So I feel like there’s been a lot of blogs lately stating that cold calling is or is not dead, and today I read another one.  Matt Gethins, from B2B telemarketing firm Professional Prospecting Systems, wrote an article yesterday entitled Cold Calling Dead?  Not For B2B Appointment Setting.  Matt makes the common observation that all that is heard today is that all a company needs to do is focus on their inbound marketing and social media efforts, and they’ll be all set in regards to lead generation.  Matt’s response, “This is, in many cases, ridiculously bad advice and completely untrue.”  I totally agree with him.

Matt goes on to share seven reasons why cold calling is not dead, and I certainly think that you should read them.  Of particular interest to me, though, was number six on his list:

“6.  Outbound accelerates Inbound – That’s right, if you have your act together with outbound (cold calling, getting on the phone) you will make more money from your Inbound marketing. I’ve sold inbound lead generation products, the clients that had good outbound always made more money than those that did not, there was no variation in this. As we say in the South, Inbound Marketing is not going to cause the fried chicken to fly into your mouth, you have to get on the phone.”

I’m not from the South, so I really can’t speak to the fried chicken analogy, but I think he’s spot on in adding this point to his list.  I’m a big believer in Inbound Marketing – I love what folks like David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah and their whole HubSpot crew have done for Marketing as a whole.  In particular, Scott and his whole New Rules are all about bringing prospects TO you.  Halligan and Shah have founded a company whose entire mission is to offer software that helps other companies get found.  I still believe that at the end of the day, you still need to utilize teleprospecting to further qualify the folks that find you.  On top of that, I also believe that no matter how great the content is that you create, there are going to be some folks in your target market who you want as a client but must reach out to them through the phone to initiate a dialogue.

I like the phrase that Mike Damphousse has come up with for amalgamating your inbound and outbound efforts – “unified marketing.”  I think cold calling has its place in a unified marketing environment, right alongside blogging, viral videos, and eBooks.

What do you think?

*Photo credit: Liyin the Designer-in-Pajamas via Flickr

So as I was perusing my TweetDeck the other day, I saw that my buddy, appointment setting guru Mike Damphousse wrote a blog entry last week that I missed (sorry about that pal!)  However, I did want to use this opportunity to spring board into another Point – Counterpoint on The CRAP Report.  Mike’s article, entitled Appointment Setting: Was I Duped? really struck a chord with me.  Mike shared with readers that he “fell victim” to an appointment setting technique, and one that had his own organization, Green Leads, used, would give them a tainted reputation.  He had me hooked right away.  I wanted to know what happened to him that made him feel like someone pulled the wool over his eyes.  I was surprised to read what happened.

Mike went on to share what the dupe was: 

I got an unsolicited calendar invite in my inbox with a bridge number, date and time.

Mike had received a calendar invite from someone selling (completely unbeknownst to him prior to the call) a “SaaS telecom/VOIP solution” without really knowing who was inviting him to the call.  Mike had taken the call because he figured that he must’ve spoken with the guy, because who else would send him an invite like that?  Mike ends his post with, “How low can you go?  If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”  If I understand and read Mike correctly, he’s not too happy with this teleprospecting technique, using calendar invites to get on people’s schedules.  I can see where he’s coming from, however, I think it’s a great tactic.

I get Mike’s point – who the heck is this guy, who doesn’t know me from a whole in the wall, getting time on my calendar to talk to me about his product!?  This rep is being über forward and has really pushed the envelope here.  I get all of that…and I love it.  I love it because I’ve seen it work for my clients.  I’ve seen plenty of BDR’s send Outlook invites to their prospects prefaced with things like, “I hope you don’t mind me taking this initiative…,” or, “I know this may be a bit forward but…” and fully qualify those individuals because they wouldn’t have picked up their phone otherwise but for something that was on their calendar.  I don’t think it’s a sleaze ball strategy at all, because the person receiving the invite can always decline.

If you’ve got a teleprospecting team, or maybe you’ve partnered with one to supply with you sales qualified leads, you know that finding those sales ready opportunities is not easy.  Teleprospectors use everything at their disposal to uncover leads, and utilizing calendar invites is just one of those tools.  It’s a battle out there, it really is.  Sure, the economy is turning around (slowly), but that doesn’t mean it makes teleprospecting any easier.  BDR’s need to take every advantage they can to ensure that their reps are the first ones in the door, and sometimes those methods make people uneasy; those methods, however, are no less effective (especially if they work).  Prospects are harder and harder to get in touch with these days; people do not pick up their phones half as much as they did 10 years ago, and they didn’t do that much then either!

