5 Ways To Stop Limiting Your Outbound Team’s Revenue
So you’ve built up an outbound prospecting team, and are getting some results. Great!
Is it built to last, to grow and scale? Or are you unconsciously limiting it’s potential? Here are five areas to look into if you want to remove your future revenue bottlenecks…
1. Prospectors must enjoy their work
Somewhere in our culture, an unconscious and very common belief took shape that “if people are enjoying their work, they aren’t working hard enough. We don’t need them to be happy, we need them to work hard.”
And then executives complain about unmotivated people…does anyone see the irony here?
Last week, speaking at a meetup, some experience sales executives on a panel told the crowd, “to succeed in sales you have to be prepared to not enjoy sales, to deal with rejection, to suck it up…”
My answer: “if you don’t enjoy what you do – even sales or prospecting – then something’s wrong.”
Of course no one will be enjoy their jobs every day. But, even in sales, even as prospectors…if more than 20% of your people are dissatisfied or missing quota, it’s your system that’s causing the problem (or most of it), not the people. Enjoyment doesn’t have to mean “fun” – it can come from learning, finding fulfillment, overcoming challenges…there are lots of ways to feel good about what you do.
When your people don’t like what they do, it’s like trying to run up a hill of sand, taking three times the energy to go half as fast.
The start a job excited, and then after a month or three, the “newness” wears off and the grind begins…their motivation drops. You spend a lot of time recruiting, training and managing, then lose people after 6 months, which is too fast to find, train and replace them.
People who don’t like their work rarely help their teammates or bring new ideas to the team (why bother?)
You can’t build a scalable team this way.
Your people need things like a manager who works for them, realistic goals, opportunities to contribute, camaraderie, respect for their opinions and ideas, a career path and fair compensation.
2. A prospecting process that gets you into cold accounts
If you hired twice as many prospectors, would you double the revenue generated, growing your ‘market pie’? Or would more prospectors split a mostly-fixed pie into smaller pieces?
The more your prospecting process & people are capable of generating quality leads at cold accounts, the more scalable your team is.
Your prospecting team should be the best at going after old, dead opportunities and prospecting into new divisions of decentralized customers (the kind where every new division is like a new sale).
But oftentimes companies lump too many kinds of lead generation into the responsibilities of the “outbound” team, especially giving them inbound leads (a no-no!) While dealing with inbound leads is a great form of training in the first month of work, making it a normal part of the prospecting team’s job or quota is dangerous, if it’s more than 5-10% of their results or time. It defocuses them and confuses the team’s incremental revenue/results.
3. Bigger deals (small deals pay the bills, big deals drive growth)
The easiest way to double the revenue generated by a prospecting team is to double the size of the deals they’re finding (assuming they are within the deal and company size of your Ideal Customer Profile). For example, it’s a lot more profitable to a company when when a prospector finds 10 $50,000 deals, rather than 20 $10,000 deals.
Demos, appointments and qualified leads per month are important types of outbound metrics, but lose the forest for the trees by over-focusing on them.
The point of a prospecting team is to add revenue, and the busier and more stressed your prospectors are, the harder it is for them to slow down the hamster wheel and focus on finding the bigger deals that more easily bring in a lot of revenue.
Related article: 7 Principles to Finding Bigger Deals
4. A very specific “Ideal Outbound Customer Profile” + relevant messaging
Out of 100 companies that you’re targeting, even if they’re all a good fit, only a certain small percentage will be ready to buy (research suggests 3-10%).
So when you’re prospecting, you’re looking for needles in a haystack. The easiest first step to find them is to get rid of half the haystack. By tightening up how you define your Ideal Customer Profile (page 47 of Predictable Revenue), getting specific, it helps you make the haystack to sort through as small as possible.
As you get more specific, you can more easily speak to them with relevant messaging.
Most companies try to speak/message to everyone, and put a lot of jargon, buzz words and fluff into their elevator pitches (whether written or spoken). “We’re the leading next generation development platform, scalable and robust. We are 103c certified, award-winning, cloud-based glazed-eye jargonation developers…”
Don’t try to impress prospects with your fanciness, make it simple for them to understand. What do your prospects care about, what can they hear?
5. People processes (hiring, onboarding & training, managing, development)
Are you too busy to do a quality job of recruiting and hiring?
Or too busy to put together a training & coaching program to onboard new employees?
Are you either understaffed with management or unwilling to let employees/teams manage themselves?
You can have the best prospecting process in the world, but if you can’t find & train quality people to do it, and then develop & replace them when they’re ready to move on, it won’t scale. You will hit a wall.
Related article: A Neat Recruiting Process