Sales Enablement/Ops

women in sales

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Apply to #GirlsClub. Stop Doubting.

Ladies, lean in.

Sometime in the last two months, you heard a voice.  No, not the crazy hearing voices kind of voice, but the future you, inspired you, the you-can-DO-this-and-you-SHOULD kind of voice.

I call it my little voice.  And every once in a while, she puts her foot down and she says, “MORE.” Not more please. Not more if there’s some left after everyone else gets some. More NOW, DAMMIT.

More. . . because I deserve it. 

Sometimes this is in a whisper.

You want more out of your career, and I built #GirlsClub to do EXACTLY that.

Now it’s time to apply.  This is NOT a time for doubt.  NOT a time to postpone.  NOT a time to be afraid to raise your hand internally and ask for the time and/or the budget to do this.  Rise up.  Fill out your application and book a meeting with your manager right now. Seriously, right now.

Explain your aspirations.  Give him or her a program information packet you downloaded.  Ask for his or her support.  Sit tall and ask.

That is step one.

It’s a big one.  But it’s critical.  And it is time to do it NOW.

YES, there are scholarships available.  I’m working my tail off so that you don’t have to ask for the full-boat budget.

How about we meet halfway?

You submit the application.  You ask for the budget.  You let them know everything it includes and why it’s worth it.  Let’s keep moving forward, and if we both get “no’s”, we will pull out.

But please, don’t quit now.  I need you to work as hard as I am to get you this new gig.

I can’t WAIT to see your application and your smiling face in this program.

Apply today!

Need help explaining the program?  Download the participant and mentor overview here.

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inside sales award

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Factor 8 Receives AA-ISP’s 2018 Inside Sales Award

AA-ISP recognized Factor 8 as part of the AA-ISP Leadership Summit 2018 at an awards gala held on April 4th at the Sheraton Grand in Downtown Chicago, Ill.

“It is an honor to recognize Factor 8 as this year’s recipient of AA-ISP’s 2018 Service Provider of the Year Award. Factor 8 has proven its dedication to helping advance the professionalism and performance of the inside sales industry, which is the mission of the AA-ISP,” stated Bob Perkins, Founder and Chairman. “We applaud Factor 8 and thank them for their service to our growing profession and community of inside sales representatives, leaders, and solution providers”, stated Perkins.

A complete list of companies and individuals recognized by the AA-ISP will be published on the AA-ISP website, go to www.aa-isp.org.

About Factor 8

Factor 8 is an award-winning inside sales training and consulting firm catering only to inside sales. With decades of time in the trenches and first-hand experience with over 200 inside sales organizations, we’ve been turning Inside Sales teams into high-performing overachievers since 2007. At Factor 8, we think theory stinks. We’re known for delivering customized, actionable solutions that quickly drive top-line growth.

About AA-ISP

The AA-ISP, the global Inside Sales association and our industry’s most trusted and respected resource for everything Inside Sales, is dedicated exclusively to advancing the profession of Inside Sales. The association engages in research studies, organizational benchmarking, and leadership roundtables to better understand and analyze the trends, challenges, and key components of the growth and development of the Inside Sales industry. Our mission is to help Inside Sales representatives and leaders to leverage our information and resources through published content, local community Chapters, global conferences, career development, and an Inside Sales Accreditation program. For more information on AA-ISP, please visit www.aa-isp.org.

Interested in partnering with an award-winning Inside Sales Training provider?

Contact us today to learn more about our virtual sales training programs
for sales reps and sales managers. 


influential sales professional

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Lauren Bailey Receives AA-ISP’s Top 25 Most Influential Sales Professionals Award

AA-ISP has recognized Lauren Bailey, President of Factor 8, as part of the AA-ISP Leadership Summit 2018 at an awards banquet held on April 4th at the Sheraton Grand in Downtown Chicago, Ill.

“It is an honor to recognize Lauren as a recipient of this year’s Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professional Awards. She has proven her dedication and commitment to advancing the profession of inside sales, which is the mission of the AA-ISP,” stated Bob Perkins, Founder. “We are confident that Lauren will continue to have an impact on the inside sales community for years to come”, stated Perkins.