To me, using calendar invites for prospecting’s sake is akin to Jim Malone’s strategy to helping Eliot Ness capture Al Capone from The Untouchables.  Malone says to Ness, “You wanna know how to get Capone?  They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”  It might not be pretty, but it works.

What do you think about using calendar invites for B2B lead generation purposes?

Did you ever have a Magic 8-Ball?  You remember that, right?  You ask it questions, shake it up, and then look at the bottom of the ball to see which side of the twenty-sided die inside floated to the top.  There were answers like, “It is certain,” “Ask again later,” and “Very doubtful.”  I had one as a kid and always thought they were pretty cool.  If the Magic 8Ball said that I was going to win a basketball game, then of course it was going to happen, right?  If only predicting the future was as easy as shaking one of those things.  Of course, with some of the answers you’d receive, I’m not so sure I want to leave the future up to fate.  So what does this all have to do with teleprospecting?  Well, it got me thinking about self-fulfilling prophecies and a conversation I had today. 

I had lunch with a friend of mine who’s a sales rep, and we were talking on the way back about the teleprospectors that provide him with sales qualified leads.  He said that his territory had recently changed, and that he was really excited to be working one-on-one with his BDR.  I asked him what was one of the more challenging aspects of working with BDR’s in general, and for him, he said that it’s helping BDR’s out of a rut.  He said that when they have a string of dry days (no leads), it’s really tough to help them stay positive.  That got me thinking about the whole self-fulfilling prophecy thing I mentioned above.  I remember being on the phones and trying to find sales ready opportunities, and if I had a run of a few bad days, it was hard to not think that I couldn’t get over it.  I kept expecting prospects to say, “not interested,” to me, and I was expecting them to hang up on me or never get back to me.  And what do you think happened?  They said “no” and hung up on me more often.  But was it because I was expecting them to?  I think so.  

You can’t think like that in sales, let alone teleprospecting.  The job requires momentum and you’ve got to keep it as positive as possible.  Here’s three ways I see that we can help teleprospectors to stay positive: 

1.  Remind them of the number of prospects they have to call:  If your teleprospectors have a large number of contacts that they can try to qualify, remind them that a “no” is just like dirt on their shoulder.  They need to dust it off like Jay-Z and move on to the next name.  There is no time to waste on people who aren’t interested. 

2.  Remind them to focus on their successes:  Here’s an easy way to keep things positive for your BDR’s.  You wouldn’t have kept them around if they weren’t successful in the past (gosh, I HOPE you wouldn’t), so go back to those past wins with them.  By helping your teleprospectors to revisit leads that they’ve passed before, you’re going to remind them that they can do the job, and have done it well in the past. 

3.  Remind them that every day brings a clean slate:  There is nothing as refreshing as that thought.  No matter how bad yesterday was, tomorrow is brand new.  Tomorrow we can make more calls, talk with more prospects, qualify more of them in OR out of our sales process, and close more business.  Focusing on what has already happened does no good. 

What about you?  What do you do to help your team out of a rut, or to keep them from falling into negativity?

*Photo Credit: misplaced in the city on Flickr

As I perused my TweetDeck this morning, I noticed Garth Moulton’s (the world’s biggest rolodex Jigsaw’s VP of Community and co-founder) blog entry from yesterday, “Cold Calling is not even on the Endangered List.”  Great blog entry where Garth concludes with the following:

“So the truly efficient organization (I’m talking B2B here) has to have at least a couple people (researching first!) braving the last matrix of hell known as cold calling to start the conversation that will eventually lead to a deal.”

I liked the article a lot, and loved the comments from Sales 2.0 big dog Nigel Edelshain, inside sales expert Trish Bertuzzi, and cold calling authority Steve Richard.  Do yourself a favor and go check it out.

