8 Leadership Quotes To Accelerate Your Sales Career
The transition from sales representative to sales leader is a step that most young sales professionals aspire to take. It's a progression that our own Operations Manager, Caleb Welch, advanced through quite quickly.
Caleb started at Incept as an Account Growth Specialist in 2016, but brought with him more than 11 years of sales experience. He quickly gained success on several different client programs and jumped to the head of the pack in terms of delivering results and client satisfaction. In early 2017, Caleb began transitioning to a client support role where he helped strategize with clients and improve program results. His success led to a third promotion - Operations Manager - within a year and a half of joining Incept.
Caleb credits this quick advancement to a commitment to results and continuous improvement, themes that are very apparent in Caleb's favorite leadership quotes.
The transition from sales representative to sales leader is a step that most young sales professionals aspire to take. It's a progression that our own Operations Manager, Caleb Welch, advanced through quite quickly.
Caleb started at Incept as an Account Growth Specialist in 2016, but brought with him more than 11 years of sales experience. He quickly gained success on several different client programs and jumped to the head of the pack in terms of delivering results and client satisfaction. In early 2017, Caleb began transitioning to a client support role where he helped strategize with clients and improve program results. His success led to a third promotion - Operations Manager - within a year and a half of joining Incept.
Caleb credits this quick advancement to a commitment to results and continuous improvement, themes that are very apparent in Caleb's favorite leadership quotes.
Keep reading to see his 8 favorite leadership quotes that helped accelerate his sales career:
“There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses - only results.”
“Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily; even if you had no title or position. ”
“A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit. ”
“No matter how good you think you are as a leader, my goodness, the people around you will have all kinds of ideas for how you can get better. So for me, the most fundamental thing about leadership is to have the humility to continue to get feedback and to try to get better - because your job is to try to help everybody else get better.”
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
“Motivation will almost always beat mere talent.”
“It’s not about having the right opportunities. It’s about handling the opportunities right.”
“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”
5 Ways To Never Make Another Cold Call
There is no shortage of content out there proclaiming that COLD CALLING IS DEAD. They're all right. We have too many tools at our disposal for that not to be true. Instead, sales professionals must drop the cold call mentality and instead turn to warm calls.
A warm call is when there is some previous connection established between the salesperson or company and the prospect being called. The stronger the connection between yourself and the prospect, the warmer the call is.
There is no shortage of content out there proclaiming that COLD CALLING IS DEAD. They're all right. We have too many tools at our disposal for that not to be true. Instead, sales professionals must drop the cold call mentality and instead turn to warm calls.
A warm call is when there is some previous connection established between the salesperson or company and the prospect being called. The stronger the connection between yourself and the prospect, the warmer the call is.
Sick of making cold calls? Here are 5 ways to never make another cold call again:
Company Website
One of the most obvious things a salesperson can do to warm up a cold call is to arm themselves with as much knowledge about the prospect and their company as possible. You can do this by visiting the company website, social media pages, and checking the Google news section. Here are a few things you can look at on the prospect's website to gather the necessary information to warm up your cold call:
- Get a solid understanding of what the company does
- Check the news section
- Check the blog
- Sign up for the company newsletter
We've had a bunch of success in getting into warm prospect conversations by referencing a recent news article or blog post by the company, especially if it closely relates to the topic you are calling about.
Industry Survey
Many of our clients will opt to do a round of calls (yes, cold calls) to collect industry information from their target market. We try to keep these as short as possible for the prospect but gather the most detail we can for the client.
This type of approach allows us to do two very important things:
1) Warm up the conversation for the follow-up call
While the initial survey call will likely be a cold call, it's an easy way to get your company's name in front of the prospect so it's more recognizable the second time around.
2) Gather information to guide the follow-up conversation
The aggregated data from the survey helps to paint a picture of the target market's pain points. That information allows the salesperson to be very knowledgeable about what the prospect is facing and speak very specifically about how to solve it.