A complete list of companies and individuals recognized by the AA-ISP will be published on the AA-ISP website, go to www.aa-isp.org.

About Factor 8

Factor 8 is an award-winning inside sales training and consulting firm catering only to inside sales. With decades of time in the trenches and first-hand experience with over 200 inside sales organizations, we’ve been turning Inside Sales teams into high-performing overachievers since 2007. At Factor 8, we think theory stinks. We’re known for delivering customized, actionable solutions that quickly drive top-line growth.

About AA-ISP

The AA-ISP, the global Inside Sales association and our industry’s most trusted and respected resource for everything Inside Sales, is dedicated exclusively to advancing the profession of Inside Sales. The association engages in research studies, organizational benchmarking, and leadership roundtables to better understand and analyze the trends, challenges, and key components of the growth and development of the Inside Sales industry. Our mission is to help Inside Sales representatives and leaders to leverage our information and resources through published content, local community Chapters, global conferences, career development, and an Inside Sales Accreditation program. For more information on AA-ISP, please visit www.aa-isp.org.

Looking for virtual sales training?

Contact us today to learn more about our virtual sales training programs
for sales reps and sales managers. 


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Top 10 Takeaways From ZoomInfo Summit

This was the second annual conference by ZoomInfo held at the Revere hotel in Boston. Honored as a speaker in the Sales track, I spent a lot of my time learning in the Marketing track. It is awesome to have these two tracks together in one conference. Naturally I also spent time at happy hours, making new friends, and heckling my speaker pals.

Here are my top 10 takeaways:

  1. ZoomInfo nailed it with this conference. Amazing speakers, nearly no “pitch” talks from vendors, awesome food, plenty of learning options, fresh faces on stage, about 300 people, and time between sessions. It’s just what you’re looking for in a conference (oh yeah, and some free drinks. How was that not number one?). Side note: I love a “Medium” conference. With 350 – 750 attendees, every other person isn’t a vendor, the audience is well targeted, and it feels like a community vs. an overwhelming barrage. My other favorite BTW is the AA-ISP Leadership Conference.
  2. Seth Godin loves pop tarts and Star Trek. Who knew?
  3. Even though “hot trend” sessions like Ai and ABM are packed, when you talk with people 1:1, there are more people just trying to figure out consistent execution at the 101 level. Folks, make sure your sales conversations are good before hiring robots to get you more (that’s Ai right? JK).
  4. I can spot a sales person vs. a marketing person with 99% accuracy at a lunch table and 97% in an elevator.
  5. Dennis Dube is my new favorite person of 2017. I love finding uber smart and witty people. Bonus when there’s no ego and an eagerness to help others. Good to meet you buddy!
  6. Seth Godin teaches to market to the fringes. LB translation: let your freak flag fly and incorporate it in your message! That’s authentic and you’ll draw the right people to you – maybe even build a tribe.
  7. LB (who will liberally steal from Seth Godin here) says: Sell this way too! Don’t teach your people to sound like a professional sales call. We all hate these. The best calls are genuine, authentic, funny, engaging – REAL. Just one more reason that I hate scripts.
  8. SDR reps seriously need more love. Find ways to help these guys win and feel like a bad-ass at least once every day.
  9. The magic circle for marketing is Blog – SEO – and Social Media – all driving back to your website. This is why I’m writing a post-session blog.
  10. No conference is the same without Peter Weyman. Missed you buddy!

Where am I headed next? You can catch me on October 11th, 2017, co-hosting a webinar, 10 Ways To Scale Your Inside Sales Initiative. Come join me, Jeremy Wiggett, Senior Director Sales Development at Salesforce, and Chase Larson, Chief Technology Officer at SixPackShortcuts as we talk about processes, people, systems and implementation methods to achieve success in inside sales. Register here.

P.S. If you missed us at ZoomInfo, you can still get my inside sales bad-ass tips to share with your team. Register here.