What really got me though, was Garth’s use of a movie clip to illustrate his point.  He used a clip of Will Smith from The Pursuit of Happiness, but it wasn’t that clip that really spoke to me.  After watching Will Smith’s clip, YouTube shows a bunch of other “related” clips to watch.  I see one from the movie Boiler Room (an all time favorite of mine).  I watch it, and there’s something that Ben Affleck, who’s playing the sales trainer in the movie, says to his new recruits that just really moved me.  To set the scene, he’s mad because none of the rookies are passing enough leads.  They’re being blown off their calls with rebuttal after rebuttal, rejection after rejection.  He closes with this:

“A sale is made on every call you make.  Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you on a reason he can’t.  Either way, a sale is made.  The only question is who’s going to close, you or him?”

As cheesy as some may make this movie out to be, that line is true.  And as it relates to teleprospecting, we either sell a prospect a time to speak with a product specialist or they sell us on a reason they’re not interested.  Either way, someone’s closing, and it’s up to teleprospecting management to do all they can to give their reps the advantage. 

I don’t know, what do you think?  This line has been in my head all day long, and I’m wondering what other people think about it.

Okay, before you read ANY further, I’m going to spoil this season of LOST for you if you read the following paragraph.  I just want to make sure you understand that.  Skip the next paragraph and move on to the next one if you don’t want this season to be spoiled.

Great, now that that is out of the way, let’s say that you’re stuck on an island, and there is only one other person on that island with you.  And let’s say that the only way you can get off of that island and go home is that you have to kill the other person on the island, only, YOU can’t actually kill them.  You’d have to get pretty creative, right?  Such is the ageless Man in Black from LOST.  He’s been stuck on that island for God knows how long, but the only way off of the island is if he kills Jacob, the other ageless man and seemingly more authoritative man on the island, only, he can’t kill Jacob.  So what does the Man in Black do?  He takes the form of John Locke and convinces Ben Linus that he needs to kill Jacob.  THAT’S creative thinking.  You know what?  You need your teleprospecting reps to be creative, too.

You may not think that creativity is really needed to be a teleprospector, in fact, I think most folks think that the job is pretty mindless.  Don’t believe me?  Try telling someone that’s what you do when they ask, “so, what do you do for work?”  The look on their face when you say you’re in lead generation or teleprospecting is all you need to see to know that they think all you do is smile and dial.  I’m here to tell you differently, though.  If you’ve partnered with an organization to provide you with qualified B2B sales opportunities, or maybe you run one inside of your company, you want your BDR’s to be creative.  I see three reasons why they need to be: 

1. Your BDR’s need to be creative because they ARE making, for the majority of their day, phone calls.
2. Your BDR’s need to be creative because they are going to need to know how to handle problems that come up spontaneously, and
3. Your BDR’s need to be creative because sometimes the gatekeeper just won’t let you through.

Your BDR’s need to be creative because they ARE making, for the majority of their day, phone calls.  Let’s be honest with each other here, although their jobs are very important, qualifying sales opportunities for your sales team, their job is not glamorous.  Your teleprospectors need to be creative because they need to be able what can be non-flashy job and make it interesting.  If they don’t, or if they can’t, they’re going to burn out quickly.  They do need some help from their managers on this one, because it should be up to them to make their reps feel important and/or understand the significance of what they do, but for the most part, if you’re going to be a great BDR, you should be a creative thinker.  It doesn’t have to be anything monumental, but a BDR should be imaginative to keep themselves from burning out. When I was making calls, another BDR and I had a bet, every day, as to who would end up with more dials by 5:30pm.  The winner got to tack the prize (just a dollar bill) to their cube.  Yeah, it was only a buck, but to me, it was what that dollar represented – that I had won for that day.  It was just something extra to keep me involved.

Your BDR’s need to be creative because they are going to need to know how to handle problems that come up spontaneously.  Inevitably, no matter how much I studied my client’s product or service offering, some prospect wound up asking me a question that I didn’t know how to answer.  That question often rolled into several, and after a while, saying, “I’ll get back to you on that,” got really old.  The thing about teleprospecting calls is that when anyone picks up the other end of that phone, ANYTHING can happen.  Questions will be asked and situations will arise that you can never train for because of the human element.  Talk to ten prospects and chances are you’ll have ten different sets of questions from them, because everyone is different.  What matters to one may not matter to the other nine, and what matters to the nine may not to the one.  The point here is that your BDR’s need to think creatively when a problem arises during their calls.

