Inside Sales Best Practices
Last week I spoke at the AA-ISP (American Association of Inside Sales Professionals) along with Michael Damphousse, CEO of Green Leads, (@damphoux) and our Host Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group (@bridgegroupinc). I talked about the best practices in training and coaching your team, while Michael talked about outbound dialing.
What I really enjoyed was that I learned some really good stuff from Michael that I am going to use and steal. But first, what are the best practices in outbound dialing? You can get the entire slide deck here, but I learned 2 significant things:
- Dial at between 8 – 10 in the morning local time, or 4 – 6 in the afternoon (people are at their desks)… Lunch works too
- Dial at the top of the hour, 10 minutes of until 5 minutes after the hour. The prospect is just out of a meeting, and hasn’t headed to the next one.
There were a number of significant best practices (more…)
Going to Dreamforce? Let’s grab a coffee
Are you going to Dreamforce in San Francisco? If you are, let’s try and connect. Drop me an email at sharper at territoryplan dot com. I would enjoy connecting and talking about sales, trends, applications, or Football. It will be an intense but fun 4 days.
If you don’t know what Dreamforce is, it is a conference of Salesforce.com developers, and partners, users, and sales professionals . 
There should be around 12,000 people at the Moscone Center, and all of us are focused on Sales, CRM, and the use of Salesforce.com and Cloud Computing. I have already begun to connect with old friends, customers, and partners since San Francisco is a great place to catch up over coffee or a few drinks.
Conferences are a great way to catch up and a great selling opportunity… PROVIDED you know why people are there. People go to conferences to learn more stuff. They go to connect with other users and their peers. They don’t go to be in a 3 day sales call. Connect with prospects (as I intend to do) but leave the pitch and the hard sell at home. Come with value… something that will leave everyone glad they took the time to talk with you. (By the way, value is not defined as a bag, pen, bobble head, or even flash drive) Value is information, an upgrade, an offer, or something that helps your prospect get more out of the event. As for P2W.. We will have a couple of special offers that anyone at Dreamforce who gets my card can take advantage of.
How do you find me to get my card… look for the black T-shirt with something (hopefully) witty on it 
And look for the Dreamforce offer next week.
Enjoy, good selling, and I’ll see you in San Francisco.
Great tips you can use
Welcome to Happy Friday! It is a rainy and raw Autumn day in New Hampshire… But we love this time of year. I have broken out the sweaters, and the leaves are spectacular! Here are some ideas for your long weekend.
You are probably sitting there trying to look busy before the Holiday weekend. Well, guess what… Your competitor may not be. And that executive that you have been trying to reach is probably working hard trying to finish stuff so he can actually take Monday off. This might be a good time to catch him at his desk and have a quick conversation about how you can help him solve some of those issues that may keep him from playing with the kids this weekend. But…
Since it is Friday, I wanted to share a few blog postings from others that I found useful and I thought you would too.
Matt Bertuzzi at the Bridge Group writes about leaving effective voice mails. I like this one since it is exactly my method and I 100% agree with him.
Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot had a great post at the HubSpot Blog about searching Google effectively.
Brian Halligan another HubSpot guy had a great post at On StartUps Blog about the impact that the Internet and new technologies are having on Selling. Who moved my customer?
Have a great weekend and Good Selling!
How to write a Territory Sales Plan
There are many aspects to creating a full blown territory sales plan. However, if you have never written one, where and how to start many be confusing. While a full blown plan description is longer than a blog post, (Download this tool kit for help and a detailed White paper) I will try and hit the highlights.
Whether you use slides, spreadsheet, or a document is up to you, but the key is the data that you need to turn into information. So where do you start? (more…)
