Working remote has been an interesting change for me as an inside sales leader who, for the last decade, has been running insides sales teams that sell digitally to now selling with a 100% remote sales team. I have to admit, I miss the personal interaction of being in the office with my co-workers and the mind share that happens working side by side every day. One of the biggest challenges I did not anticipate was; how do you train a new hire who is 100% remote? Like many companies out there, we had three new hires right around the time COVID-19 had forced everyone to work from home.

I had to work quickly and adjust not only for our inside sales team but also for these brand-new employees, who had committed this time in their career to XANT. Though there have been some bumps in the road, here are some of the things I have learned over the last four weeks:

Listen to Calls

Listening to live calls and past recorded calls is a must for both your senior account executives (AEs) as well as your newest AEs! New AEs need to not only know the value prop and message of the product you are asking them to sell, they also need to hear and understand the customers current state and some of the challenges your product can help solve.

Listening to calls alone will not be enough to ramp quickly. Post call sales training will allow you to dissect these calls and will help internalize correct processes. These calls will also highlight many of things they may have missed working on their own. A pro-tip is to create a basic rubric for them to score each call as they review. This will help everyone to gauge progress and understanding.

Virtual Role Play

During this work from home period, one of the activities I miss the most is live role playing with my sales team. In the past, our new employees would team up with another AE for daily role-playing sessions from discovery to demo to overcoming objections. A role play partner provides a great opportunity for reps to coach each other, as well as helps them to build camaraderie and more quickly integrate into the team culture.

Working from home should not detract from this practice. In fact, working from home is the perfect place to hone these skills as digital seller execute their discovery calls and most demos remotely. Roleplaying will also sharpen their virtual conferencing skills. Teaming up new hires with a seasoned partner really makes this type of training work and will speed up the time for a new hire to fully ramp.

Over Communicate

When your sales team is in an office together, you can identify all of the non-verbal communication skills to quickly gauge if your new hires are sinking or swimming. Not having in person interaction requires some over communication so you don’t assume everything is running smoothly when it most likely is not.

A key part of over communication is to hold morning and evening check-ins with your new hires to map out the plan for the day, talk through any questions or challenges they may have and measure their progress. Using video for these check-ins is a great way to have a more personal connection to your team members.

I asked my team what they have missed the most about being in the office and many responded that they missed the ease of mind sharing and being able to mimic what they see working for others. To help overcome this, we use a team chat channel (Teams or Slack) where our team can post questions, successes, and challenges for the group to respond to. We also will spend time at the end of the day on a Zoom meeting, sharing successes of the day both with work and non-work-related topics. These types of regular touch points help to keep the culture of the group healthy and engaged.

The final point on this topic I would like to recommend is to make sure your new hire has a “Bat” phone when they have questions. Showing urgency to their needs and questions helps to ease frustration and can mirror the in-office experience where they can just walk up to someone and get an answer. Don’t miss this key ingredient, it is a massive difference maker.  If you find they are pestering you that could mean. either you are doing a poor job of communicating or you have hired the wrong individual.

Metrics

Many of the questions a new hire will have for the first 30 days are, how am I doing, what should I be working on right now, and am I going to be successful here? Metrics and benchmarks will help to answer those questions for you as well as your new employees. Every morning, have your new hire develop a plan for the day, identifying what they want to accomplish and have them be specific for you to review and sign off.

A simple plan may look something like this:

• Role play first call discovery with Mike from 9:00 – 10:00
• Review two discovery calls
• Prospect for two hours
  • Enroll 20 new contacts into a cadence
  • Send 20 emails
  • Make 40 cold calls

At the end of the day, review with them what actually happened. Were they able to complete all of their daily tasks, if not, what stopped them and how can we adjust for tomorrow?

If you are in Sales, you want and expect to me measured. Defining the correct benchmarks and metrics will provide the necessary feedback to ensure they are on track and will ultimately ramp on time.