In our experience, this is one of the best ways to increase your sales call connect rate. By emailing your prospect ahead of calling them, you've instantly added one more touch point that can help familiarize the prospect with your name and company ahead of the call.
An even better outcome follows when the prospect has read your pre-call email, familiarizing themselves with the actual offer. Many times prospects will not allow a salesperson to even get to a description of their offer on a sales call, but when the prospect is pre-exposed to some of the details of the offer ahead of the call, they will often times allow the salesperson to get to the point of the call much faster, leading to higher efficiency and effectiveness.
One extra tip regarding sales emails - if you've recently left a voicemail for a prospect and are following up with an email, use a subject line that alludes to that. When we've used the subject line 'Voicemail from [INSERT SALES PERSON'S NAME],' following a voicemail versus something less directly referencing that previous touchpoint, we've seen significantly higher open rates.
LinkedIn is one of the best tools for sales professionals trying to warm up their cold calling, a favorite for our Business Development Manager, Timothy Serafino. There are several different kinds of engagement actions you can take, but the most effective are the ones that create some kind of notification for the prospect:
- View their profile (make sure you aren't doing this anonymously)
- Add as a connection
- Like their activity
- Endorse one of their skills (this one can get a little creepy in my opinion)
A few months ago I got a call from a salesperson that had just looked at my LinkedIn profile and sent me an email. With a notification on my browser, a new email in my inbox, and a phone call in quick succession, I was convinced to pick up and talk to the salesperson when I otherwise would've ignored the ring.
Inbound Marketing
What about just cutting out cold and warm calling all together? Fully committing to the inbound marketing methodology might get you there, depending on the type of product or service you're selling.
If you're selling a B2B product or service that requires consultative selling, inbound marketing may not be enough to free you from all sales calls. In our experience, inbound marketing is the best long-term approach for growing your business but, and this is a big but, it works best when paired with warm calling.
Did your prospect just download a piece of content from your website? Why not follow up with a call asking if you can answer any questions for them? Has one of your prospects visited your website 56 times in the last two days? It might be worth reaching out with a quick call. Skipping these kinds of opportunities in the name of inbound marketing is leading to lost opportunities for many organizations.
What other ways are you effectively warming up sales calls?
Revitalizing Sales for Manufacturers
I had a conversation the other day with a gentleman who is on the executive team at a manufacturing company with five production facilities that all support 4 major customers. He joined the team a few years ago, and was shocked to find out they have had one sales guy who has pulled down commission checks in the tens of thousands per month for the past 10 years, all from those same 4 customers.
Something's horribly wrong with this picture. I asked him a handful of questions after learning this, and I thought I would share parts of our conversation with those of you in the manufacturing space to see how many of these you're wrestling with yourself.
I had a conversation the other day with a gentleman who is on the executive team at a manufacturing company with five production facilities that all support 4 major customers. He joined the team a few years ago, and was shocked to find out they have had one sales guy who has pulled down commission checks in the tens of thousands per month for the past 10 years, all from those same 4 customers.
Something's horribly wrong with this picture. I asked him a handful of questions after learning this, and I thought I would share parts of our conversation with those of you in the manufacturing space to see how many of these you're wrestling with yourself.
Does that sales guy commission fall off after a period of time?
His answer was no. That sales guy was paid the same commission for every order that came through. All he had to do to make a fat commission check was to make sure he kept his customers and that they came back and ordered again and again.
That's not necessarily the wrong behavior to incentivize. You obviously want to make sure that your sales and customer support teams are aligned with the goal of keeping every customer you have and losing none of them to a competitor. But it's not a very complete way to incentivize sales.
Consider revamping the commission structure to incentivize sales to be hunting new, unique customers. Sure, they still need commission for maintaining customer loyalty, but perhaps dropping the percentage after two years and again after five years will keep the sales team from resting on their laurels too long.
What happens if one of those customer leaves?
