Inside Sales by Design

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What makes you go faster?

What makes you go faster?

I get asked fairly frequently about tools for Inside Sales teams. Here are my typical questions in response:

  1. What are you looking to accomplish?
  2. What does your current process look like? (The one you’re trying to automate.)
  3. Have y’all used tools in the past?
  4. What’s prompting the search now? (This will help in prioritization.)

Unfortunately, I get a lot of vague answers and even worse, the dreaded “we don’t really have a defined sales process right now.”

Yikes. We’ve all been there and as a practitioner, I was in the same boat. Do more with less was the message from executives, so off we go tool shopping. Only to come up against those questions time and again.

So now I ask those questions and share with individuals, if your process isn’t in place, you’re not really automating anything. 0+0 = 0.

If we stick with the theme from our picture – ban low performance (or non-existent processes, not high performance tools (designed to enhance and accelerate your process).

Before going tool shopping, start with the four questions above and come up with some specific answers. Those answers are the key to successful tool shopping, choosing the right tool, and making the experience overall successful and giving you everything you’re hoping for in a tool.

Here’s what to do next: 

  1. Leverage the Tool section from the PM Inside Sales course to define and hone your process so you’re not buying shelf ware.
  2. Visit the AA-ISP website and review the Resource Section.

P.S. This is the same approach for both tech, non-tech, SaaS, etc. The overarching theme is to have a plan to execute against in order to achieve the goal brought on by a great idea.

Dionne is an 18 year sales veteran having built and scaled Inside Sales team from the ground up. She recently started her own firm, Inside Sales by Design, to work with mid-size companies to share the ultimate best practices of high performing Inside Sales teams. To that end, she recently co-created PM Inside Sales, an online course teaching the fundamentals that have made her teams so successful.