The keys to successfully on-boarding and training a new employee are consistent role-plays, call reviews, and training, as well as keeping an open channel of communication to replicate the in-office experience. Finally, provide a plan to help measure progress and success beyond just a revenue target so both parties can quickly gauge where weaknesses may reside and identify a solution.

Author
Daren Reschke
Head of Emerging Enterprise Sales | XANT

In the beginning stages of structuring a sales team, a new hire will get the chance to work alongside a seasoned rep and soak in the sale process, as well as how to best prospect leads. But when your sales team grows from a few to dozens, it can be difficult to keep the focus on how everyone works as a cohesive unit. More team members means more people to train and onboard in order to get them speed as soon as possible.

Oftentimes as your team grows, finding time to train every single new hire falls to the wayside. As a sales manager or leader, your job is to provide your team with the tools they need to be successful. Before you dive into the meat and potatoes of sales training, some pre-training is necessary to get everyone on the same page. 

Sales team pre-training:

1. Assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses
2. Align training with your company’s goals and strategy
3. Choose the training format that makes sense for your company

Without adequate sales training, your team will struggle to keep afloat and the growth of the business can slow to a standstill. In this article, we’ll discuss the eight techniques you can use to effectively train your sales team.

Why sales training is important

Every round of new hires that join the sales team will need a group of designated mentors to help them get acclimated to the company sales processes. This training period will give both the new employee and their manager a look into how they work and how they may impact the success of the company down the line.

Sales training is more than just the customary 60 – 90 day period of trial and error. It’s essential to the workflow of the team. It can cover anything from basic onboarding, skill development, and setting expectations for the future. It can be more complex than other employee training periods. 

Sales team pre-training

To start, thorough pre-training can be done to make things easier for everyone.

1. Align training with your company’s goals and strategy

To introduce new employees to your company, you first need to know what strategies keep it up and running. Knowing the sales strategy and how new hires can support the company’s goals is crucial. 

Before any training happens, you must determine the behavior you want your sales hires to possess. How do you want your reps to push the company forward and improve upon set processes? What do you see them doing in order to achieve the desired outcome? 

Knowing the answers to these questions will directly connect your sales training to the needs and goals of the company. If you’re able to see how these new employees will impact the company, it’ll keep both parties focused on the bottom line.

2. Assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses

To begin, it’s important to take the time to assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Doing so can highlight the areas where you can improve going forward. Routine reassessing can ensure that the team has the skills needed to use the company’s choice or software or equipment. 

Some questions you can ask to dig into the details can include: 

• Do you have a focused sales process in place?
• What is your value proposition?
• Which KPIs are you using to track sales effectiveness?
• What are you actively doing to increase your sales funnel?
• Are you taking advantage of changes in the market?
• Does the sales team work well together?

You may find that you’re losing deals from a lack of product understanding or that the sales process of bent out of shape and needs a refresh. Talking to the salespeople will give you much more detail than a deep dive into your performance year over year. Speaking to the people who do the job every day will help you to get a broader perspective and give you insight on how you can assist with their specific needs. 

3. Choose the training format that makes sense for your company

When you start to brainstorm how you want to train new salespeople, the range of options may be overwhelming. No single format is right for every company or team, so determining the most effective way to train your sales team can help you save time and effort. 

If you’re stuck on which format to choose, consider the size of the team. If you’re an early-stage startup with a lean sales team, compiling a few short courses or holding workshops may work better than formats that cater to larger teams. If your team has grown considerably, bringing in an outside consultant may be more effective. You can also send a group of team members to a conference to take note of how the market is changing. This way, you can gain insight into how the team needs to adjust training into the future.

During your sales team training

Once you’ve done all of the necessary preparation and planning before your new sales hires arrive, it’s time to execute your training. The following are a few things to keep in mind as training is underway.

4. Begin with the basics

If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, go ahead and assume your new hires already know the basic foundations of sales and selling. There may be the unicorn hire that has a leg up and has already familiarized themselves with these basics, but to build a strong foundation, starting from the beginner is a much safer bet. 

