We all need money to live in comfort and to support our families.  However, I believe that most normal human beings thrive on being recognized for their accomplishments.  Most people thrive in environments that give them ample recognition.  At home, you can do things for your roommates or family members.  In most cases it’s a crapshoot if they will appreciate yourefforts.  If you are married, your spouse may or may not recognize the extra effort that it took to make the house or yard sparkle.

I believe that the place where we can be recognized, consistently, is at work.  When we are at work, we are measured for our efforts that support revenue growth, or for our efforts that increase net profits.  Revenue growth and net profits can be measured and it is easy to appreciate when these increase because increases in these areas impress investors.

It is important that all individual employees be given a set of metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that they can be measured on.  If everyone is held accountable for their jobs and measured accordingly, they have a framework by which they can be recognized.

Once you have created the metrics and KPI’s, for every contributing member of your company, you have the framework to build a consistent recognition process which can be implement across the organization.  As I mentioned, earlier, I believe that people thrive on recognition.  If this is true, to help your employees to thrive, your company should consider building a continuous recognition program.

A continuous recognition program may recognize those individuals who consistently meet their objectives.  This is an easy place to start.  To get your entire organization to thrive, however, your company might consider recognizing employees who have made incremental improvements.  You may want to recognize people who contribute to the greater community, etc.  The continuous recognition program can be run as often as you’d like; monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, etc.

Give Managers the opportunity to do “spot” recognition, on the fly and in front of their teams.  This type of recognition will prevent complacency.   Imagine how you might feel if, out-of-the-blue, your manager recognized you and gave you the rest of the day off because of your contribution to the company.

The method of recognition can take many forms.  As a company, decide if you will give days off, gift cards, cash, etc.  However, don’t let these be the only forms used for recognizing your team members.  A nice letter, on company letterhead, or a note of thanks can go a long way in motivating your team and building a “thriving” organizational culture.

Design a continuous recognition program and implement it.  Watch your team members and organization thrive.

I have written a few blogs on the topic of the lead qualification process, however, I continue to find prospects without a clue as to the meaning of a lead qualification process or how to start begin the process.

Here are a few “Best Practice” tips that I share with all of our clients.  Numbers matter and to ensure that your company’s telemarketing is a success, the infrastructure needs to be in place to track the call activity and the progress of each lead.  Without this information, you won’t have the data to track the success of the Telemarketing team.  A successful Telemarketing organization is focused on generating qualified leads that build the sales funnel.  Without a pre-defined process, your team may not be successful.

Best Practices

Start by Mapping Your Lead Process into your CRM Your lead qualification process includes the questions that will help sales to move the sales process forward.  Most companies understand the basic qualifiers, such as:

• Need– Prospect has a need for your solution or service
• Authority– You uncover the person or people who can make a purchase decision
• Budget– Prospect has assigned a budget for the solution or can set aside funds for
  the right solution or service
• Timeframe– The prospect can make a purchase decision within a reasonable timeframe, for example, in under 6 months

These are generic qualifiers and from my perspective don’t really add value to the quality of the lead.  A lead that is highly qualified will have additional qualifiers that support your business.  These are the questions that provide intelligence that helps marketing build better campaigns and give sales a great overview of the prospect so that they are better prepared for their first prospect call.

Build a list of qualifying questions that are specific to your business and map these intoyour CRM.  Ensure that your Telemarketing team understands the value of this information and make sure that they ask these important questions.

Implement a Lead Approval Workflow

All leads aren’t created equal.  Some leads will need further development or may need to go into a nurture program.  Therefore, it is important to have a process where every lead can be reviewed and assessed before they become sales opportunities.

Build a lead approval workflow that enables your Telemarketing Manager to review the leads and pass on to Sales for final approval.   In addition, the approval process should give Sales an opportunity to validate the lead and approve or reject the lead, before it moves to the sales funnel.

Create a field that captures the “rejection” reasons, so that your Telemarketing team can understand why their leads are being rejected.  You can use this information to train your team and help them to improve their qualification skills.

