The CRAP Report

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?