If this organization lost one of their four major customers, they would have to shut down at least one, if not two of their 5 production facilities, including lay-offs, unemployment, and thousands in lost production.
The idea that four people in the world hold the employment of how many hundreds of people in their hands should be enough to keep any executive awake at night. I went through a season with one company when one major customer left and took 40% of the revenue with them.
The key issue here is diversification. Sure, you need whales, and your sales team should be hunting whales. But you also need a whole bunch of trout just to keep the boat from tipping too far in one direction. Obviously, commission on these isn't quite as enticing as it is with whales, so get creative on how you incentivize your sales team to go find you a hundred small customers to balance out your 4 whales.
Do you do secondary operations, direct to consumer, or through distribution?
A little bit of all that, actually. Some of their facilities do secondary ops for other manufacturers, others manufacture consumer items that are sold through distribution and online through an eCommerce site.
Obviously, this may be less the norm and more an exception, but let's dig into each of those a little bit. If you do secondary ops, you may consider conducting a market survey to get a better grasp of the scope of your prospect universe, the reasons they buy, and the triggers that would cause them to switch out members of their process.
If you are among the few (and growing) number of manufacturers who are selling direct to consumer, eCommerce isn't slowing down. Look into selling on Amazon, or using a platform like Shopify or Magento to build your own eCommerce sire. Sales from eCommerce are easy to track, and through a proper application of data analytics and marketing, can quickly become predictable and repeating.
Selling through wholesale and distribution is about putting your sales team in front of purchasing teams at the right stores. Again, a market survey may give you insight into the scope of the universe, their motivators and triggers. This data can be used to segment the market and leveraged to create strategic sales initiatives.
What kind of content marketing or lead generation are you doing?
Obviously, the gentleman's team does almost no content marketing, because they haven't properly prioritized new-customer acquisition.
There's a lot of buzz lately around becoming a "thought leader" in your industry. Sure, this can be done by releasing some good white papers, publishing a study you conducted, or speaking at conferences and trade shows, but you can also become a thought leader by consistently pumping out high quality, relevant, engaging content. Even if it's only engaging to other members of whatever niche market you're in, let them all know that you know your stuff, and you're doing things better than the competition.
Lead generation usually refers to creating enough interest that prospects are calling you to buy from you. It can also refer to phone-based sales, generating interest through personal connections with your prospect base. Either way, generating interest among your prospect base has to become a priority for growth and sustainability in an increasingly competitive manufacturing landscape.
To sum it up, revitalizing thesales process for manufacturers involves lighting a fire under a complacent sales team, setting goals for a diversified client base, understanding your verticals and using data to approach each, and keeping yourselves at the forefront of your prospects minds.
Should I Use A CRM For My Sales Process?
I've been asked this question by customers and prospects in just about every industry. From start-ups to 50-year old manufacturers, security companies to a dentist's office, folks are wondering how much attention they should pay to this term CRM. To be clear, I run in circles where things have always been done a certain way, so even many of them are just now starting to pick up on buzz words like CRM, inbound marketing, content, etc.
For those who are wondering and too afraid to ask anyone, here's a few reasons why you should use a CRM in your sales/customer acquisition process:
I've been asked this question by customers and prospects in just about every industry. From start-ups to 50-year old manufacturers, security companies to a dentist's office, folks are wondering how much attention they should pay to this term CRM. To be clear, I run in circles where things have always been done a certain way, so even many of them are just now starting to pick up on buzz words like CRM, inbound marketing, content, etc.
For those who are wondering and too afraid to ask anyone, here's a few reasons why you should use a CRM in your sales/customer acquisition process:
Keep track of your contacts
If you're responsible for selling, you get into at least 1 sales-related conversation each day.
That's 22 new contacts per month, and north of 250 new contacts every year. If you factor in one or two conferences and a handful of networking events, you've got to be pushing 500. That's a ton of business cards! You don't actually want to hang onto that many business cards do you?
