The success of your B2B lead generation campaign depends on your inside sales team. Every day, different scenarios such as cold calling, email blasting, lead generation and lead nurturing are handled by your inside sales team. Doing different tasks everyday makes them less effective in generating high quality leads. The skills of your people will help determine whether they can handle different tasks and become productive at the same time.
However, as a Sales Manager, if your inside sales team is lagging behind their productivity, you must take a closer look for the reasons behind it. Here are the 8 factors that might affect your team’s performance.
#1. Lack of Skills or Inexperienced Talent
Yes, skills can be acquired through time by practice. Oftentimes, companies hire young and inexperienced staff and treat inside sales as a training ground. Sales organizations believe hiring employees with little or no sales experience is better because you can easily teach them how to sell.
Related: 5 Research-Backed Reasons to Outsource Your Marketing & Lead Generation Program
#2. Lack of Training
Continuous training and coaching is needed for sales reps to perform well and become more effective in selling. Lack of training leads to burnout and sales team become less productive.
#3. Attitude and Actions
Sales reps that don’t have an enthusiastic attitude can’t execute well and think of consistent actions to improve his performance.
If you are a sales manager, an owner, or a client using such a service, you should figure out how to improve the performance of your team. And here’s how to do it:
#4. Identify the problem.
Sales Manager monitors the success rate of every appointment setting campaigns. When you found out that leads are going down, you need to identify the reason behind it and come up with a solution right away.
Examples of problems to identify include;
- The team’s cooperation. Teamwork means better productivity. No one can do multiple tasks on his own. Everyone needs to cooperate in order to achieve the team’s goal. Sometimes, frictions within the team can result in lower performance. When that happens, deal with it as soon as possible, ironing out differences and issues, can mean a great deal for your team.
- See what’s not right in your team. Factors that might affect your team’s performance includes;
Related: Running Low on Passion? Remember the First Day Feeling
#5. Malfunctioning equipment.
How to solve it? Check all of the equipment from the computers to the phones that your sales reps are using and see if everything is working well.
#6. A bad calling list.
How to solve it?
Assess if the calling list has the following information; name, correct job title, business email, company name and address. Also, ask the sales reps if the companies included in the list has wrong numbers and no answers. Once identified, remove these numbers from the calling list and ask someone from your inside sales team, a new or an inexperienced employee to do profiling for your senior sales reps to call. Here’s how to start with a fresh calling list.
- Poor script
How to solve it?
Redefine your script.
Related: Don’t Waste a Moment! See Sample Cold Calling Scripts For You
#8. Sales reps way of calling
How to solve it?
Listen to the calls of your sales reps and conduct coaching if necessary.
Once you’ve identified which of these factors are causing low production, check and take immediate actions to solve the problem.
- Recognize success. Nowadays, dedicated sales team is hard to find. When you found one, you need to recognize their efforts. A simple “good job” with a little bit of pat at the back will help them boost their confidence. By making them feel appreciated and valued will help them improve their sales performance.
- Provide constructive feedback and coaching regularly. Sales reps want to know how they’re doing at work on a regular basis. By providing feedback and coaching, you are helping your team identify their strengths and find ways on how to improve their weaknesses.
Related: 4 Signs That You Badly Need a Lead Generation Team
Productivity can go up and down in inside sales, you should keep that in mind. It may not be your team’s fault, since this can be a seasonal campaign. Showing your team some love and appreciation can help them feel motivated in meeting their sales targets.
