Blog

August 28, 2017 By Dionne Mejer

Get Stuff Done

If you live by the words “this is how we’ve always done it” and really, really like a well defined rut, this is probably not what you’re looking for. If however, you are interested in making changes within yourself and your team, you’ve come to the right place.

If you’re someone who likes to get up and get stuff done, then you’re in the right place. If dangling items on your to-do list make you nauseous and procrastination make you cranky, you’re in good company.

As a leader, we are on the hook for numbers, relationships, process, initial onboarding, ongoing training, the list goes on and on. Can I get an Amen? Sometimes, tackling these big initiatives is so overwhelming, we don’t know where to start.

And even worse, we do nothing.

Well, let’s talk about eating the elephant one bit at a time, just like in the video. At the AA-ISP Leadership Summit in 2017, I was fortunate enough to lead a pre-event workshop titled Transforming your Inside Sales Team. During this workshop, we walked through an Inside Sales Infrastructure scorecard and everybody rated themselves.

The purpose of this exercise was (and is) to stop, think, and do.

The leaders in this workshop scored themselves and then rated what particular area of focus would give their team the most lift. Based upon those scores, they were then able to plot actions on an annual calendar for tackling.

Again, keeping in mind that things happen – both good and bad – and we should allow enough time so we’re not short-circuiting our efforts before they begin.

Resources for you:

AA-ISP
Transforming your Inside Sales Team worksheets (this is where you’ll find the scorecard)

Action tip of the day: (1) complete your scorecard, (2) figure out which area of your Inside Sales Infrastructure you could improve that would matter most to your team and deliver the biggest impact, (3) determine next steps and right them down, and (4) compartmentalize what you need, next best steps, and execute!

Dionne is a 20 year sales veteran having built and scaled Inside Sales team from the ground up. She started her own firm, Inside Sales by Design, to work with companies wanting to build their Inside Sales Teams right the first time and transform their current Inside Sales Team into something greater. Dionne believes in and uses common sense, practical approaches to inspire leaders and teams to greatness.

August 29, 2016 By Dionne Mejer

Expert Interview Series: Dionne Mischler on Boosting Your Inside Sales

This post originally appeared on the KiteDesk blog.

Dionne Mischler is the founder and CEO of InsideSalesByDesign.com, an inside sales consultancy based in Southern California helping companies take their teams to the next level by implementing proven best practices. We recently caught up with Dionne to get her advice on how companies can implement better inside sales strategies. Here’s what she had to say:

Tell us about Inside Sales By Design. What services do you offer?

Inside Sales by Design offers workshops and seminars to companies looking to start and/or grow their Inside Sales teams. Additionally, I’m available to talk with teams at their sales kick off or other events about the power of Inside Sales and get everybody on the same page.

What’s your approach and/or philosophy to inside sales?

My approach to Inside Sales is to be deliberate and intentional in order to be successful. My philosophy is hope is not the right tactic when a team or department is on the hook for revenue.

What is the current climate for inside sales? Why should brands be investing more into their inside sales teams?

Oh man, the current climate for Inside Sales is hot, hot, hot. For a variety of factors, Inside Sales is a proven sales channel and brands are looking at leveraging this model in order to improve their time to market of a new product, have more coverage in communicating with their prospects and customers, and having the right people in the right chair in order to communicate with their prospects and customers in the way they prefer.

Where should companies begin when growing their inside sales efforts?

When talking with companies about starting an Inside Sales team, I ask a ton of questions related to their product/service readiness. From there, we talk about their customer onboarding and retention efforts. Starting and/or growing an Inside Sales team happens AFTER these processes are in place or at least being practiced.

Inside sales cash investments

What are the most common mistakes or oversights you see clients making when trying to grow inside sales?

The most common mistakes/oversights I see typically fall into two buckets:

1. Funding is approved for the team and results are expected too soon; and
2. Inside Sales people are put into the seat too soon without enough infrastructure to support their efforts.

How important is good leadership to the success of inside sales teams?

Good leadership is probably the single biggest asset to the team and directly ties to the success of the Inside Sales team. I was fortunate enough to present on this very topic and it’s one of the workshops I provide.

What do you think are the qualities that are sales leaders should possess?

