The best sales teams are a lot like great schools: They care about results, but the way they achieve them is by being relentless about developing the inside sales skills of their reps. In fact, the best sales teams are most often led by someone who is more like a sales coach than a sales manager. This dedication to developing inside sales skills ultimately creates a sales team that not only hits its short-term goals, but instills a culture of learning and self-improvement in order to achieve its long-term goals as well.
But it’s not always so easy. Superb inside sales skills don’t always come naturally to young reps, and sales leaders often feel like they don’t have the time or mastery to adequately coach their reps. We know how important this process is, though, so we boiled everything down to the 14 inside sales skills every sales rep must master.
A sales rep who doesn’t perfectly understand the product they’re selling is a completely ineffective rep. Product training should be one of the very first things you teach new reps – they should be able to explain in detail how each product works, what business value it offers, and the reasons it appeals to your company’s ideal customers. This will help ISRs (Inside Sales Reps) craft their sales pitch effectively, and ensure they highlight each product’s strongest features.
Once ISRs have the product knowledge to sell, it’s time to do some prospecting. However, while many sales leaders have their quota-carrying reps also do early cold-calling, I actually don’t suggest for ISRs to do cold calling. From a unit-economics perspective, it is obviously considerably more cost-effective to have your Sales Development Reps (SDRs) do cold calls, while your quota-carrying ISRs should be doing more sophisticated prospecting – what I call “strategic prospectingâ€. This means searching for referrals through existing connections to new prospects that fit the target buyer or ideal customer profile.
Read more at https://iigrowrich.com/top-14-inside-sales-skills-every-sales-rep-must-master/
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