Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

How did you celebrate your last win? Did you buy champagne for the entire sales team, or take that healthy bonus and use it as a down payment on your next ride? Did the entire bullpen get excited or did you do your own happy dance in the way of celebration? It doesn’t really matter how you expressed your excitement, the point is that sales professionals love to win and when it’s hard-fought, it’s a glorious feeling.

Inside sales lead management is designed to support the sales professional and promote the win. But not all successful sales are actually wins for the company. If the deal isn’t profitable, it can quickly become a liability. The goal is to drive sales success through deals that actually benefit everyone involved. According to a recent VanillaSoft blog post, the key to success in this area is discipline.

This discipline is built around understanding the goals of the sales team and the purpose of inside sales lead management. More importantly, it’s also built around understanding the goals of the customer organization. It sounds like a no-brainer, but sales professionals are famous for being very single-minded, focused only on the win instead of how they can help a customer accomplish a business goal that also contributes to the win. To do so, they must be able to articulate how the customer defines value.

VanillaSoft suggests there are three elements to consider to be successful in inside sales lead management. First, the sales professional has to understand probability – the likelihood that the customer will buy something. They need to look for an urgency to solve a problem or a specific compelling event. If these things are missing in the conversation, it’s time for the sales professional to move on to the next opportunity.

The second focus is on value – how will the deal provide value to the company? Is there enough profit in the deal to make it worth going after? How much time must be involved to get it done and what other resources are required? At the end of the day, the sales professional’s goal is to produce profitable revenue for the company. If the deal doesn’t have enough profit, it’s time to move on to the next opportunity.

Finally, the sales professional may have identified that the customer will buy, but will they buy from that particular professional? It’s important to understand the competition and how an offer has an advantage or disadvantage by comparison. Does the customer see more value in one than the other? The experienced sales professional will understand this positioning and either reconfigure the offering to stand apart from the competition or move on.

The sales team is the lifeblood of the company, but its members must have the discipline to focus on the deals that make sense and move on when they don’t. When this discipline is in place, celebrations are well-deserved.