Hastening this rebirth are pressures from dissatisfied buyers, a growing imbalance between spending on sales efforts and buyer’s budgets and scrutiny of return on marketing spend.

What to do?  

The answer:  Innovate to improve the buyer experience and enhance outbound productivity.

Organizations such as Ariba, LivePerson and TriNet are reinventing their go-to-market and sales strategies through innovative approaches to outbound demand generation.

• Ariba radically changed their approach to event recruitment with startling results by using social networks and a sales intelligence solution.
• LivePerson bolstered the outbound productivity of their enterprise sales team with a new telesales enablement solution.
• TriNet increased sales productivity and expanded into new geographies more profitably with accelerated customer acquisition rates with a sales intelligence solution.

I reviewed these outbound success stories on our webinar on April 13.   Couldn’t attend?  No problem, go ahead and view the webcast here (no registration required).

The significance of the outbound renaissance on B2B sales & marketing is profound as these innovative approaches drive organizational change:

• Sales Six Sigma – Once the domain of manufacturing and other back office functions, organizations like TriNet are ‘ripping apart and putting back together’ sales processes.     To drive scalable and profitable growth, sales and marketing teams through their operations teams, are taking rigorous, analytical methods to improve their business models.
• Front End Loading of Talent – Enabled by intelligence and productivity tools, sales can now afford to position higher skill set and even subject matter experts at the top of the sales funnel and at the first touch with the prospect.     Ariba now engages sales reps to precisely target prospects in event recruitment programs.    In the past, the first touch would come from marketing and not sales.    
• Hybrid Roles Align Sales & Marketing – Marketing operations collaborating on sales process.   Field marketing reporting to sales management.    Inside sales reps recruiting prospects for events.   These cross-over and hybrid roles are driving alignment between sales and marketing.
• The Democratization of Sales Intelligence – Once the preserve of senior management or analysts, business intelligence is speading out to the far reaches of the organization.    At TriNet, front line sales reps are enabled to engage CXO level decision-makers at small businesses in timely, relevant and meaningful messages.     Prior to enabling solutions such as InsideView, only enterprise sales reps would be able to profitably leverage sales intelligence gathered from disparate sources.
• Sales Labor Arbitrage -  The first human touch between the seller and buyer cannot be automated, only outsourced.   At least, that was the approach before new solutions like ConnectAndSell.   Now the low skill set dialing can be outsourced and the high skill set discussion with the prospect is conducted internally.      In the past, LivePerson outsourced appointment setting.  Now LivePerson’s enterprise sales team sets their own appointments. (Full disclosure: my organization, Direct Impact Marketing is a ConnectAndSell solution provider partner).

A few weeks ago, my firm was invited by a large California-based tech organization to respond to a telesales RFP.

Given the terms & conditions that were included, the client’s legal counsel was involved in the creation of the RFP.

Yet, this organization requested that each bidder record all calls.

The irony for this tech company in California calling Californians, is that their request could create a legal liability.

If your telesales team is making calls from the USA to California, it is illegal under California law to call record and call monitor without the consent of all parties on the call. See an excerpt below from the California Penal Code (Note: for appropriate interpretation of the law, please seek legal counsel as this blog post does not constitute legal advice. Sorry my one college course in business law doesn’t cut it.)

632. (a) Every person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, by means of any electronic amplifying or recording device, eavesdrops upon or records the confidential communication, whether the communication is carried on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of a telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison, or by both that fine and imprisonment.

There are eleven other states that require this consent from all parties on a call: Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington. (For an overview by state and by country, see Wikipedia’s coverage of telephone recording laws).

Beyond the legal implications, there are nagging questions about the business case for call recording and whether viable alternatives have been adequately considered.

I sense that many executives believe that all front office contact center functions should record calls. However the nature of the beast is very different for inside sales versus technical support and customer service.

Certainly those customers with a strong relationship could be judiciously targeted by inside sales. A customer would be more receptive when notified of a call recording.

Here are a few reasons why I believe that recording calls is a poor practice for inside sales when calling prospects (rather than customers).

Announcing the intent to record the call will address telephone recording laws but will leave prospects cold. When a customer calls tech support or customer service, most customers are willing to be recorded as common practice and as a reasonable exchange for having their issue addressed. Imagine outbound calls to prospects from inside sales that would be prefaced by: “This call may be recorded for the purpose of quality assurance and quota attainment” . Prospects will have no patience or inclination to cooperate with inside sales by agreeing to record the call, especially when their relationship is marginal at best.