Create Dashboards to Manage by the Metrics

Build dashboards to monitor the Key Performance Indicators  or Metrics that are important to your business.  These dashboards should include call activity and other sales related activity levels, campaign results and pipeline growth.  Dashboards will enable you to keep a pulse on your business.

Build the Infrastructure

Implementing these basic “best practices” will save your company a lot of grief.  You will capture intelligence that can help your marketing department improve its campaigns.  Sales will love your Telemarketers, because they will receive excellent leads from the team.  The review and approval process will ensure the quality of each lead passed to sales.

To begin, you go through your list of contacts. Many of your contacts will know someone who needs your product or service. If given the opportunity, they will help coach you on what to say and how their referral can be successfully reached by phone or email. Again, getting a referral from someone you know (or someone you don’t know) is your best source for getting solid leads.

Timing is everything. Asking for referrals at the correct moment (when the contact is most enthusiastic for what you have done for him/her, for example) can help increase the referrals you get. Keep in mind, whether or not the contact has purchased from you, it is appropriate to ask for referrals.

When collecting referrals, you need to give an update to your contact. People want to know what happened. Let your contact know that getting referrals is a part of how you get paid. Never give up on a referral. The timing may be off but the referral may be in the market at some future date. Lastly, research shows that the more times you call a given list of prospects from referrals, the better the results.

Attitude is the key factor in selling success while networking. It is all important to ask your contacts for information. Nearly all contacts will comply, if asked, by giving the information you need. However, the fact is that most sales people never ask for information, don’t like to prospect, and especially don’t even ask for referral business. If this is the attitude of your sales staff, then you need to change this attitude right now.

My approach to negotiations is not simplistic. Situations do vary, people vary, competitive pressures vary, etc. You cannot take a tough line and expect to win, nor can you give in to the first offer. The actual negotiation is typically an emotional encounter, started with lots of discussion and preparation.

In all of the negotiation, you need to behave rationally. You need to justify your position and explain where you might have some flexibility. You need to leverage yourself during the course of time to being “reasonable,” “practical” and “understanding of the other position.”

If you say something that is not in keeping with the drift, ebb and flow of the negotiation, you stand the chance of being considered not relevant and unreasonable. Negative actions soon follow, where one party will break off discussions. You need to be clear, concise and reasonable in your approach.

You need to gauge how much room you have in the proposed price, consider what secrets may be locked up in the agreement, what the benefit will be for you. Common things that negotiations miss are clauses in agreements that are “escapes,” where if performance does not meet expectation, the other party walks and gets rewarded.

Keep in mind, every good negotiation is a compromise. Either party thinks they should have asked for more or given less. The art of the deal really rests with your interest and timing to get things done the way you want. You need to protect your own essential interests and need the courage to walk away or put the negotiation on ice until you are satisfied with the results.

Now is the time to SELL!!!

The majority of buyers don’t want to take their valuable time to deal with uncertain salespeople. They want to be sold on what you’re selling. So the language and message must be powerful, not passive.

When in a sales presentation, you need to lead it. That does not mean, however, that the prospect shouldn’t be given a chance to talk. No buyer wants to sit thru even 10 minutes of introduction, followed by 20 minutes of scripted features and benefits of what you are selling.

Let the prospect set the pace of the conversation. Ask your questions to get the interaction you need to get attention and understanding. Ask closed-end questions, when possible, like “This is important to you, right.”

Keep it simple. Stay on track, go thru the entire presentation, but don’t give entire explanations. However, be aware that the part that you may skip over may be the part the prospect wants to know.

What you say and how you speak is important. Monitor your tone, inflection and emphasis when speaking. Keep in mind, the information you are delivering is news to the prospect regardless of how many times you have given the presentation.

The goal then is not only to engage, but to also sell. Give adequate time to make this a selling opportunity by referencing his/her needs and by asking “if those needs can be addressed, would you buy NOW.” [Use tie-downs to get your prospect to agree with you, as needed. It’s one way of getting your prospect to agree with you and start saying yes before you get to your close.]

First, make sure that you have a well-defined lead qualification process. Get buy-in from all stakeholders including Marketing, Sales and Product Marketing. Once you have determined the lead qualification process, map this process into your sales automation application. Ensure that the mapping includes workflows that enable approval for leads before they get turned over, officially, to sales. (Check out the SOMAmetrics blog “CRM: Is Your Lead Process Mapped”, to get more details).

