The CRAP Report

Okay, if you’ve got a stick of gum, a paper clip, three pennies, a ball made of rubber bands, and an acorn who are you?  A lot of folks may say that you’re the contents of the front pocket of a seven year old boy, but they would be wrong.  Actually, the real answer is a flame thrower if you’re in the hands of one Angus MacGyver – yes, THE MacGyver.  You remember him, right?  They guy with a penchant for getting out of inescapable situations by creating some contraption out of things he’d find on the ground or in his or a partner’s pockets.  MacGyver was awesome (besides the mullet) and one of the cooler aspects of that show was actually trying to figure out how he was going to do what he needed to do, and with what.  Like I said, the guy could make a tank out of a broken baby-stroller and a coat rack.  More than anything, MacGyver was inventive, and without a doubt, one of the top 100 qualities of a great teleprospecting rep is being inventive.

MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, had a great number of skills that really do not pertain to sales prospecting and B2B lead generation; most notably, the guy was a physicist and chemist.  Not necessarily skill sets that make one a fantastic qualifier of potential sales opportunities.  Now, the fact that the guy was inventive?  That is a skill that BDR’s need.  I can see three ways that being inventive is a great quality for your teleprospecting reps to have: 

1. They invent new ways to shape messages.
2. They invent new ways to get in front of prospects.
3. They invent new ways of streamlining their job.

First of all, being inventive comes in handy for your BDR’s because they are always going to need new ways to shape their teleprospecting messages.  If you’ve got an in-house teleprospecting team or maybe you’ve partnered with a vendor to supply you with sales qualified leads, you’ve got to remember that at some point, “new messaging” becomes “old messaging.”  Who better to help you tweak and reshape their call scripts than a great BDR.  The really good ones are already doing this, anyways!  They’re taking what works and what doesn’t and amalgamating them into one really successful teleprospecting script.

Second, being inventive is necessary because getting in front of prospects gets harder everyday.  Administrative Assistants get colder to the cold call, and decision makers are picking up their phones less and less.  Great teleprospectors invent new ways to get time with their (or their client’s) targeted prospects.  Take for example, one of my colleague’s BDR’s.  Now, although someone else may have come up with this idea, this particular BDR was the first to do it in his group.  He had gotten tired of never hearing back from prospects that he was emailing, so he decided to take a bold step and send out an Outlook invitation for five minutes to talk about his product.  It worked.  He got more prospects to respond than he ever had.  Now granted, more of them were declinations, but he got a lot of prospects to give him five minutes, which is all he needed to get his foot in the door.  Again, maybe someone else did this before, but never in my buddy’s organization.  They standardized sending Outlook invites, and while some prospects get offended, more often than not their praised for their inventiveness.

Lastly, being inventive is important because you want a BDR who is looking for ways to streamline their job.  A teleprospector spends their day making phone calls, and the good ones always make more.  The great ones invent new ways to get more done with the hours they have.  Now, I’m not talking about inventing new software or telephony products (though that would be awesome), I’m really talking more about processes.  Whether it’s inventing a new system to get more calls made in an hour or a new way to write up the sales qualified leads that they’ve found, they’re doing something.  It may be as simple as the way they set up their CRM and their web browsers, but to them, they’ve invented a new way of doing things that makes them more effective.

There you have it, my reasons why a great teleprospector is an inventive one.  What did I miss, or what can you add to this topic on inventiveness?