Telemarketing Software Featured Article

Lead management has become ridiculously complex. To help address this madness, businesses require new technology and workflow solutions says Guy De La Cruz, vice president of sales at VanillaSoft, in a recent blog.

Just consider these statistics, he adds. Forty-five percent of companies say their sales people need help in prioritizing leads, according to Lattice Engines/CSO Insights (News - Alert). Eighty percent of the day of an average sales rep is used on non-revenue-generating activities, according to Telesmart.com. Eight dials an hour is the output of the average salesperson, according to Ovation. And 80 percent of sales require five call attempts after the first contact, but the average rep stops at just one, The Market Donut suggests.

All this, he adds, points to the need to streamline inside sales through automation, increasing inside sales productivity, and improving strategy implementation.

“Sales automation is the technology that automates the lead management and sales cycle to move leads more productively and efficiently through the sales funnel,” explains De La Cruz. “The idea is to give the salesperson the ability to perform consistently at the highest level possible in the simplest way possible.”

But before automating a process, he adds, it’s important to build workflow for each lead so the system knows how many contact attempts to make, whether a voicemail is appropriate for all calls, what kind of voicemail is the most effective for a given kind of call, how to prioritize each lead type, whether or not to pair voicemails with emails, who needs to do lead qualification, what happens to a lead at the end of a call cycle, and how to nurture a lead after the call cycle.

This all may sound difficult, but as De La Cruz and VanillaSoft CEO David Hood explained in their recent presentation at the inside sales professional event 2016 AA-ISP Leadership Summit in Chicago, it is possible to keep inside sales simple.