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8 Signs That Your Rep Onboarding Program Is Broken

Do you mind if I start with the obligatory story? I think it’s one you might recognize. It’s the one about a busy sales manager frustrated with the under-trained newbie reps she got as “graduates” from her training department.

But this story is about me. I was the “undertrained newbie” – and the boss. I was twenty-four, and was brought in from the outside to manage a team of 15 outbound B2B Reps in tech. I’m new. My team is new, and we’re all “graduates” of the company onboarding program and all 100% clueless. (Yes, of course we turned it around and were the number one team within a quarter – cue the Rocky music here – but this isn’t that story.)

This is the story of being frustrated that you can come out of a 2 or even 4 week program and still have absolutely no idea how to do your job.

Who do I call first?

What do I say?

Why isn’t anyone calling me back?

What’s the product SKU for an IBM Thinkpad again?

Sound familiar?

Brace for it–now I’m going to hit you with some stats.

  • One in five sales executives are satisfied with their Rep onboarding program (Sales Architects 2014).
  • Fifty percent of reps selling today need to be retrained (or removed) (Bain / CEB 2016)
  • Organizations spend an average of 3x more on rep tools than on rep development (Inside Sales.com 2016) and 25X on recruiting (Training Magazine)
  • Attrition can be cut in half by a good training program (Training Magazine)

So, are you an unwitting accomplice to rep abuse? Let’s find out. Here are some top signs that your new hire training might be broken:

1. The majority of your attrition occurs in the first five months.
They like the company, don’t mind the job, but they’re not ramping up fast enough to make money and they’re frustrated. Time to pull the ripcord.

2. It takes your business development reps over 3 months or your account managers over 6 months to ramp to target.
There will always be a ramp, but a great new hire training program can cut this in half (and significantly impact your attrition, too).

3. Average call length is about 1:30.
These are voicemails, every last one of them. If your reps can’t get people on the phone, keep them on the phone, and get calls back, they need better sales training.

4. Your program is under 4 days or over 4 weeks long.
The first is an orientation, the latter is a firehose. Get them on the phones after two weeks and bring them back for the rest of it! Check out my video on “Just in time” New Hire Training.

 

5. Your reps have no clear plan of attack for their lead list / book / and/or day.
Ask them how they decide who to call. If they say they start at the “A’s…” then you’re missing a cohesive sales strategy – or your training department isn’t training it.

6. You aren’t training any business, customer, or industry acumen.
Forrester taught us that over 60% of buyers found their sales rep added no value to the buying process. College isn’t teaching them how, and we have to.

7. You’re using the same training as the field.
I get it, you had to use something and your org is new. But it won’t work and frankly frustrates reps to try this old-school model in their new-school world.

8. HR is teaching your reps how to sell.
85% of the best-in-class use a professional sales trainer or curriculum. When’s the last time HR sold your product?

How’d you do? Some of these might take a custom report, but trust me: you’ll be glad you had it created. Your training department needs to be your partner like marketing is your partner – no, scratch that, recruiting is your partner…wait, I can do better…payroll is your partner.

In a recent model I completed with Microsoft, we found that they could add over $50 million back into revenue by cutting new hire sales ramp time down to best-in-class – and nearly double what they could save by cutting attrition to the same. If you focus and invest here, it will quickly be like having another 1/3 of your headcount to help you hit the number.

Ready to fix your oboarding program? Learn the components of a World Class onboarding program that you can steal immediately. Read the article here.

Want more? I did a quick video on what good sales training looks like. What are you going to change in your onboarding program?

This article originally appeared on SalesPop!

 

 

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Factor 8 Named Inside Sales Training & Development Provider of the Year

We’re thrilled to announce that Factor 8 took home four industry awards at the Annual AA-ISP Inside Sales Leadership Summit on April 20. The prestigious honors included the 2017 “Inside Sales Training Service Provider of the Year” and three individual designations in the category of “Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals.”

“I’m tremendously proud that we’ve once again been recognized by our industry association and peers with inside sales, AA-ISP,” noted President Lauren Bailey, Factor 8. “Our team is particularly thrilled to receive Inside Sales Training and Development Service Provider of the Year, which is based on direct feedback from the inside sales reps and managers who’ve experienced our training workshops.”