To truly train your team from the bottom up, have them work with the tools and software, such as your CRM software, your salespeople are currently using. Starting from the basics (such as admin or technical tasks), you’ll save your team time and frustration. Show them everything from the pages customers see to the landing page sales funnels you have in place to even the social advertisements.

The basics are more than just admin. Believe it or not, email is not a dying format. Hold a session on cold email outreach for your team and teach them the foundations of an effective and professional cold email. When implemented, email marketing best practices can help take a prospect from unengaged to closed.

Another training session you can hold is one about the product or service you are selling. If your product constantly undergoes development or improvements, it may be wise to continually send out teamwide updates to keep everyone up to date. Even long-term employees may need a refresher after years on the job. Laying out your product’s features from day one gives new hires the needed knowledge to sell with confidence. 

The purpose of sales performance management tools is to monitor sales progress to determine and recognize success and respond to processes and employees that need to improve. They offer data through scorecards for both individuals and teams. Check out the top sales performance management tools and start tracking your team’s progress. 

5. Tap into e-learning content

Just like the wide selection of formats you choose from when you conducted pre-training, there are a plethora of options to choose from when it comes to e-learning. The internet holds a practically unlimited amount of resources on helpful sales techniques.

Companies everywhere are embracing the beauty of e-learning. With resources like blogs, online courses, podcasts, and webinars, you can educate your team on things like company procedures, policies, and products in development. 

You can ask your team to suggest resources that have helped them and compile a library to train new hires. The best part about e-learning is that your team can learn about new sales techniques wherever they are. If they have a pressing question, they can reference a blog post or a YouTube video to get the answer they need in an instant. A project management tool can guide your new hires through video and training content they’re expected to complete.

7. Make learning real-world based

Make the learning process practical and real-world based. Salespeople are highly situational learners and will want to apply what they’ve learned in an authentic way. If their training doesn’t seem applicable, they can disengage, forget what they’ve learned, and resort back to their old selling habits. 

Conducting relevant training is crucial to the success of the team. It shouldn’t just be about passing down knowledge, but about letting the sales rep know what is expected of them and how the company will benefit. If they can connect what they’re doing to the company’s overall goal, they’ll be more willing to put in more effort. In other words, if it feels real and fulfilling, they will be motivated to go above and beyond.

8. Encourage the use of data

Because sales is the ultimate results-driven position, the sales team should make a habit of reflecting on past performance. An easy way to do this is to dedicate part of the day or week to look back on meetings and sales calls to gauge what went well and identify areas that need improvement.

Is the sales training yielding the results you forecasted during planning? Your marketing automation tool can deliver a flashy marketing campaign that can dazzle audiences, but if the data isn’t trending in a positive direction, the company is built on an unstable foundation.

Utilizing accessible data to measure performance can be helpful to many different departments across the company. It’s no secret that big data is becoming an essential part of business development. Tracking it allows any team to determine the most efficient way to use their time and money.

Set your team up for success

At the end of the day, sales training will likely never be complete. If you take anything away from this article, always give your team access to appropriate and effective resources, be open to answering questions, and create a culture where learning is recognized. If you can do all three, you’ll support your sales team and give them the knowledge and confidence to succeed. 

If the sales team is successful, the company thrives. The only way is up.

Want more sales content? Read up on how you can boost your sales team’s motivation.

——

Alexa is a Content Marketing Associate at G2. Born and raised in Chicago, she went to Columbia College Chicago and entered the world of all things event marketing and social media. In her free time, she likes taking her dog on walks, creating playlists for every mood, and finding the best vegetarian food in the city.

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When I worked for FranklinQuest, I learned about the power of sales training.

We offered a seminar called Language of Selling. So, just to see what would happen, we put our sales reps through a full-day seminar of Language of Selling — and sales went up 20%. Their language on the phone was crisp, and we made more sales.

The only problem was, the training didn’t last. It seemed to start decaying in 3 to 4 weeks. We found they hadn’t built habits.

