Keys to building a company with high (and fast) growth thanks to Inbound and prospecting

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Many companies have a bad sales system and a high failure rate. If you are producing more than 10% of your staff or if more than 20% of your staff are missing a quota, then you have a bad system, not bad people.

Aaron is a big believer in the need to specialize, specialize, and… specialize! SDRs (aka “prospectors”) should only prospect. There should also be a Marketing Response Representative (MRR) who specializes in marketing rather than doing Cold Calling 2.0 like their SDR colleagues.

Best practices for generating leads through inside sales
Identify your buyer persona first and target it towards your top 20% of customers. Train your people and give them the support they need. Don’t forget that they must have specialized skills and job responsibilities.

Common mistakes companies make when building sales and prospecting engines
Brute force lead generation – “give me more leads!” – when they don’t clinical nurse specialist email database understand that not all leads are created equal. Another big mistake is not having a specialized approach. Sales people shouldn’t be prospecting.

Companies treat all leads the same. CEO, VP of Sales, VP of Marketing…they sit in the board meeting and set hyper-targets. This exacerbates the problem because the types of leads you can nurture are the nets and spears we talked about above, but these conversion rates are much lower than seeds.

Key performance indicators and metrics
For a Sales Development Manager, there are weekly and monthly activity metrics we track for prospects. Some of the key ones include the number of calls connected with leads (goal: 25+ per week), conversion rates of scheduled appointments to qualified sales leads/qualified opportunities (goal: 70-80%+).

Also, there are many companies that outsource their role as representatives (aka Market Response Representatives), each Market Response Representative should not receive more than 400 leads per month to deal with, otherwise things quickly fall apart.

For the prospecting team, you need to tie compensation to a few things. First, pay people enough of a base salary that they don't have to worry about rent. Otherwise, they'll do stupid things to your prospects. Then, their commission needs to be tied to

1) A number of qualified opportunities generated per month

2) A percentage of the income that comes from the agreements they obtained

Aaron is one of those people who likes to set a bar for success for some basic metrics that are attainable so that people feel successful. Give people a path to success. You can't have predictable income if you're not tracking and measuring metrics correctly and regularly. If you can't understand what's working and what's not, then you can't manage it and grow it.