Listening to call recordings is drudgery and unproductive. Any manager with a team quota and a sense of priority will minimize the time spent on listening to recordings.

Prospect satisfaction is not on the corporate radar screen. Technical support and customer service are critical to customer retention. Call recording is standard procedure for these two departments. But for inside sales, is prospect satisfaction a priority? Win/loss analysis is common but I have yet to find an organization that survey’s its prospects early in the buying cycle to gauge the impact of inside sales.

Let’s take a closer look at some alternatives to call recording:

Call Monitor, don’t Call Record – for the states where this is permissible, monitor the calls of inside sales but do not record the conversation.

Role Play – if the goal is to train and coach inside sales, role playing is preferable to recording calls. It is very beneficial for inside sales reps to role play with internal staff who have customer insight. An even better approach is for inside sales reps to role play with cooperative customers. We have found this to be invaluable given the rich feedback provided instantaneously by the customer.

Exception-based Assessments – rather than measuring the activity (i.e. conversations), focus on measuring the results (qualified, sales-ready leads, pipeline impact, closed sales). Leakages from the pipeline should be tracked to determine trends. Interviews can be conducted with prospects who ‘leaked from the funnel’ to see if buyer needs were addressed and if the telesales rep was successful in meeting those needs.

For example, the field sales team at one our clients complained about the quality of the leads that we generated. According to sales, the prospects were not evaluating.

An audit of those leads by my firm indicated that not only were those prospects evaluating but the leads purchased a solution from a competitor to our client.

When presented with this information, the sales team sheepishly admitted that those leads were never contacted.

The moral of the story is that a call recording of our initial conversation would not have addressed the issue raised by our client’s sales team. Only by conducting a post-mortem lead audit, could we uncover the truth.

Are the penalties and enforcement of call recording laws inconsequential to you?

Or have you implemented alternatives to call recording?

Photo Credit: Matti Mattila

For telesales groups that target the SMB segment (Small, Medium Business), the dynamics are very different than in pursuing large mid-market or enterprise accounts.

In targeting the vast SMB market through lead generation, the challenge for telesales is to break into large numbers of accounts without the luxury of referrals or deep account insight.

The issue of minimal customer insight is problematic for both outbound cold calling and the telequalification of responders where limited profiling information exists. The issue is exacerbated by the demanding metrics set for telesales.

The recognition that the internet has enabled buyers to be in control of the buying process creates formidable challenges to telesales: how to be knowledgeable, consultative and bring value to the discussion.

For many organizations, the resources for telesales enablement may limited adding to the woes of telesales.

So what to do? How can you trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness?

Let’s start with an example of what not to do:

Hi Mr. Lesser, I am calling today after reviewing your website. Our solution is well-suited to your company. It will help you save at least 10% in costs…

The problem with this approach is that the sales rep is calling under false pretenses – hardly a way to build a rapport with a prospect. By their generic value proposition it becomes clear that the only thing customized about their pitch is the use of your name.

For fun, try this out: ask the telesales rep why he/she believes that their solution is a good fit to your company based on their review of your website.

In contrast, my suggested approach digs deeper but still allows you to work on a shoestring lead generation budget.

Segment your List & Segment your Messages
By segmenting your list based on criteria such as size of organization or preferably, industry/vertical market, you will be able to use the power of mass customization.

A message using industry vernacular to articulate how your solution addresses industry pain points can be an effective door opener.

Although not as effective, as communicating to account-specific pain points, it can build credibility and give you the ‘right’ to ask more detailed, account questions.

Fact-Find Low, Call High
A year ago, Paul McCord, sales trainer, consultant and author, blogged about how he prospected. Paul’s approach to sell his firm’s services was to call ‘low’ into an account to discover pain points and potentially generate an internal referral to a senior decision-maker.

Then, armed with account insight, Paul calls to the decision-maker with stellar results.

To economize, this approach can be well-adapted to high volume telesales by interviewing only one low level contact prior to approaching the senior decision-maker and limiting the number of call attempts.

Use Trigger Marketing
Just as consumers who move through life stages, the buying cycle for businesses can be triggered by milestone events such as changes in the executive suite, mergers & acquisitions, office relocations, the bankruptcy of the vendor of an installed solution etc.

Lists that track these triggers are broadly available and also with such tools such as InsideView.

Overlaying this data onto your database can flag accounts that then can be batched and targeted by telesales.

Telesales faces very different pressures than field sales. Some of the above approaches are used by field sales in a similar fashion but the approaches described here reflect the unique requirements of the world of telesales.

Photo credit: Balancing act by theDQT