The CRAP Report

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.  Read more… »

Where do you get inspiration from?  Better yet, how do you inspire your teams to bigger and better things?  To pass more leads of higher quality?  To make more calls today than they did yesterday?  To make more calls tomorrow than they’re going to make today?  To talk with more people who will probably hang up on them?  To initiate interest in a product that the prospect knows nothing about but after a ten to fifteen minute phone call now has to have?  How do you get them to do that if you’re feeling burned out yourself?  If you’re a manager of BDR’s, you can’t afford to burn out.  You can’t afford to do anything BUT burn bright.  You’ve got to keep yourself ablaze if you expect your reps to even glow, so how do you do that?  Read more… »

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? Read more… »

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. Read more… »

Okay, so for the most part, I really can’t stand reality television.  I watched my fair share of MTV’s The Real World (when it really was “real” back in 1992) before it became obvious that the same “type” of character was cast season after season.  I watch stuff like Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen shows and who doesn’t watch American Idol, right?  Don’t judge me for my television watching, please!  This past weekend, however, while I was flipping around the channels, I came across A&E’s new reality show called Steven Seagal: Lawman.  How can I pass this up!?  This guy was in the coolest action movies of three word titles the early 1980’s had to offer!  Who can forget Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, and Out for Justice?  Steven Seagal was (and apparently still is) a bad ass, and I think teleprospectors can learn thing or two from him. Read more… »

One of the games I liked playing as a kid was Connect Four.  You remember that game, right?  It was like tic-tac-toe and checkers had a crazy love child.  You have to strategically connect four of the same checkers before your opponent does.  Playing the game with someone who’s never played before was fun, because it was easy to win.  More fun than that, though, was playing someone who had played before.  As a kid you could play for hours going back and forth with, “okay, how about best 9 out of 17?” or something like that.  The strategy of that simple game, much like that with tic-tac-toe, obviously determines the winner.  The same thing goes with teleprospecting and connecting with your intended contact.  How, then, do you as a manager (or maybe as the client of a B2B lead generation company) help your BDR’s connect “more”? Read more… »

I’ve blogged before about my love for the Cobra Kai from The Karate Kid, but today I want to share with you my admiration for Mr. Miyagi.  You remember him, right, Daniel LaRusso’s pseudo father/mentor/karate teacher?  What I love most about Mr. Miyagi was his dedication to not only teaching Daniel Okinawan style karate, but it was his dedication to Daniel as a person.  Yes, he was willing to teach him karate, but he was going to do so all while making Daniel a better person.  As the movie goes on, you can see Daniel’s transformation from a fearful victim of bullying to a very confident young man.  You know, when you think about teleprospecting and lead generation, it’s our jobs as people who manage BDR’s to make them better, too, and one of the key things we need to teach our BDR’s is confidence. Read more… »