Franklin constantly quoted some pretty amazing research that showed it takes 3 weeks to build a habit; we later found it was closer to 4 weeks or 28 days. We weren’t holding our reps accountable to repeat what they had learned every day for even 1 week. After 3 months, the effect was almost gone.

I noticed the new reps who went through the training outperformed the old reps who hadn’t been trained recently, but they decayed in their organization and sales skills even faster.

That initial training was like a firehose. They understood a lot, but they didn’t actually learn the material. Understanding alone did almost nothing. Learning was the key.

We defined learning as “Could they teach it back to us, and could they do it day after day?”

Retrain your sales reps every 90 days

I didn’t know what to do, but then I thought, let’s train everyone again. In fact, let’s retrain them, or reimmerse them, every 90 days.

I got a little pushback because they thought we were training too much. Wait a minute, we were the world’s largest training company … right?

I ran the numbers to prove my point. Half a day of time management and half a day of sales skills in 3 months is just slightly less than 2% of our time. We were achieving a 20% bump with time management, and another 20% with sales skills. So, I was investing 2% of our time and getting roughly 40% returns.

Who could argue with that?

Training decay will sabotage your success

I later learned that Franklin found this immediate decay to be the primary problem our customers had, too. We called it training decay. It was the enemy of our success.

We did all kinds of things to prevent decay. Later, we bought a company called True North, which helped coach customers over the phone to help them maintain and increase their skills. It worked quite well, but not as well as reimmersion.

Franklin taught another way to avoid knowledge decay right in their seminar. They told us to teach the content to somebody within 48 hours. It was best to teach it to our colleagues, but even our spouses, our children, or ourselves in the mirror would help us remember the content.

If we had to see it and hear it, and then turn around and process it through our own hearts and minds, then speak it, we made it our own.

People ask me all the time how I can cram so much stuff in my head, especially stories and statistics. It’s because I get so excited about everything I learn, I can’t help but teach it to everyone around me. And I remember.

Teach what you learn within 48 hours to make it your own.

If we put reps through the exact same training again, they did fine the second and third times, and then we started getting complaints that it was boring. That was a tough thing to overcome.

We found we could shorten the subsequent reimmersion training sessions and add new examples and stories to reinforce the same original principles. We also let some of the reps teach the concepts to their teams, and the boredom went away.

Every time we would reimmerse reps in content, the net decay was less and less, and performance went up.

How often do you retrain your sales reps?

But even high-performing machines can improve.

From July 22 to July 24, XANT hosted 13 executives from seven companies for the first Executive Speed Camp.

Those in attendance included:

• Apttus
• Blue Coat
• Coupa
• MarketStar
• Smart-HR
• Zenefits
• ZipRecruiter

What is Speed Camp?

Speed Camp is a consulting, conditioning and coaching experience for sales executives, customized for each organization. The goal of Speed Camp is to improve sales results.

Speed camp is facilitated by experts from XANT’s Momentum Strategy Team, including Ken Krogue, president and founder, Dave Boyce, vice president of strategy, and Gabe Larsen, director of strategy.

“The purpose of Speed Camp is to help our customers maximize their potential,” Boyce said. “By combining their experiences with what we’ve learned through years of research, we know we can create a customized consulting experience designed to improve sales results.”

How does it work?

For three days, XANT takes care of everything.

Participants are treated to black car service, five-star accommodations and the pristine Wasatch Mountains, which provide the perfect setting for 100% focus on improving sales results.

At Speed Camp, executives work together to solve problems as well as receive coaching on XANT best practices, which stem from decades of research.

“My Speed Camp experience has been amazing in the sense of being around peers that have been struggling with a lot of the same issues that I’m struggling with,” said Lauren Delfino, director of account management at ZipRecruiter.

By the end of the camp, XANT coaches and visiting sales executives roll up their sleeves and work together to create individualized, six-month success plans.

It all starts with the XANT ResponseAudit. The ResponseAudit tests how well your sales reps are following up on inbound web leads, what your average response time is, and how many times your reps call or email each lead.

