COMMENTS
I can relate to the perspectives from this interview. A strong inside sales organization comprises of having good alignement with marketing, motivating, rewarding and measuring performance. Last, having good synergy with field counterparts and management. Communication at all levels of the sales process is a must.
Excellent interview Trish and Silvana and I really appreciate the insights. I am really interested to understand more about your compensation program, success objectives and hiring process. I am Inside Sales Manager for a technology services company but have not been successful in recruiting candidates to date. To date, my efforts are currently the lead generation engine for the company. Any ideas how I might develop a winning compensation program and attract competent and skillful inside sales reps would be greatly appreciated.
Nice interview.Extremely pertinent points.
One way of bringing new reps up to speed, or rather dealing with the challenge of maintaining productivity around attrition & scaling up scenarios, is to have a two layered delivery structure. We use that quite effectively within our our company. For the first few months, our less experienced reps utilize their time in purely mapping companies around predefined parameters.This helps them to understand the business environment, and build on confidence. Meanwhile, the intelligence they capture is forwarded to more experienced reps who then, use the information to develop a business case so as to pitch to the decision makers. This process has quite a few benefits;
a) You are to some extent, de skilling at the lowest level, and therefore are less vulnerable to attrition.
b)It gives time to the new reps to internalize the business challenges without really breaking under the pressure of giving qualified meetings immediately.
c)It ensures that the quality of meetings does not suffer on account of lack experience.
Then again, in our case, we also maintain a bench to ensure that we have the neccessary band width to address scaling up/ attrition situations.
@ Edward. I would be happy to discuss your questions around compensation and hiring. If I am correct, you are an outsourcing vendor. The scenario for you is a bit different but we have a significant amount of experience there as well. Reach out at your convenience.
This is very informative information although I would prefer to see it in two postings rather than one.
It strikes me as very difficult to retain top salespeople if they have to cold call. There are much better ways to drive qualified prospects to your web site.
Dan