Home > Membership >

Ask an Expert

Ask an Expert

Welcome to the "Ask An Expert" section of the AA-ISP. We understand that inside sales is a growing industry and that we often learn by "trial and error" or "as we go". Sometimes there is no clear answer to some of the challenges we face. Ask An Expert can help inside sales reps or leaders gain feedback from our industry experts on various challenges that we face. Please complete the information in the form provided and we will respond to your question promptly.

Dear John, Thanks for your question. Again, we apologize for the delay of getting your question answered due to an issue with the ask-n-expert site. Good question which I know is covered in many white papers and best practices within your member library. I’d encourage you to spend some time reviewing what’s out there. Also, we will get this posted right away as there are many experts who have used particular coaching guidelines and I’m sure they will be happy to share them with you. In addition, I can provide a very simple answer to this which is based on the final exam grading requirements of the CISP (Certified Inside Sales Professional). These areas are graded from the final exam call and would be areas that a manager would be looking for on most any call. CALL OPENING, DISCOVERY PROCESS (including pre-call research), LISTENING AND QUESTIONING SKILLS, SALES QUALIFICATION, OBJECTION HANDLING, CONFIRMING NEXT STEPS IN SALES PROCESS, and OVERALL SOFT SKILLS. Of course all of these areas have sub-points, in fact a total of over 30 points are graded. I hope this helps. Now let’s post this so we can hear from other experts!

Additional Insight Provided by LLynard: Assuming you have a set of standards that make up an effective outbound call, you already have a "checklist" of what to listen for. If you do not, that is the place to start.

Once you have trained your team on the telephone sales skills expected, you simply use that checklist, or call structure, to coach them to consistently apply those skills (listening to calls together, identifying strengths and opportunities and role-playing to mastery).

After they have mastered the basics you then have a template for monitoring/scoring their calls to hold them accountable to the standards.

Coaching never stops and is always necessary to take skills to the next level. Many managers make the mistake of thinking of monitoring and coaching as synonymous, but coaching is for helping reps change behaviors and monitoring is for measuring their behaviors against the standard.

I hope that helps, John. Feel free to contact me offline for clarification.

Laurie Lynard
laurie@telemasters.net 651-245-3766

Be the first to rate this answer.

Question from: Private to Non-Members

good morning experts. I have a couple of questions. 1) we have a cutting edge, new to market technology that really needs to be pitched at a high (senior) level to get the right traction. We have little marketing support, it is ramping. I was hired in march to initiate a new lead generation team, and hired 2 people in May. In the past month, we have been building lists (our database has few of the right names), reseearching in ISell and LinkedIn for good titles, hunting down contact information, and doing research, so our outreaches are "warm", or at least educated. We're capable of about 20ish calls/day with all that effort, and expect to ramp to 30ish or so. Our current commissionable activity is to find a SPONSOR (Solution Selling), who ADMITS PAIN, and the sales rep agrees that there are NEXT STEPS. Our current quota is 12 of these qualified leads/month. In my research with peers, and my experience outbound prospecting for the past 6 weeks, that feels high. We're able to connect with about 15% of our outbound outreaches, but only 1 has converted to the definition of a commissionable lead, and even that has lost steam already. I am looking for advice on the following issues: benchmarking -- what are other companies defining as a commissionable "lead"? We cannot use BANT, it is a cross-departmental business solution, we do not sell into IT. Tactically - in SFDC, how are other organizations "delivering" such leads to sales? I have a meeting tomorrow to discuss these points, and a meeting on Weds to discuss with my boss, who is openminded to resetting expectations. Please reach out to me directly if I can provide enough more detail to get the answers that will help me. I'd prefer to keep this anonymous to the rest of the audiece just now. thank you. Diane

*AA-ISP assumes no liability from companies or individuals who take action or implements strategies or tactics based on the answers.