Rob Eleveld ask Steven Woody our senior manager of software sales, “Woody, how much new MRR have we added today?” And while our inside sales team isn’t directly responsible for generating new MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) because we don’t work directly with our agency partners and B2B clients, we do play a major role in the sales process. As my colleague David noted in his last blog post Fuel Your Inside Sales Engine: “our inside sales team is the engine of the Optify sales vehicle.” It’s our job to consistently push qualified leads into the Optify sales funnel.
But this is easier said than done. Every inside sales rep. knows there are challenges to our job. Yea, we’re not creating contact manager 2.0 or email manager 2.0. but we are calling people that aren’t expecting a phone call and often times have never heard of our company. We’re calling people all over the world, “hoping to catch them at a good time.” And let me specify: by people I mean CEO’s, marketing directors, VP’s of marketing, and sales managers – decision makers that don’t exactly have time in their day to have a 10- minute phone conversation with an inside sales rep.
And these are just the logistical challenges, I haven’t even mentioned getting yelled at and hung-up on. Long story short, every inside sales rep has had a bad day on the phone, bad week, and sometimes even a bad month. So here are a couple tips I find that help me when I am struggling on the phone.

Three Tips For the Struggling Inside Sales Rep

First, if you have a bad call (i.e. the person yells at you, hangs-up, you muddle your pitch, etc.) you immediately pick-up the phone and call someone else. I call this “dialing through it.” I started doing it shortly after starting at Optify. It helps me have a short memory about a rough call and move onto the next one.
Second, understand that inside sales has an art to it. Its not telemarketing and we’re not reading scripts. Be efficient and direct about the purpose of your calls, but don’t be afraid to be creative. Remember, decision makers get 40 calls a day just like yours. Try to find a way to stand out of the crowd by capturing people’s attention.

And lastly, remember nobody’s perfect. You’re going to make mistakes on the phone. Its important to learn from them and even find humor in them as well. One of our inside sales team’s favorite things to do is talk about a weird call, a funny call, and even a bad call. In my experience the most important thing you can do in inside sales is be persistent, be creative, and learn from every call you make.