Lastly, your BDR’s need to be creative because sometimes the gatekeeper just won’t let them through.  They need to be creative not only in terms of working their verbal mojo, but for using their Sales 2.0 tools, too.  If an administrative assistant won’t let them talk with a decision maker, your teleprospectors need to be able to find a way in past that admin.  Now, if they can talk their way through, great.  If they can use the tools around them like Jigsaw, LinkedIn, or whatever, that’s great, too.  They need to be creative here because there will come that time when none of these tools works for them, and the account their calling on is a must have for you or for your client’s organization.  Again, this is another reason why your teleprospecting manager should be creative, too.  Creative thinking BDR’s find a way into an organization when no one else can.

Well, there you go – do you agree or disagree?  What do you think?

Steve Richard, co-founder for sales training organization Vorsight, wrote a guest blog article yesterday for sales strategist Chad Levitt’s New Sales Economy Blog.  The article, entitled “11 Sales Tips for Cold Calling and Prospecting,” offered some good insight into making the most out of each and every attempt to get in touch with your potential buyers.  One of the questions that Steve suggests asking yourself is this:

“Do you revisit your talking points periodically to more effectively tell your story and stand out from the vendor noise and static?”

This is a great question!  It makes me wonder how many times prospects hang up on teleprospectors because they do nothing to make themselves unique in terms of their messaging.  There is some interesting discussion going on over at that post, and I think you should take a look at it and join in the conversation.

*Picture credit:  Linda Cronin via Flickr

If you’re like me and my friends, you were pretty hyped up for last night’s season premiere of LOST.  I came to the game late on this one, having to watch three seasons on DVD (which by the way, is actually more fun because you can just keep watching episode after episode).  If you don’t know what LOST is, it’s a show about survivors of a plane crash and their adventures on the island that they crashed on.  To tell you anymore within the confines of this blog would break the space-time continuum.  I’d say it’s probably one of the most well developed shows in TV history; that’s just my limited opinion though.  As I was discussing last night’s two-hour opening with some of the BDR’s at work today, it got me thinking – how can you keep your teleprospectors from becoming “lost” on their sales prospecting calls?

If you’ve got an in-house team of B2B lead generators or maybe you’re partnering with a vendor to provide you with sales qualified leads, naturally you want to make sure that the folks representing you and your organization over the phone are as effective as possible.  Teleprospectors, for the most part, make a ton of dials every day, and depending on who they talk to, there are times when conversations can be very dizzying.  I think there are three ways we can help BDR’s from becoming “lost” on their teleprospecting calls: 

1. Ensure they know who they’re calling.
2. Know when to call your prospects.
3. Help them to control the conversation.

The first way we can help teleprospectors from becoming “lost” on their calls is to ensure they know who they’re calling.  I’ve had many clients who’ve told me that they’re not sure who they want my BDR’s to speak with.  Okay – big red flag here!  Help your BDR’s by nailing down the top two or three titles in an organization who would want to buy your product or service.  If you’re doing your due-diligence, you should already be creating buyer personas, as marketing strategist David Meerman Scott points out in The New Rules of Marketing and PR (which by the way just came out with a second edition).  By understanding exactly who is going to buy your solution or service, you can help your BDR’s to target those titles on their teleprospecting calls.  They’ll keep from becoming lost because you will have given them a mark with which they can align their lead-gen compass by.

The second way we can help teleprospectors from becoming “lost” on their calls is to know when to call your prospects.  Appointment setting guru Mike Damphousse blogged about the best time to make lead gen calls after reading sales management expert Gerhard Gschwandther’s highlights on an MIT/InsideSales.com study of outbound prospecting lead conversion.  Mike points out himself the most effective time to make teleprospecting calls, and you can read that here.  The take-away from this is that if we can help our BDR’s figure out the most likely time that they’re prospects are going to be in their office, we can increase the possibility of those prospects becoming sales qualified leads.

Lastly, we can help our teleprospectors from becoming “lost” on their calls by helping them to control the conversation.  There have been plenty of times when I’ve sat in with rookie BDR’s who have had prospects run them ragged on a call.  They get off the phone, head spinning, saying, “What the hell just happened!?”  We can help our BDR’s take control of the conversation just by giving them better qualification questions to ask.  I think we can agree that most folks like to talk about themselves, and by helping our BDR’s to ask more poignant, pain-eliciting questions, we keep the ball in their court by keeping the prospect talking.  It’s not always going to work, because we’re dealing with another human on the end of the line, but for the most part, if we can help our BDR’s to control conversations with better questions, and then couple that with a better understanding of the technology or service their calling on, they’re certainly going to get “lost” less.