Following the audit, we run your organization through our 7-Tier Benchmark. This benchmark uses 21 questions on a 7-point scale to determine where you need improvement.

Armed with this information, our experts can help you map out your current state process and determine which specific changes to implement in order to reach the results you want.

These plans come with ongoing coaching, ensuring your organization stays on track.

How do I get involved?

XANT will offer its next Executive Speed Camp on September 23.

Visit the Executive Speed Camp page for more information and RSVP today.

While the numbers do seem to be getting better, the Wall Street Journal reports they’re not as promising as one might be led to believe. According to the Labor Department, employers added 169,000 jobs in August and 79,000 in June and July combined. However, most of the jobs being added are in low-paying sectors like retail and restaurants, according to the Wall Street Journal’s article.

XANT Hiring Hundreds of Professionals

Fortunately, XANT, a high-tech software company based in Provo, Utah, is not following the trend the rest of the country seems to be stuck in. It is experiencing rapid growth and hiring dozens for professional, full-time jobs.

XANT has grown from 120 full-time employees to nearly 300 in the past 12 months and plans to reach 400 by the end of 2013, with about 50 hired in September alone.

The positions aren’t like most of the jobs being added to the U.S. job market, low-paying service positions; XANT is hiring senior-level management, engineers, marketing specialists, sales representatives and other professionals–all full-time. Plus, employees have opportunity for fast advancement within the high-growth company.

Opportunities For Employee Growth

Recently, XANT was featured in BusinessQ magazine’s Best Company to Work For (Quality of Work) article for the opportunities it presents its young employees. Some employees are managing teams after only 6 to 8 months with the company.

“You see people who are working hard move to where they want to be fast. It motivates you to work harder because you know it will pay off,” XANT business development representative, Morgan Lyman, said.

InsideSale.com HR manager, Dustin Fuller, said the company worked with what it had during the its first major growth phase. People who were willing to step up were given more responsibilities. “Now, we actively screen for people who have that energy and drive. We are looking for people who are technologically savvy and willing to learn and accept new things,” Fuller said.

Energetic, Fast-Paced Culture

Business development representative, James McAllister, said his department frequently holds competitions to motivate reps. “Our team recently won one of these competitions and went to celebrate at Tucano’s Brazilian Grill — on company budget,” he said. “Some of my favorite bonding moments with the people I work with on a daily basis took place that day.”

Lyman describes another experience with the BDR team. “Our CEO and our vice president of sales came into the room with our team and opened a briefcase full of cash,” Lyman said. “They offered us cash as an incentive for hitting quota. Some of us walked away with a lot of money that day, and we all left with a really fun memory.”

These stories only touch the surface of the culture at XANT. Enterprise implementation manager, Dave Draper said, “The culture here is ambitious and very goal-driven but close-knit as well. We know people from all departments, and we do things outside of work together. We have poker nights. We play softball. We’ve gone to Lagoon. So, while we get a lot done at work, that isn’t all there is to our relationships.”

“We have a very energetic, fast-paced culture.  The opportunities for advancement are high, so we tend to attract very driven people. Our employees are eager to work hard and succeed, and that is apparent in our culture,” said education specialist, Tori Ackerman.

XANT recently brought on former Citrix global vice president of integrated marketing and strategy, Mick Hollison, as its CMO.

“I joined XANT because it is at the intersection of the fastest growing areas of high-tech – where marketing meets sales and where sales meets science,” Hollison said. “Our data scientists are delivering breakthrough innovation in predictive analytics and data visualization that are changing the very nature of sales.  I couldn’t be more excited about joining the ‘Silicon Slopes’ movement and the great team at XANT.”

Grow the People, They Grow the Company

XANT is also increasing pay and benefits for employees and is constantly offering training, including one of the most comprehensive on-boarding programs in the industry that introduces new employees to the company and product.

