Six Essential Steps to Improve Your Sales Team Prospecting Results:
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- Provide Salespeople With a Survey to Self-Assess Skills
- Meet with Your CRM Team
- Facilitate a Discussion with Marketing
- Refresh or Develop Training
- Conduct a Prospecting Workshop
- Insist & Inspect Salespeople are Blocking Time for Prospecting Activities
Most people give up their New Year’s Resolutions by the third week of January, precisely where we are on today’s calendar.
We work with sales leaders across a range of industries – logistics, software, technology hardware, telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, automotive, and education, to name some – yet one of the top challenges we heard in 2021 with their sales teams was consistent.
The 2022 Top Sales Leader Resolution – Improve New Account/New Logo Growth
The inability of salespeople to consistently identify, target, prioritize, pursue and win new names/new logos is a significant inhibitor to revenue growth.
Advances in technology, marketing, and content tools, coupled with the advent of a hybrid of virtual and in-person selling, allow salespeople to know more about their prospects and engage with them in more ways than ever before. Yet, many salespeople continue to rely heavily on cold-calling.
Sales enablement and training organizations have their flavor of challenges, so many have not delivered the support salespeople need to harness the tools and modern prospecting approaches available to them.
Most salespeople rely heavily on LinkedIn, direct email, and cold calling. Only a tiny portion of salespeople leverage all the tools and resources at their disposal, and even fewer coordinate with marketing’s parallel efforts.
Ultimately, one of the most significant issues salespeople struggle with is scheduling time on their calendars for prospecting. Yep! The majority of salespeople do not block time for the all-important prospecting activities.
In summary, sales team prospecting skills are out of date.
This resolution may be one to adopt if your sales teams struggle to sign new accounts at the pace needed to meet business objectives.
Below are the essential steps to improve your sales team prospecting results:
1. Provide salespeople with a confidential survey to self-assess their prospecting skills and needs.
The results will help you invest in the support they most need. Please don’t assume you know what they need solely based on their sales results.
2. Meet with your CRM team and ensure that salespeople can view their target account list in reports and efficiently manage their progress in prospecting efforts.
This step is essential. If salespeople aren’t tracking prospecting efforts in the CRM, chances are the actions aren’t being captured anywhere.
3. Facilitate a discussion with marketing to determine which initiatives and campaigns will support new customer acquisition.
Align prospecting efforts to the timing of marketing initiatives for maximum impact. Marketing efforts can warm up salesperson outreach and keep your company top-of-mind.
4. Refresh or develop training on how to best leverage tools they should be using (e.g., CRM, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Calendly, etc.)
The chances are that most of the sales team is underutilizing the available tools.
5. Conduct a prospecting workshop to introduce prospecting standards, best practices, and process integration of marketing efforts and technology tools.
Make prospecting improvement a team sport. From new hires to seasoned veterans, team dynamics can energize salespeople to learn from each other and improve faster.
6. Insist and inspect they are blocking time on their calendars for prospecting activities.
Things that get scheduled get done. Try this experiment; next time you are with a salesperson, ask them how much time they have blocked for prospecting last week or this week. Then ask them to show you their calendar. You’ll find that what’s on their calendar may not align with their answer.