The Stack is a weekly Facebook Live show focusing on the latest tools, trends and technology in the world of sales and marketing.
In this week’s episode, Sean and Tim bring you through a day in the life of an empowered salesperson so that you can understand the value of sales enablement and how you can implement it in your operations.
Note: We ran into some audio issues at the beginning, so you may want to skip ahead to about 15 minutes in.
Featured Segment: A Day in the Life of an Empowered Salesperson
Posted by Pepperland Marketing on Friday, July 14, 2017
Sales is hard. It’s especially hard if you don’t have the right tools, process, people and content in place to support you. To sell effectively in today’s world you need to be enabled with the right tools, the right insights, and the right material to do your job effectively. We call that Sales Enablement.
So what does an “enabled” sales rep’s day look like? We’re going to walk through what we think it should look like by each hour of the day, and hopefully you can see where your gaps might be.
Let’s pretend my name is Jim, and I’m on a team of 5 sales reps working for a fleet management software company called Fleetr.
5:30 AM—Wake up
I’ll speak to my own routine here. When I roll out of bed, I stumble downstairs to make some coffee, and while that coffee is brewing I do two things:
- I scroll through my flood of email opens and lead revisit notifications that the HubSpot apps gives me to get a feel for who was up losing sleep at night thinking about our services.
- I check my inbox and look for any urgent messages. If it’s something I can answer within a second or two with a super short answer, I’ll reply and cross it off my list. If it will take longer, I’ll prioritize it for when I get into the office.
6:00 AM—By now I’m sitting back, listening to the news and sipping my coffee. I like using this time to check my social networks. This is how I keep up with industry trends or major news that might prospects and customers might find useful. When I come across something that might be of value to a contact, sometimes I’ll fire it off in an email if I have someone in mind. If not, I might schedule it out on Buffer so my social networks stay active throughout the day while I’m working on other things.
8:00AM—The kids are dropped off, so now I’m listening to audiobooks or podcasts in the car on the way to the office. Once again, I’m trying to capture new insights that I can share with my leads and prospects so that I can be perceived as a trusted advisor.
8:30AM—Getting settled. Once I’m in the office I’ll make a fresh cup of coffee and start to queue up my day. If there were any urgent emails I noticed earlier, I’d likely get a jump on them; if not, I switch into a more proactive mode.
8:45AM
I open up the HubSpot CRM, and dive into Contacts.
With the help of our agency partner, my sales manager has created a series of custom views for me to work with that helps me prioritize and structure my day.
The first set of people I’m going to reach out to are my Marketing Qualified Leads, or MQLs. These are people who either have explicitly asked to be contacted by submitting the consultation form on our website, or have shown so much interest through their activity on our website that we believe there’s a very good chance they might be getting ready to buy.
I want to start here because I know that the faster I follow up with an inbound lead, the greater my chances of both connecting and closing the deal are.
To help me zone in on my best opportunities, I’ve customized this view to include some key data. I’m looking at Job Titles, Lead Score, Time Created, and Industry, because that helps me identify who has the best mix of interest and fit for my company. The person at the top is who I start with.
Once prioritized, I open up the first contact record and begin to do a little research.
I want to learn more about their company. I read their services pages, look to see what industries they offer, pricing if I can find it, then jump over to their team page to see if I can learn about the individual I’m about to call.
I’m also going to do a search on Google to see if I can glean more about their personality and interests.
9:45—Take a quick break to loosen up a bit, chat with the team and maybe grab another cup of coffee. Getting up and moving around helps a ton with keeping you energized.
10:00 am—dive right back in.
If you have more MQLs to churn through, keep chipping away at it. These people need a quick response.
If you don’t, here’s where I would switch gears and focus on your open deals.
In HubSpot, I’m going to jump over to the Deals view. I’m always going to start with the deals that are closest to closing and have the greatest value.
I see I have a deal for Bob’s Donuts that’s on the verge of closing. They’ve been sitting on the contract since yesterday morning and had emailed asking to discuss a few concerns they had, so it’s time to prep for that call. I open up the deal and am reminded of their specific concerns, because my CRM automatically syncing with my Google Calendar and email history.
They want to see if we can bend the terms and conditions a bit, specifically around the renewal process, so I’m going to spend the next few minutes chatting with my internal team to see what we can do, and to begin to formulate my response. I need to be prepared for that call so doing this a few hours in advance helps me to that.
From within the CRM, I send of a quick email preparing them for the call. I let them know I’m working things internally and will have a final solution in place by the time we’re on the line.
As I’m writing that email, I suddenly see a lead revisit notification and notice they’re looking at a totally different service than the one we’ve included in our contract. This gives me an idea… if on the call I’m sensing that their concerns deal breaker, maybe we could suggest bundling in this additional service at a significantly discounted rate for a limited period of time as a value add and a means to push them over the edge.
11:00—I’ve worked all my deals, and now I’m going to see if I can drum up some activity from my warm leads. I jump back over to contacts, and go to my “In Progress Leads” view. These are people
12:00PM—Lunch, take time to get out of the office and reenergize.
1:00Pm – rinse and repeat
In the News
This week, Sean signed up for the Inbound conference, which will be taking place in Boston in September, and Tim saw an article from Bloomberg about the reversal of work-from-home programs and benefits.
Tool of the Week: Headline Analyzer
The Headline Analyzer offered by CoSchedule is a great tool to help marketers and content creators score their headline to make sure that it is hitting the mark before you push content live. All you need to do is enter your headline, and the tool evaluates it out by a number of criteria including:
- The kinds of words you use (they call this “word balance”)
- Length by Characters and also by Word Count
- Which words come first and last
- What kind of sentiment the headline conveys
- And previews of how the headline will appear in search engine results and in an email subject line
Check it out!Looking for more tools to add to your arsenal? Read our article about the best free (or cheap) tools that content marketers should be using!
