A couple of weeks ago I spoke with a sales leader who was frustrated because his team wasn’t getting consistent results from their outbound sales efforts.
In short, they weren’t hitting quota consistently.
When I asked him why he thought this was happening, he paused for a moment.
“I’m just not sure outbound works for us,” he finally said.
“Oh, is there any specific reason you think that?”
“Well, the reps keep mentioning it’s hard to reach the right people. They spend a lot of time reaching out, but it seems like they only close deals from inbound leads or companies we already know.”
“When you say they spend a lot of time reaching out, do you have a sense of their typical daily time commitment and call volume?”
“Not really.”
“So, you don’t really know?”
“Uhm… no. But that’s what the reps say, and that’s what the deal stats seem to suggest.”
But when we started looking into the actual data, we quickly discovered the real issues:
- The call volume simply wasn’t there.Each rep made around 5-10 calls scattered throughout the day.
- There was little consistency.Some weeks, reps made calls regularly; other weeks, they barely did anything to build pipeline.
- Most outbound efforts were...