Since 2013, Factor 8 has received numerous designations from AA-ISP, including:

  •     2017 Inside Sales Training Service Provider of the Year
  •     2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals – Lauren Bailey
  •     2017 Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals – John Healy
  •     2017 Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals – Regina Manfredi
  •     2016 Service Provider of the Year: People Development
  •     2015 AA-ISP Leadership Development Provider of the Year Award
  •     2013 Spirit Award – Lauren Bailey

Learn more about Factor 8’s inside sales training here and manager training here. Follow Lauren Bailey on Twitter @factor8sales.

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how much does sales training cost

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How To Get Budget for Inside Sales Training

If your Inside Sales team is relatively new, chances are you don’t have a defined training budget at your disposal (am I getting warm?). I’d also venture a guess that your somewhat green team could definitely use some inside sales training. (Still warm?) Which means that either:

  1. You’re individually training each of them yourself (ouch!)
  2. You’re sending them to some form of field or other training that doesn’t seem to actually fit
  3. You’re pulling out your hair and ready for some help! (ooh! Now she’s hot! Ha ha)

We’re here to help!

STEP ONE: DETERMINE NEEDS

The average company spends around $1000 / rep / year on training. Companies that score in the “best practices” range for sales spend closer to $2K. This goes right next to your incentives and recruiting budget my friends. Every year. In the meantime, ask for the equivalent of $1750 / Rep. You have some gaps to fill. This should buy you a few days of training per rep.

STEP TWO: FIGHT FOR BUDGET

Enter the Big-Bad–Doesn’t-Want-to­-Spend-Money-On-Your-Silly-Little-Team-Boss:

“Why would I spend money on training! I heard that by the time you back to your job, you’ve lost 90% of what you’ve learned in training and 3 months later the rest is gone too. And by the way, these Reps will be gone in six months anyway, right?” (Whoa Boss Man!)

Don’t panic…we’re gonna get through this. Ready for your side of the negotiation?

You (Superstar Inside Sales Leader): Sure, sometimes that is true (with bad training) but did YOU know that:

  • A recent survey found that 40% of employees who receive poor training leave their positions within the first year (and site “lack of training” as a reason for leaving!)

So providing good sales training will reduce attrition!

  • A second study found that companies with training programs that “exceeded expectations” achieved 94.8% of quota – ten points above companies with mediocre programs (and X points above you today with no training???) – So providing good sales training will raise our performance to quota!
  • Best in class sales training improves individual performance by an average of 20% – So if we raise even 10%, we should recoup ____ $$ and pay for training in X months!
  • 85% of companies rated best in class in Sales use an outside professional sales trainer / curriculum – So we probably should buy this not build it. I’ll do the legwork…

STEP THREE: FIND YOURSELF A VENDOR

So, what does good inside sales training look like? How can you prevent the “fall out”? Check out my recent video for quick tips to get the most from that training budget you fought so hard to get!

Hope this helps you Super Star Inside Sales Leaders out there!
Cheers!

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At Least My Hair Turned Out

Last year my amazing Factor 8 team took home the award for best Sales & Leadership Development company in the AA-ISP community. And when I saw the picture I sadly (like a typical woman) thought I needed a better haircut.

So not to downplay bringing home this award AGAIN (renamed PEOPLE development in 2016), but seriously, I look much better. 😉

Now on to the real reason for the email: THANK YOU.

Really. These awards hold a special place for me because they are a 100% direct result of the feedback that YOU and your teams post online about your experience training with us. Also, I was voted a Top 25 person again and that rocks. Thanks for taking the time to vote.