Now that you have the infrastructure in place to manage the flow and qualification of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to Sales Qualified Leads, you are ready for the next step. Here’s the secret sauce that will get your Telemarketing team rave reviews. Your leads need to contribute 3X or more to the sales funnel and contribute a minimum of 50% of the revenue.

Below are the best practices that I have implemented to support these outcomes:
-Pay a bonus for every SQL that is approved by Sales. The bonus amount should be commensurate with the complexity of the solution and the Key contact required for a qualified lead. For example, if your solution is a high priced IT Infrastructure Solution and VP’s and C-Level contacts are required to consider the SQL as “qualified” you may need to pay a handsome bonus to keep your Telemarketers motivated.

-Assign an SQL-to-Sales Funnel Quota for each Telemarketing Rep. For example, if your Telemarketers are supporting 2 Sales Reps (a ratio of not more than 1 Telemarketer to 2 Sales Reps, is highly recommended) and each Sales Rep has a quota of $1M, the Telemarketing Reps Sales Funnel Quota is $6M. Pay a bonus for pre-determined increments of this quota.

-Make sure that Fifty percent (50%) or more, of closed deals, come from SQLs that were generated by Telemarketing. Therefore, using the example above, the Telemarketer should have an SQL-to-Revenue Quota of $1M. The SQL-to-Revenue bonus should be the largest component of the Telemarketing Reps variable compensation.

Telemarketing Managers should be compensated in a similar fashion. If everyone on the team is accountable for highly qualified leads, the Sales Funnel and Revenue, your Telemarketing team will be in complete alignment with the Sales team. Sales will really love you if Telemarketing focuses on what they focus on: sales funnel growth and revenue.

It is an old-school view that some companies are innovators and others are followers. No business manager should dictate the terms of the company’s existence. You need to make the time to make your business transformative.

You need to develop individuals to be power-players, you need to expect and encourage more individual results. You need to tap the human resources of your enterprise to do things more economically, more strategically, with more focus and conviction. You cannot dictate this, but you do need to nurture these attitudes. You need to encourage growth, you need to compete in areas that may be foreign to you, you need to take on the challenge to be leaner and meaner and you need to be a visionary.

You can continue to struggle or you can apply out-of-the-box thinking to tweak what you are doing. You need to pay attention to quantitative and qualitative measurements; and, you need to be the agent of change.

Bottom line, you need to find your formula for greatness. Whatever happens, your sales staff will play a central role in keeping customers and growing revenues.

Before you take to “unknown waters,” check these important concerns:

• Are you satisfied that your sales staff knows what they are selling?
• Can salespeople “walk/talk/chew gum?”
• Is your team motivated to sell?
• Do they regularly provide you with accurate, updated information?
• Do you support their efforts to make the sales process adapt to their needs? To the needs of their clients?
• Do you have an understanding of what is happening today, tomorrow, in a week or month or in a year with your business?
• Do you get discouraged when you don’t see immediate results?
• Do you have an established lead generation program that is closed-loop?
• Do you routinely change what doesn’t work?
• Do you routinely try to improve your organizational and operational efficiencies?

Probably the biggest challenge is keeping out threats to your business. If you do nothing, your competition and marketplace will overtake you. You need to have the proper “depth of field” to make effective decisions.

What is a qualified prospect?

-They recognize a problem exists.
-They are motivated to solve problems.
-They feel that your product or solution will solve their problems.
-They have budget to make a purchase. They are willing to spend money to solve their problem.
-They want it now.

You can qualify your prospects to your definition. Trying to create qualified prospects from poor suspects is one of the greatest wastes of your selling time.

You need to develop a “Fact Finder” which is a tool to collect relevant information. Your CRM system can greatly improve the quality of the information by making it a simple process to collect and store this information.

Fact finding is your responsibility. It will help you get closer to your sale. As needs get exposed, favorable circumstances may prevail. Information collected needs to be relevant to moving the sale to the next step. Listening is a big part of this, focusing on understanding and any hot buttons which may help trigger the sale.