“We have learned that if we grow the people, they will grow the company. Generals are made during times of war, and we are presenting battlefield promotions everyday,” said Ken Krogue, president and founder of XANT. “Our hyper-growth has allowed us to dramatically improve our employee benefits, and we are increasing them again. We also invest in our employees with stock options, so everybody is an owner.”

Refer A Friend, It Pays, Literally

Smart, motivated people generally associate with other smart, motivated people. That’s one reason InsideSale.com encourages employee referal. The company also wants to foster a close-knit environment among employees. If someone refers a friend, chances are, they’re going to enjoy working with that person.

To increase referrals, XANT gives employees a $200 bonus for every individual they refer who is hired.  During August and September, employees were given a $1,000 bonus for every business development representative they referred who was hired.

Apply Today

To find out what positions are open in your area of expertise click here.

During her session, Trish shared valuable insight into the onboarding process, a critical time in a salesperson’s career, but the least understood. Trish maintains that while sales and marketing leaders are making a first-class investment in their hiring process, they are completely undermining it with a second-rate onboarding process.

Trish identified five “gaps” in the standard onboarding process, and gave advice on how to make the process more effective.

The 5 “Gaps”

1. The Context Gap

As your first step, you need to help your reps understand your buyers and their personas. Your sales reps need to understand what their future customers are worried about, what their metrics are and how they define success.

Instead of giving your onboarders case studies, press releases and testimonials, why not let your customers do the talking?

The solution? Do video interviews with your customers, asking them questions like: Why did you select us? How would you tell the story of what we deliver to you? This is a great opportunity to collect incredible language that will resonate with future buyers and it’s easy to record it and share it many times.

2. The Orientation Gap

Your new sales rep may be able to find her way around the company, but can she tell you about the company’s vision without sounding as if she’s reading something off a marketing slide? Probably not.

The solution? Why not create a welcome video from the CEO or from the founder to your new sales reps? Hearing about the vision and culture of the company from the very top makes it personal for the reps. They will also feel motivated by the one-on-one communication.

3. The Planning Gap

Traditional onboarding helps reps understand performance expectations. But do they really own the steps to success, or do they simply plan on staying busy and hoping for the best? It’s important that your future salespeople know the difference between a busy day at work and a productive day at work.

The solution? Have your reps create a personal plan that serves as their road map to success. Ask them questions like: Which industries are you going to target? What size companies are you going to go after? What’s your strategy? Be specific. Make them own it. Help them discover how they are going to plan and measure their success.

4. The Investment Gap

Companies are willing to invest in hiring people. But far too many aren’t willing to invest in growing those same people. The average company spends $10,000 to $15,000 hiring an individual, and only $2,000 a year in sales training.

The solution? The solution to this problem is threefold. First, if your salespeople want to join professional groups, fund them. Invest in them. Professional groups give your reps a great opportunity to learn from their peers. Second, if they want to view a paid webinar, fund it for them, and give them the time and privacy to attend it. Encourage them to discuss the webinar at their next meeting. And third, buy them books. Which sales books have inspired you? Share them with your team. Start a book club to give them a place to discuss these ideas. It will bring them that much closer to their future clients.

5. The Coaching Gap

Are you coaching or just ghosting? Coaching is defined as training or instructing a team or a player. Ghosting is hiring a great rep, bringing him on board, giving him a slap on the back and then disappearing until his forecast review session. Good coaching begins in onboarding. How do you know if you’ve given your new reps all they need to succeed?

The solution? Check up on your new employees 30, 60 and 90 days after their onboarding ends. You’ll get a lot of great information about how to improve your onboarding process, what worked and what didn’t work.

For an in-depth discussion on these issues and more helpful tips, check out Trish’s Inside Sales On-Boarding Ebook, or view the whole session in the video above. To see other sessions from the Inside Sales Virtual Summit, register for the event below.

What tips do you have to make onboarding more effective? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

What’s the point? We’ll here it is …

You spend most of your waking hours perfecting and tweaking your sales pitch. What about your emails? How much time do you spend to polish them? Let’s be honest — not enough.