A few other really cool highlights:

  1. We need to open up a T-shirt business. Total cult hit: GET ON THE PHONES! (The Only Way To Train) is the coolest new T-shirt in town. If you really do want to buy some, email me. . . I think I’ll be forced to put in an order for more. Seriously, we just wanted to wear T-shirts, so glad everyone at the conference loved them!!
  2. Our clients and friends also brought home accolades:
    • Jorge Diaz from Fleetmatics – Executive of the Year
    • Michele Fidler from Allergan – Spirit Award
    • Paula White from BoundTree Medical – Top 25 Most Influential People in Inside Sales
    • Chad Burmeister from RingCentral – Top 25 Most Influential People in Inside Sales
    • Trish Bertuzzi from Bridge Group – Top 25 Most Influential People in Inside Sales
    • Lori Richardson from Score More Sales – Top 25 Most Influential People in Inside Sales
    • Team Staples for the top workplace video submission…watch your brains, “The Talking Dead” will hire you dead or alive!
  3. We paid someone to take pictures of our Happy Hour this year because, well, we all might have been too happy in the past. THANKS for joining us and letting us get to know you and your teams face to face. It was awesome to see the folks from Del Mar Fans, Quill, Grainger, and Cardinal! Finally, we meet!! (and next year we’re hiring a bouncer – who WERE some of those people drinking our booze?)
  4. If you brought home a T-shirt or mug, send us a selfie of you or your team with it out on the floor and we’ll put you on our LinkedIn page. Fun! While you’re out there, make sure to follow Factor 8 to see what we’re up to.

Plenty of good content on its way, so stay tuned. But for now, please accept our heartfelt thanks for an amazing year!!!

LB

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Are You Riding The Inside Sales Wave?

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking to a phenomenal group of Inside Sales Senior Executives in Dublin, Ireland.  It was the first International Leadership Summit hosted by the AA-ISP and it was fantastic.  The energy and participation were amazing – and that was before the Guinness!  I covered the top ten blunders I’ve seen in our industry this year and did my best to advocate for sales manager and rep development.  Many organizations represented at the conference were absolute innovators.  I loved hearing about how Intel Security is a top company to work for in Ireland and how IBM is enabling the social and digital aspects of selling (really, how do I get a wall I can roll AND write on!?).

Believing In Inside Sales

Most of the folks who sought me out afterward, however, were facing the same very big challenge:  Senior Leadership doesn’t really believe in Inside Sales.  “Our product can’t be sold over the phone.  Now be a good VP and go fetch me some leads.” 

It was so frustrating to them, and rightfully so!  Any of us in this profession has faced this at one time or another.  I’ve literally ridden this wave for the past twenty years through IT hardware and software to distribution & industrial companies, to big-box retail and pharma today.  And now the wave is crashing hard on the shores of Europe, and I’m here to tell you to jump in and swim.

Here are a few reminders of why the Inside Sales wave is righteous (and why it cannot be stopped):

  • Your customer demands it.  It’s not OK to get back to them a few days later.  We want NOW and that means folks perched by the phones.
  • There is no faster way to attack a new market – be it customer set, product set, our geo.  I can talk to 20 people a day.  If you got your field rep a jet pack, he’ll max at five (but how cool would that be).
  • The one-two punch.  Let field take down the big game and let inside pick off the rest of the herd.  You know your field reps aren’t calling anyone but their top three contacts at that account, right?  And how about the bottom 20% of their book?
  • Three little letters:  S M B.  It’s not efficient or cost effective to tackle this massive market with field resources.
  • Product maturity:  Margins and complexity decrease as the product lifecycle moves to the right – you’ll need to lower your cost of sales.
  • Accountability and scalability – there’s a reason you don’t see many field reps successfully transition to Inside Sales.  It’s harder, it’s faster, and there’s no “appointment” where you can hide on a Friday afternoon.

Ride The Wave

Surely one of these can serve you as you fight for your piece of the wave.  Obviously I’ve also picked a fight with a pretty large and mobile group of sellers, so I say game on.  If you have a comment about why this is wrong or how you’ve proved one of them right, please leave it!   No argument is quite as strong as your own success story about a big deal uncovered or won by the Inside.

Hey, history has proven across the globe that this wave is real.  You may be paddling a bit longer, but you’re on the board and you’re in the water, and the Wave. Is. Coming.  So get your house in order because it will be fast and furious when it does.  Today you’re proving the value, but mark my words that in a year or two you’ll be asked to grow 10x.  Will you be ready?  Enjoy the ride; you’ll be running the place in no time if you time it just right.

