Big Mistakes to Avoid when Building an Inside Sales Team
By: Steve Richard, Co-Founder & Head Sales Trainer
Building a high performing inside sales team is tough. I see so many people making the same mistakes over and over. The other day when out running it hit me: building your team is kind of like growing plants from seeds. I know what you’re thinking, “Steve, plants, really? Are you comparing my team to plants?” I’ve spent many years in inside sales so I get to compare inside sales to whatever I want. Deal with it. The analogy is almost perfect and it teaches us the biggest mistakes to avoid:
- Seed = Recruiting. Recruiting & staffing inside sales people is like a gardener picking the seed. The right DNA is critical to growing a healthy plant. Bad seed, weak plants. It’s the most essential ingredient. If you get good people with the right talents and tendencies, the rest becomes much easier.
- Soil = Management Created Environment. The environment that the inside sales manager creates is like the soil. It serves as the home for the seed. It is the second most important ingredient. I’ve seen great seed grow into healthy plants when hanging to rock faces of cliffs. I’ve also seen amazing people defy the odds of incredibly negative working environments and become stars. I’d rather play the odds and go with nature. The better the soil, the better the plant. The more positive the environment you create and the more it complies with behavioral psychology, the better your inside sales team will be.
- Sunlight = Comp Plan. Inside sales people need something to strive for just like plants reach for light. Have you ever seen a plant growing in the absence of light? It grows wildly in many different directions to find the light. A strong inside sales comp plan gives your team direction and helps them to generate energy from within (photosynthesis?) with less help from the outside.
- Water = Training on Inside Sales Skills. Now that you found people with the right talents and tendencies for inside sales, you need to arm them with the right skills. Similarly, if you have a seed with the right DNA, it still needs water to grow. The right amount of water is critical as is the right amount of training. If you overwater the plant, it suffers. It needs time to absorb the water and use it to get stronger. Your team needs time to absorb the training and reinforce it periodically. When you neglect to water a plant, it seeks moisture from the air or grows roots to find other water sources. The same thing happens when you neglect to give your inside sales team training. They will go off on their own to independently find the skills education they need through books and the internet. Have you seen some of the garbage inside sales advice on the internet? Some of that stuff is an awful lot like polluted water. Be careful some of these cheesy experts on the internet don’t make the whole team sick. The best inside sales leaders see the value in standardized training.
- Fertilizer = Coaching. Fertilizer helps a plant get more out of the soil, sunlight, and water. So does coaching for your inside sales team. It’s true that a plant can survive without fertilizer. In fact some plants grow very strong with no fertilizer. However if you want to get your entire inside sales team performing at a high level, fertilizer makes it a whole lot easier. Inside sales, telesales, and lead generation coaching is the most neglected ingredient of all others on this list. Just like fertilizer, if you are smart about how you use external coaching you can literally double the performance of the team.
- The Pot & Support Stakes = Technology & Tools. This one makes me laugh because so many inside sales managers think that buying a new technology or tools will be the answer to all their problems. WRONG. It’s just like buying some fancy garden stakes or a big nice pot for a sickly plant. Will an unhealthy plant fill out the nicer pot or reach the heights of the fancy garden stake? NO! Unless you have figured out most if not all of the other ingredients, don’t waste your money on inside sales tools or technologies. You do, however, want to arm your top reps with the latest and greatest tools and technologies. These high performing reps are already strong plants and able to take advantage of the benefits that these tool and technologies offer.
Think I’m crazy??? GOOD. Tell me what do you think of this analogy?
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Posted by on 02/09 at 04:03 PM