A CRM can help you keep track of all those contacts, where you met, what they do, and what you last talked about.
Maintain a log of touch-points
Most sales processes take multiple touches with the same person or company. Phone calls, emails, and face-to-face visits can all be tricky to maintain from memory with multiple prospective customers at once.
Within each contact record of your CRM, you can log calls, emails, and meetings with each prospect, so you don't have to rely on memory to recall where you left off and when you last made contact.
Set reminders for yourself
Even the most basic CRMs have certain functionality, including the ability to set reminders for yourself to follow up with a specific contact on a specific date and time.
Jotting down reminders in the margins of planners or on the side of your desk calendar only goes so far. With a CRM, you can be automatically reminded via email to circle back around to a certain contact days, months, even years later (hopefully your sales cycle is a bit shorter than that!).
It's free!
Need I say more? Most major CRM names have some sort of freemium account. These accounts have no or very low monthly fees, so it doesn't have to become a major line item on your budget quite yet.
Most freemium accounts come with basic functionality, and you have to be diligent about maintaining it without some of the more robust automation that accompanies more expensive accounts, but if you're just looking to start out, it does the trick!
Personally, I use the Hubspot Sales CRM, but have also used Salesforce, Dynamic, and Pipedrive. It's free and has a relatively robust set of sales tools that I leverage. I would love to hear from others what CRMs they use, recommend, love, or hate.
4 Reasons Why Pay-Per-Lead Pricing Doesn't Make Sense
Sales organizations often boast how great their pay-per-lead pricing is, or include some sort of money-back guarantee that ensures you get the right number of leads.
Most of the conversations we get into here at Incept are with companies and organizations that have utilized similar services in the past and gotten burned. Here's why:
Sales organizations often boast how great their pay-per-lead pricing is, or include some sort of money-back guarantee that ensures you get the right number of leads.
Most of the conversations we get into here at Incept are with companies and organizations that have utilized similar services in the past and gotten burned. Here's why:
They end up with too many leads
After signing an agreement to pay $X.00 per lead, it usually becomes the goal of your lead generation partner to send you as many leads as they can. Sounds good, right?
The question is are you ready for them? Chances are even if you include language about a maximum monthly budget, their goal is to send you as many leads as possible to reach that budget in as few hours as possible, in order to maximize their own profitability. So they race through your list and send you anything that doesn't sound like a hard, "No."
Are you and your sales team ready to handle that quantity?
They'll be bad
As mentioned above, most pay-per-lead partners aren't as concerned about sending you high-quality leads as they are about sending you what are called 'billable' leads, meaning leads that fit into whatever broad definition of a 'lead' you agreed upon so that they can be included in your invoice.
These leads will be less-qualified, less warm, and harder to convert to revenue. But you still end up paying for them!
That gets old really quick…
They distract from the ultimate goal
When you get sick of paying for bad leads, it suddenly becomes a major priority to screen the leads you're receiving from your lead generation partner, in order to keep the money you already have in your pocket.
Now you're distracted from your ultimate goal: putting more money in your pocket. That lead generation partner was supposed to help you do that and instead has become a distraction from that goal because they require too much oversight.
You'll spend more in the long run
You'll spend more in the long run, combining the lead generation test with the overhead of hiring after it fails.
After you get fed up with managing this lead generation partner, you inevitably decide to do things internally. After all, if you have to manage someone, why not have them in your office where you can keep an eye on them 24/7?
Now you're in the hole the money you were invoiced by the lead generation company, plus the overhead that goes into hiring and maintaining a new employee to do it internally, and you're kicking yourself for not just hiring internally for it in the first place.
Then after 6 months of managing this new employee and covering the cost of their overhead, they may end up not working out, and you're back to where you started. It's really a brutal cycle.
So what is the alternative to pay-per-lead pricing? Check out this post on fractional inside sales and learn why a dedicated sales representative makes the most sense.