What do you think?  What can you add to the list?

I read a blog today from the inside sales consulting firm The Bridge Group’s Patrice Murray.  Patrice highlighted a post from Dave Kurlan’s blog, where basically Dave shared a story of a time where he was giving a presentation on a Sales Hiring Webinar.  Dave was asked why, if his process worked so well, were more people not using it.  Dave’s answer was broken down into three points – ego, money, and fear.  Patrice did a great job breaking down the post, and you should read it here.

Additionally, my colleague, Craig Ferrara, hosted a webcast about best practices for hiring teleprospectors.  In it, Craig shares his thoughts on setting up a teleprospecting profile, implementing an interview process that focuses on the phone role play, and his evaluation process.  Check out the Perspectives on Teleprospecting – Best Practices for Hiring Teleprospectors webcast here.

*Photo courtesy of LisaDeeRN via Flickr

Now, I’m not really much of a racing fan, car, horse or otherwise.  What I do know about the sport of racing, however, is that whatever method you choose to use to race, you’d better make sure that it’s in top shape.  It always amazes me, whenever I do catch an auto racing event on TV, is how fast the pit crews are when a car comes in.  Even for a flat tire, they’re so fast at changing them!  They have to be though, right?  I mean, there’s a ton of money riding on those races.  You can see where this analogy is going, right?  Your sales machine is typically the money maker of your organization, and the “pit-crew” of your sales machine are the folks who are fully qualifying leads for them.  If you want to keep that crew at a level of high performance, how do you go about doing that?

If you’ve got your own in-house teleprospecting team, or maybe you’re partnering with a vendor to supply you with sales qualified leads, this question has to be answered.  Typically, in the teleprospecting/appointment setting/telemarketing industry, the turnaround for the ground-level, in-the-trenches, phone-jockey job is pretty high.  It is the rare organization that is able to keep their top producing folks around for a while.  The way I see it, there are a few ways to help ensure that the folks who are great at qualifying sales opportunities for you to stick around longer: 

1. Inspire them consistently.
2. Keep them challenged.
3. Have them mentor new BDR’s.

The first way you maintain a high performing BDR is to inspire them consistently.  Let’s call a spade a spade here, okay?  Teleprospecting is not rocket science.  That being said, it is by no means any less important to the organization utilizing teleprospecting services, be they in-house or outsourced.  The job that teleprospectors do is so important!  Every dial they make should have a purpose behind it, so that they don’t feel like all they’re doing is smiling and dialing until the 5:30pm whistle blows.  If you’ve got a high performing BDR, you want to make sure that they feel like what they do is important; not because you want to manipulate them, but because it’s true.  If you really don’t see the value in teleprospecting, then that is a completely different story that I would be happy to talk about.  Thomas Edison said that, “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”  If that is true (and if you’ll allow me the stretch of “genius” being analogous to “high performing”), and you’re not inspiring your BDR’s to be better today than they were yesterday, than you really can’t expect them to be at their best.

Second, to maintain your high performing teleprospector, you need to keep them challenged.  This can look like different things to different folks.  If you manage a team of teleprospectors who work on various campaigns for different solutions, you may want to put the high performing BDR on the struggling project.  Maybe you’ve got a project that’s only yielding five or six sales qualified opportunities per month.  Give that project a shot in the arm by putting in place one of your better performing reps.  The really great ones will rise to the challenge.  A couple of things will happen here – one, if that BDR is really good at what they do and the lead flow doesn’t change, you’ll know it may be an issue with the project, and two, if the BDR blows it out, then you know the rep that was first on the project may need more help than you thought.  If you don’t have the luxury of switching BDR’s and placing them on different projects and have an in-house team, you still need to challenge them.  This may come in forms of their metrics or the quality of their opportunities.  Challenge them to set personal records and then break them.  This is simple stuff, folks, but it bears mentioning.  Kudos to the manager who can challenge a BDR to break his or her older records because they actually did the job, too!

Lastly, another great way to maintain your high performing teleprospector is to have them mentor new BDR’s.  Let your BDR know that the reason why you’re using them to help train new reps is because of their high level of performance, and that you expect them to keep up that same level as the new employees sit with them.  Better yet, find a way to incent them on the effectiveness of the rep that they’re mentoring.  When I was a rep, I made sure I did everything I could to hit my bonus numbers, and would have jumped at the chance to earn more because I was able to train someone to do the job better than myself.  Training people should, theoretically, keep your skills sharp, too.  The sharper the skills, the more effective you can be.  The same should hold true for your BDR, too. 

