Pre-sales or inside sales teams are critical in most businesses today. However they often aren’t managed optimally. Sales processes adopted by pre-sales teams today have come from companies selling products like credit cards, mobile sims, personal loans etc. which were the first to adopt this sales model.
However, these do not work for most modern businesses selling slightly more complicated products and with a relatively limited number of potential buyers. In this note, we touch upon four key flaws that might be impacting your pre-sales teams.
Excessive emphasis on input activity metrics
Most Pre-sales teams work on very strict input activity numbers- no of calls, attempts, connected calls, talk time etc. This has become so endemic that most sales leaders end up discussing this number more than anything else in reviews.
With remote work, this has only gotten worse as managers often feel this is the only metric they can use to track effort.
These metrics unfortunately are neither an indicator of effort or effectiveness. Moreover, they crowd out discussions on actual issues that are affecting the sales funnel. Teams that lower expectations on inputs to a reasonable level and track it only on an exception basis show much greater improvement in engagement & conversion.
Over reliance on phone calls
Most pre-sales or inside sales teams work with some kind of cloud telephony. Apart from issues like poor answer rates & numbers being marked as spam, this reliance on phone calls has made teams ineffective.
Buyers today don’t always want to speak to someone for every small thing. Sales teams insist on ‘getting on a call’. At most, some salespeople might send across a generic brochure or a deck over whatsapp or email. The intention is to push the buyer to connect over the phone. Successful pre-sales reps are the ones who can go beyond this and can actually engage buyers over these mediums- encourage them to ask questions and have a coherent conversation over these channels.
Scripted call openings & pitches
Presales or inside sales teams were built for scale. A key part of this scalability was to have a ‘script’. In an effort to make a script that can be replicated across the maximum number of agents, call opening & discovery has significantly deteriorated. Average pre-sales teams today face more disconnects and no answers than actual conversations.
The biggest challenge for pre-sales teams today is to get past the buyer’s initial reluctance to engage. Unfortunately this cannot be solved by a ‘script’. In fact it can only be corrected by discarding the script. This does not mean there can’t be a process or guideline to navigate calls. However unless you get rid of your sales script, reps are unlikely to learn a new process to handle calls.
Broken handover or onboarding process
Inside sales teams are required either to pass on the lead to another sales rep or sometimes close the deal by collecting payments. The process often involves multiple touchpoints & action items from the user. While this might be unavoidable, this process is often not well documented and the customer is lost in navigating through the process.
The emphasis on closing the deal before a certain date, means this process is further compromised. The somewhat fragile trust built painstakingly by the inside sales person over a few phone calls comes crashing down when the customer loses confidence in the onboarding process.