By upping your email game, you’ll find a simple way to boost your sales instead of wasting time lying on the flat of your back and looking up toward the ceiling at night pondering how to tweak your pitch to hit your number.

It’s time to have a cross-legged, powwow sit-down with your email marketing manager and get a few pointers (and if needed to reduce cross-divisional stress, get a couple puffs on that proverbial peace pipe as well).

Here are three questions to pose that will put you on your way to getting rock-star email results.
 

What is the best time to send out emails?

 
If you were told you could double the response rate to your emails by changing the time of the email would you do it? DUH. Well, the good news is that’s in the realm of possibility.

At XANT, we typically see over double click rates by sending between 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. compared with just a few hours later. HubSpot found the same trends.

What subject lines perform best?

 
I’ve seen several sources say that longer titles perform better. A subject line study done by Adestra last year shows that the optimal length for an email subject line is roughly 120 characters and 21 words long. Whoa, that is long! Take caution though. We tested longer subject lines various times and they were epic fiascoes.

Our data shows that shorter performs better. But maybe that’s because we target prospects who primarily work in sales management and are presumably busy. And this is why you’re asking your email marketing manager, right? What works for us or somebody else won’t necessarily work for you.
 

How do you draft killer message content?

 
By killer message content, I’m referring to content that your prospects will actually respond to. (Dangling preposition? Who cares?!) Make this your bible of content drafting.

• Make it short(er)

Mark Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” While people might enjoy Mark Twain’s ramblings, you’re not Mark Twain. Write an email, not a novel. Take the time to make your messaging clear and concise. Enough said.

• Personalize it

Here’s a tip to try. Make reference to something unique you remember about your previous conversation. We do it here at XANT and it works wonders.

If your message looks like it could be an automatic message, it might as well be an automated message. While typical merge fields are better than nothing, make it a point to make your messages personalized.

• Make the call to action clear

Your email should have a purpose. What is it that you want your prospect to do? As a pointer, I would recommend putting the call to action at the end of the email message so it’s the last thing the prospect reads.

Make the CTA the clearest section of the email. You should be able to clearly see what the call to action is even when skimming the email. One easy trick for this is to put it on a line by itself.

Now you have a good starting point on what questions to ask. Put it on the calendar to meet up with your company’s email guru. Get the answers, put them in practice, and have email do some of the heavy lifting in reaching your sales number.

Free eBook: 42 LinkedIn Tips for Inside Sales

Gain access to 42 tips from industry experts Ken Krogue and Jamie Shanks on how to grow your business through LinkedIn.

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Photo Credit: David Lipscomb

Brandt Page, from Launch Leads, shared how to turn a blow off phone conversation into something positive. And let’s be real – every sales rep has experienced this all-to-common phone call.

You pick up the phone, talk to the lead for a bit and then they ask the dreaded question: “Will you send me an email?” According to Page, every sales rep knows that translates to “Sorry, not interested.” The real question is how to turn the conversation on its head and keep them talking. It’s simple.

It’s important to accept that they want you to send an email, but the key here is to not hang up the phone. Using the InsideSales.com system, sales reps have an automated email template that is already to go, they just have to plug in the right information about the lead.

When the lead says to send them an email and that they’ll follow back up with you, the XANT system allows you to send an email right away and ask them to open it before they hang up. The key to making the call a success is while you still have them on the phone you can ask them to check their spam folder to see if they got the email (since it is sometimes sent there). Sure enough, 95% of the time the lead will open the email right there.

After you get them to this point you can ask them to check the link to make sure it isn’t broken, Page said, and most of the time they will.

“This is amazing!” Page told the audience. ”They are now looking at exactly what we wanted them to look at and they had just told us no!”

In case you missed it. Here’s literally all we did. We sent them an email, like they asked us to. Then we walked through the email guaranteeing they are reading the information you wanted them to see.