What do you think?  What are some other ways to maintain your high performing teleprospectors?

Last week I blogged about things that you need to think about before you decide to build your own in-house teleprospecting team,  where I tried to get folks thinking about some of the questions that they may not have considered, and hopefully offer some insight into the difficulty of creating their own teleprospecting team.  Today I was thinking – what if someone had all of those things covered?  What if someone decided to build their own team and had been an experienced, successful teleprospector?  What if they knew exactly what their ideal BDR looked like and what if they really knew how to measure their team’s success?  It certainly isn’t beyond the scope of possibilities that if you’ve decided to build your own team that you already know how to answer these questions.  As a follow up, then, I’d like to offer some additional questions that you should think about.

So, let’s say that you’ve got yourself your own teleprospecting team – now what?  The way I see it, there are a few questions that you need to ask yourself once you get to this point: 

1. You’ve done teleprospecting before and you were successful at it.  Do you know the people you should surround yourself with so that you can focus on managing your team?
2. You’ve hired the right BDR’s, but do you know how to train them?
3. You know what metrics to measure to determine your team’s success, but do you know how to improve them when they’re not successful?

Congrats!  You’ve done teleprospecting before and you were successful at it.  You’re already way ahead of the game, but, do you know the people you should surround yourself with so that you can focus on managing your team?  There’s a lot going on from an operations perspective regarding the management of a successful teleprospecting team.  Who’s going to build out your team’s CRM so that it’s optimal for the BDR’s?  Who’s going to do your list scrubbing for you (and by God, get someone to do that!)?  Who’s going to manage all of the call metrics for you?  Who’s going to write and rewrite messaging and email templates?  Those are just a few questions that need answering.  Can you do all of this yourself?  Absolutely.  I’m not so sure you should be, though.  By determining who you should have working with you besides your BDR’s, you’ll be able to spend more time focused on managing your BDR’s rather than having to be sidetracked by all of those other issues that come up.

You’ve hired the right BDR’s, but do you know how to train them?  Just because you were a successful teleprospector doesn’t mean that you know how to train someone else to be just as successful.  They say those who can’t, teach.  I think that’s bunk.  Teaching isn’t easy.  Make sure that if you’ve got your own team of teleprospectors that you know how to train them.  And I’m not just talking about getting them up and running so that they know how to make a cold/warm call.  That’s all well and good for a little while.  I’m talking about keeping them sharp.  I’m talking about knowing how to keep them maintained as a well oiled sales opportunity qualifying machine.  I’m talking about having a team of folks who are constantly improving their skills, and better yet, are being taught to do so by you.  It’s fantastic if you were a really great BDR, but if you’re not a teacher or a trainer, take some time to plan out your team’s improvement process from an expertise perspective.

Lastly, you may know what metrics to measure to determine your team’s success, but do you know how to improve them when they’re not successful?  You’ve got a great connect rate but your lead rate is low, why is that?  Is that because you’re solution or a service is a “nice to have” or is because your BDR is afraid to pull the trigger on asking for a meeting?  Your lead rate is off the charts, but your connect rate is miserable – how come?  Does that even matter?  What about your leads that are hitting pipeline versus the ones that aren’t; do you know why?  Why is it that your BDR’s get off a call and feel like they’ve got a great opportunity but your sales rep says the lead sucked?  Who’s wrong in this case?  These are just a few questions you need to ask yourself regardless of whether or not your team is successful.  If they’re not though, and your boss has the metrics that you’ve determined for him/her that are what you should be measured by, you need to know how to improve.  You need to be able to determine when you need to add a little manpower to this campaign, or throttle down the activity to that campaign.  You need to be able to receive feedback on all of your team’s opportunities from each person that is a recipient of a lead, and you need to know how to get that feedback from the toughest reps who are not fans of your team.  It’s one thing to know how to measure your success, it’s a whole different animal knowing how to improve upon them.

Hopefully I’ve given you some things to think about.  If you have any questions about building your team, or improving them, feel free to give me a shout.  I know a lot of folks that would be happy to talk with you, and it would be my pleasure to help you get in touch with them.