I think all leaders, especially Sales, should be slow to speak and quick to listen. I expect any good leader to seek to understand (Covey) first and foremost. I expect Sales Leaders to model the behavior they want to see from their team. I actually train new leaders on this very topic. Teams mimic the behavior, tone, mannerisms and priorities of their leader, even if they’re not directly communicated. Leaders live in a fishbowl. It’s what was signed up for, therefore, leaders must model what they want to see.

What are the most effective methods you’ve found for motivating sales teams? What doesn’t seem to work as well?

Let’s start with what doesn’t work. Sticks. Saying “just do it” is out. These are adults, not children. Motivating sales teams is really about changing or enhancing the behaviors we want to see. It’s about incentivizing appropriately. And in order to do that, we must know the individuals on our team and what makes them tick. Specifically speaking, money, gift cards, time off, are all great incentives. Providing a sense of purpose is actually the biggest motivator.

How does having shared goals and a sense of purpose improve a team’s output?

This is a great question and ties directly to the previous question. Every team must have a you-are-here dot. There is a collective goal that galvanizes the team and generates tremendous focus and subsequently, a vast amount of results. I’d also say, this is the first step in setting the team in the right direction aligning to company goals. For example, is the team responsible for selling a new product? What’s the company goal? And what is the team on the hook for? This goal alignment generates the desired behavior, focus, and goals.

What are your favorite tools or resources for sales managers and their teams? What will help them achieve results?

I’m a fan of continual learning and mastering our craft. So reading blogs, books and belonging to and attending targeted group and events is absolutely critical. The other half of the coin is the tools. The use of tools must propel activity forward in order to increase the velocity to goal attainment. For example, if you’re team is prospecting, a tool like KiteDesk is highly recommended. My other favorite tools are ExecVision for call coaching, Ambition for sales effectiveness and Wide Angle for robust 1:1’s.

Need more ideas for winning sales?

Watch Designing the Ultimate Sales Development Team

June 10, 2016 By Dionne Mejer

What makes you go faster?

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

What are you looking to accomplish?
What does your current process look like? (The one you’re trying to automate.)
Have y’all used tools in the past?
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:

Leverage the Tool section from the PM Inside Sales course to define and hone your process so you’re not buying shelf ware.
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.

February 15, 2016 By Dionne Mejer

Growing Pipeline in 2016: Webinar on 2/19 with David Sneider of SendBloom

A sustainable and sizeable pipeline unlocks the full potential of your sales team. You already know the ROI on inside sales as a channel. Are you ready to find out how you can scale your pipeline growth?

Then you need to attend our upcoming webinar.

In this discussion, I want to introduce you to David Sneider. He runs Growth and Customer Success at Sendbloom, the sales automation company that powers some of the world’s most effective pipeline building sales teams.

In the webinar we cover…

Two key fundamentals that as an organization you MUST have in place
The framework where top reps excel and can bring others up with them.
The missing link in prospecting that holds wannabe ‘quota crushers’ back
Actionable ‘nuggets’ that you and your team can test today

Join us for this fast paced and information packed webinar on Friday, February 19th at 10am pst.

October 30, 2015 By Dionne Mejer

The Fundamentals of Sales Enablement: An Interview with Amy Pence, Sr. Sales Enablement Manager, Alteryx

Amy Pence and I were able to catch up last week to talk about Sales Enablement and the value of having properly prepared sales people. In addition to a program and process by which sales people are brought onboard at a company, initially trained and then receiving ongoing training (for both sales and product).

By way of introduction, Amy Pence is the Senior Manager of Sales Enablement at Alteryx, the leader in data blending and advanced analytics software.

The oldest of six siblings and a self-proclaimed mother hen, keeper of the peace and problem solver, Amy is a natural (and I say gifted) fit as a Sales Enablement leader.

Read on for excerpts into our conversation and subscribe to our upcoming blabcast on 11/4 to hear more.

DM: How would you define Sales Enablement?

AP:When I think about sales enablement, I think about the enablement of breakthroughs through those moments of breakdowns. Figuring out how people learn, what’s going to make people “get it” to click for them, and put that into practice. It’s putting it into a coaching perspective, be vulnerable – you must practice what you preach.

DM: Why Alteryx?

AP: When I was interviewing, Alteryx stood out as the real deal. Talking to leaders, people in the building – everyone was here to make a difference and make it happen. Being here now, it’s the people, the product – it does what it says, no smoke and mirrors here. I could just feel it here, in the back of my neck, that this was it.

DM: Tell me more about your Enablement role within Alteryx?

