What Your Sales Reps Should Be Doing Beyond Sales

If you’ve just hired a career salesperson to run point on business development at your agency, there’s a good chance that your new hire is expecting to spend the vast majority of their time on traditional sales activities — a little prospecting, jumping on calls, sending emails, and a lot of closing.

If you ask that sales rep to spend 4 hours a week producing content for your blog, 5 hours each week on prospecting, or 6 hours a week in customer success, that might sound like a suffocating responsibility for the traditional salesperson.

In this episode, Gray and I talk about what you should be asking your sales reps to do in addition to traditional “sales” and how to set those expectations effectively.

What Should an Inbound Sales Person Be Doing?

The stuff we all think of — evaluating inbound leads, reaching out via phone/email, setting appointments, walking prospects through your sales process, building proposals/contracts, closing deals.

The other stuff we think of that they don’t like to do — prospecting, networking, sales reporting…

Creating content — this is probably the single biggest mistake I see. “I’m in sales, so I don’t have time to blog or be active on social…”

Picture this from the prospect’s point of view: I’m getting this on-point messaging from your marketing that is speaking to my pain, the solutions, and convincing me to talk to you guys. I’m reading up on the problems you help solve, I’m learning from your delivery team exactly how you do that, I’ve read a couple good articles from leadership about the agency and your growth. It all sounds good, so I’m ready to chat and schedule a call from your website.

Now the rude awakening. The one person I haven’t learned anything about so far (the dreaded sales guy) jumps on the call with me. I don’t know anything about him, I hardly know his name, and I’ve only seen his picture one time on the about page. My guard instantly goes up, assuming that he’s “in it to win it” and will do anything for the close.

Most of you have lived through this and you know from experience that it’s a mistake. Let’s get our sales team involved in content creation and start building that relationship earlier by making them visible from the marketing front.

Following up with closed customers — your sales reps are setting client expectations. They ought to be following up with those customers to make sure those expectations are being met. If they’re not, the sales person is in a great position to be the client advocate and help the servicing team get things right.

Experiencing inbound first-hand — everyone is more persuasive when speaking from experience rather than just in theoretical terms.

Do you know when our agency really started to take off? After we’d practiced inbound marketing hard-core on ourselves for 9 months. Traffic & leads skyrocketed, which was vital for growth. But just as importantly, we’d experienced it. Now we knew that inbound really worked and we were our own best case study. Suddenly we became much more confident and persuasive during the sales process and started closing deals.

I love that part of onboarding with HubSpot (for all employees) is an inbound practicum where every employee strategizes, builds a website, practices inbound, and measures results. That creates empathy with prospects and your internal team, it creates powerful stories, and it builds your authority on the topic.

Get your sales reps involved in inbound first-hand to position them for success.

Communicating well with the client servicing team — let’s be honest here. The sales to servicing dynamic is traditionally rocky for a lot of valid reasons. Without sales, the services team doesn’t have a job and doesn’t get paid. That’s the part that you hear from sales all the time. Suspiciously enough, you never hear the flip side from the sales team 😉.

With too many sales, the services team has a hard time keeping up and maintaining quality. With inaccurate expectations set during the sales process, the services team is hamstrung from the beginning and is in for a lot of stress-induced headaches.

The conversation between the two sides needs to be ongoing, honest, and with empathy and respect for the other side’s job. Your sales rep needs to know what is okay to promise and what isn’t okay. Your services team needs to know what expectations have been set, what’s in the pipeline, and how to prepare and deliver. Ultimately, meeting and exceeding your client’s expectations is the key to business growth.

Reviewing and improving outreach methods — Email is a primary outreach method and hopefully your sales people are using templated emails effectively to save time. Great thing about templated emails is that you can easily track effectiveness. Take a quick look at open and click rates, as well as which emails are leading to appointments set. If templates are performing changing them, just be sure the sample size is over 50 prospects to get a more accurate sense of effectiveness. 

How Do You Set Accurate Expectations from the Beginning?

Detail out what you want from your sales reps, make sure that’s documented, and share that during the recruiting and onboarding stages. Communicate consistently — the requirements may change so keep this conversation going. Lead with why you are asking your sales team to do these activities, then present the what.

Any tips or examples of how you’ve done this well?

Pass them along!