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Why Rep Ramp Time Lights Me Up (VIDEO)

In the twenty years I’ve been at this, I’ve found one singular topic that lights me up the fastest:

Rep ramp time.

I wish I could tell you that every client and every event focuses here with me, but the truth is they don’t. I’m a bit of an island on this one, but I think that’s only because we’re not all exactly sure just how much slow ramp is costing us (or could be saving us) – more on that in a second. According to the most recent research from my friend Trish and her team at The Bridge Group (full report here), the average ramp time for an Inside Sales rep is 4.4 months. Let’s be honest, Trish works with awesome tech companies, and they’ve been doing Inside Sales longer than anyone. If you’re a distribution company, an outsourcer, big box retail, or manufacturing, chances are you average 6 months until Reps start paying for themselves (or “six months ramp”). If your training department is less than 5 years old and/or reports up through HR instead of sales, chances are you’re north of 9 months. When you are spending 2-3 times the rep’s annual salary to onboard him, every extra week it takes to get him to start paying that back is a big deal. Especially when 1/3 to 1/2 of them will be gone within the year. So which costs more…attrition or ramp? Well this blog is about rep ramp time, so I hope you guessed it. Man I bet you were surprised. But wait till you hear how much more!

We modeled it for a little company called Microsoft.

They were hot about the cost of attrition with some outsourcers, so we ran a model comparing the cost of their industry-average attrition vs. best in class, and then compared that against their industry-average onboarding vs. best-in-class. It’s basically a magic wand question – If you could fix either, which saves you more?

Cutting the ramp time saved nearly DOUBLE than cutting attrition

(BONUS ALERT: help reps make money faster, you’re also going to impact attrition). The money is in the green seat. The what? The cost of having your customers worked by a rep ramping. The same book or leads worked by a tenured rep produces double or triple that of a green rep. Multiple that by the six months that your rep is green. Ouch. NOW assume that 20-50% of your floor is “green” due to attrition, and we’re talking big dollars. I don’t know your numbers (email me if you want to plug them into our model). But I’m betting big money that cutting your ramp time in half would be like adding an extra sales team to your numbers.

So, how do we do it? GET TO IT LB, right?

Well, I often like to blame your training team, but ramp time is a function of a lot of different groups: Are you recruiting the right candidates? Is your hiring process designed to identify the attributes that align with your most successful reps? Does your new hire training provide practical experience that mirrors what reps will see when they hit the floor? Here’s one trick that I think is CRUCIAL to cutting ramp time: Use Call Recordings! But not the way you think. They don’t even have to be those green Reps’ calls; any calls will do. When used right, recorded calls simulate experience. Months and months of it! It’s the reason all Factor 8 sales training uses call recordings and live floor time: simulate real experience. (Here’s the secret sauce folks)

Simulated experience is crucial because the key isn’t really about WHAT skill to apply. . . it’s about WHEN to apply it.

This is what takes so darn long to collect and thereby ramp.

So infuse it as often as possible using the Pause Game. Check out the video on how to do this:

(I think I filmed this one in my front courtyard, so enjoy the stupid plane overhead that just wouldn’t land!)
Personally, I’m a fan of hands on engagement from Sales leaders here. Have your Supervisors grab a bunch of recorded calls and pull your new hires into a room for a few rounds of The Pause Game. Then sign them up to do it every day during new hire training. The more real life situations you can expose new reps to, the faster they can build up their bank of experiences. That experience bank is what will get them ramped and producing faster. Man this was a long one. I’ll work on that. I hope this is helpful!

ACTION suggestions:

  • Forward this to your lead Manager / Supervisor and tell them to make it happen
  • Forward this to your New Hire Training Manager and tell them to make it happen
  • Ask both of them to invite you to the first one.
  • Email me if you want to plug in your own numbers or learn more ways to reduce your ramp
Here’s to you (and your ramp), LB

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