AP: Even though enablement pops up as not a word in spell check, the enablement community is really excited about being more widely recognized as a key and strategic function in sales – a bonafide profession. I run and provide a host of enablement services from sales boot camps and sales onboarding to ongoing sales training. I work with our Sales leaders to build 30/60/90 days plans – we call it the cohort approach – by team and then across teams. And we’re very careful to do retrospectives, aka postmortems so that our enablement efforts further a collaborative culture. One thing our culture demonstrates is this – accountability and engagement go hand in hand with collaboration.

As an extension of that, I am constantly asking what we can do better to make the reps successful. And further, build the tools and be sure to stay focused on testing, experimenting, executing – in other words, making it happen!

DM: Would you share with me your key insights re: Sales Enablement?

AP: It’s a mix of training, but not just from an event standpoint, it’s ongoing support and making sure people have what they need when they need it. Being the oldest child of 6, that was my role – making sure that everyone was happy, kids were in bed, so I could hang out later. Being helpful and keeping the peace, but making things happen.

These are the fundamentals I see as aspects of Sales Enablement:

Onboarding, Ongoing, Over-the-Shoulder Coaching
Training, tools, talent management
Vulnerability, vigor, volume

I and my soon to be team, tie all of that together and use SalesHood internally as a means to foster that collaboration, accountability and engagement within the team.

I consider it validation, a true compliment when reps ask: “What do you think? What would you do?” This tells me trust is there and I’ve done my job.

DM: What makes people embrace change?

AP: Sales Enablement is not for the faint of heart. It takes a ton of moxie, courage, and grit to train sales people. So I start with “there’s got to be a better way” mindset. And I show the outcome and definitely have refined my art of persuasion ability.

Literally what I tell reps is trust in the process, have faith, you’ll slip back into old tendencies, and that’s okay – and when you do, I’m committed to helping you reel it in so you can keep it between the ditches.

The Alteryx sales approach flips the traditional model on its head – and that’s where the onboarding, ongoing, over-the-shoulder coaching comes into play. Being one sales enablement leader to 75 reps means working closely with the sales leaders is not just a commitment, it’s a necessity.

DM: What does the future hold for you?

AP: Acceleration. Accelerating everywhere – and while setting the pace, not just keeping pace. Personally, I’m primed and ready to kick it into overdrive. I have the privilege of working with amazingly talented, driven individuals each day – people who wake up thinking about transforming lives by means of an insanely great analytics platform. We’re helping people learn to love their jobs again. And that’s exciting. I love my job – making that a reality for others is what I wake up thinking about.

I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Amy, she’s an amazing individual and definitely in the right role at the right company. You can catch up with Amy at our upcoming Modernizing Inside Sales blabcast series. We’re talking Sales Playbooks on Wednesday, November 4^th at 8:30am pst. Subscribe here.

Dionne is a 17 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 small and 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. When not working, Dionne enjoys spending time with her husband, kids, and friends at the beach and embarking on new experiences.

October 27, 2015 By Dionne Mejer

Modernizing Inside Sales – A Series of Blabcasts starting Wednesday, October 28th

Have you wondered where to start with learning something new as it relates to your Inside Sales team? Are you asking yourself, “I need to do something new and different, I just don’t know what.” Then join us as we bring together key insights, best practices and take-aways from expert practicioners and deep subject matter experts.

We’re kicking off tomorrow, October 28th, at 8:30am PST talking about Training and Onboarding with Jeremy Boudinet, Director of Marketing for Ambition and Vince Gatti, VP Sales ITsavvy. Subscribe today and join us tomorrow for a high quality conversation.

And visit my Blab page for upcoming Modernizing Inside Sales sessions. Already scheduled are:

Coaching and Accountability with Jon Birdsong, CEO of Rivalry
Sales Playbooks with Ralph Barsi, VP Field Operations at Achievers and Amy Pence, Senior Manager Sales Enablement at Alteryx
Process to Scale with Charlie Teed, VP Inside Sales at Mavenlink

Stay tuned and follow me on Twitter for more….we’re bringing deep knowledge to share and know we can learn from you too. Join us!

Dionne is a 17 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 small and mid-size companies to share the ultimate best practices of high performing Inside Sales teams. To that end, she recently partnered with Rhonda O’Neill to create PM Inside Sales, an online course teaching the fundamentals that have made her teams so successful. When not working, Dionne enjoys spending time with her husband, kids, and friends at the beach and embarking on new experiences.