Now here’s the trick. After you’ve gotten them to this point, simply ask them if someone could call them back in a couple days to follow up with them. Amazingly, a high percentage of the time they say yes.

This wasn’t the only useful take away from the Salesforce User Group meeting. A lot of insightful and intelligent information was exchanged with people to learn new tricks of the trade. If you’re interested in attending the next Salesforce User Group, check the Salt Lake Salesforce User Group website periodically for updates about the next meeting including location and speakers.

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The infamous predictive dialer was one of the early dialers around (and sadly still in use) and went through its own wave of changes. Floppy disks were used, painstakingly so, to contact leads in the early days and with the power of the internet both the leads and dialers found their way online.

But they didn’t stop there.

With the predictive dialer becoming more powerful with the explosive growth of the internet and the companies that sprung from it, the tool was powerful but flawed. A lot of people have had the experience of the dialers that would put the person they called on hold when an agent wasn’t available. Others didn’t keep track of past leads and would call leads and lists multiple times a day (annoying the recipients to say the least!) The predictive dialer allowed for sales automation, and it did succeed with some things and failed miserably with others.

In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) started to take action to keep the peace between telemarketers and the public. Those who were using predictive dialers were forced to be more choosey with who they contacted and when.

Since then technology companies have continued to improve and develop predictive and power dialers (an important distinction) For the full run-down of the different between predictive and power dialers, read this article by Ken Krogue: Power of Intelligent Communications – Premise-based Dialers a Dying Breed.

PowerDialers are a powerful tool and shouldn’t be mistaken for predictive dialers. While predictive dialers typically call multiple people and then send the first person to an agent (or worse yet, put them on hold!) who is waiting for someone to pick up? Power dialers work differently. An agent is already connected before the software calls a person on their list and is waiting for someone to answer. If no one does, they press a button that documents the call attempt. Power dialers help sales reps increase their call volume, track data and record metrics.

Have you switched from a predictive dialer to a power dialer? What differences did you notice?

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Photo Credit: Nutdanai Apikhomboonwaroot

XANT provides the best lead management and dialer technology available today.  The technology provides increased efficiency, high visibility, and exponential output.  Companies using any combination of the XANT technology are experiencing a 5x increase in results … sometimes more.  How can you not with amazing products like PowerDialer, LocalPresence, and PowerStandings?

As I survey the sales floor at XANT, I hear the constant buzz of 22 business development reps, and close to 40 sales reps answering questions and sharing demos of this phenomenal technology.  It is a major reason for our huge growth.  We’ve more than doubled in size since this time last year and expect to double again by the end of 2013.

Yes, XANT technology is unmatched in the marketplace.  But, what many don’t see, or sometimes don’t understand, is that XANT is a full sales solution that includes training and consulting for organizations who want to transform the productivity and professionalism of their sales teams.

The software enables sales organizations to adhere to best practices that drive contact rates, qualification rates, and sales revenue.  These best practices are derived from extensive research spanning many years, thousands of companies and billions of sales data points.

Certification Training

Training and consulting is provided as a way for clients and other organizations to master the research and best practices. It helps companies take the 5x gains derived from the software and increase it another 8x. I’ve never met a CEO or VP of Sales who didn’t want to see a 13x improvement in the results they get — no matter how good they already are.

The Certified InsideSales System Administrator (CISA – I) certification provides full knowledge and expertise on the technology and how the best practices are served by it.

The Certified InsideSales Operations (CISO) certification provides the research, models, and strategies to drive exponential sales in any sales team.

Information on these programs can be found at www.www.insidesales.com/certification.

Consulting

XANT takes its industry-leading research and best practices and combines it with technology to help organizations build, improve, or save their sales organizations.  Through a process of analysis, design, implementation and evaluation, we have helped many organizations accelerate sales and exceed revenue goals.

See www.www.insidesales.com/consulting

Really, any organization that purports to help improve your sales team has to provide you an entire solution.  Without the research, best practices, and the technology to incorporate them, you are missing the opportunity to improve your sales results EXPONENTIALLY!

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