Dear Sales Directors: Lead Generation Companies Are Your Friends
Sales directors are responsible for strategically directing a company’s sales department. The job involves overseeing the team members and working with other directors to continually refine the corporate strategy based on context and market requirements. He or she bears ultimate responsibility for sales within an organization. Thus, this role has to remain constantly aware of how the team is performing in absolute terms and in comparison to previous years.
Sales directors are juggling more than they can be tasked with. Often, pressure around quotas is too much to bear (and leads to dubious decisions). More common than believed are even the most successful sales directors burning out. If they don’t burn out, turnover is still high for the position. One way to avoid the vicious cycle of pressure, stress, underperformance is building a predictable pipeline. This doesn’t always need to be in-house—in fact, strong evidence points to the efficacy of outsourcing.
People and Software Both Matter
As a director, making sure your team constantly hits quota while helping them grow into successful sales professionals is a large task. Combining human intellect and machine powered sales acceleration is one of the only ways to have a pipeline consistently filled.
Many lead generation companies use advanced software, but software alone can’t get to know your ideal customer persona, pain points and goals. It’s crucial for lead generation companies to combine software with highly trained human assistance. Blending these two elements together is the key to really progressing and allowing your sales team to focus solely on closing deals.
No one expects the sales director’s job to be easy; however, it doesn’t need to be needlessly complicated when sales lead generation companies with the right tools exist can help.
An excellent sales director is able to map out where the company wants to be in terms of overall sales—as well as the strategy for how to get there. Strategies are influenced by many factors, including new products, market demand, and pricing. Therefore, the director must understand the status of these factors at all times. But sometimes he becomes sidelined on tasks that are outside these responsibilities. It’s not really anyone’s fault, but the result can be a sales director who is stretched too thin.
Conversely, lead generation companies focus on giving sales directors the ability to focus on what brings the business most value. In many cases, lead generation companies can be found at less than the cost of hiring an employee in-house, making it an all around efficient idea.
Sales Team Activities Sales Directors Often Take On
Directing the team activities, on a high level, is part of the sales director’s responsibility. However, this shouldn’t extend to directing individual team members’ specific activities. When the director is heavily involved in day-to-day activities of his team, including details such as ensuring customer and contact data is correct, his real responsibilities can get pushed to the sideline. If it goes on for too long, strategic development and progress can falter. If sales teams are given a highly curated list of qualified leads, their time can be spent better in closing deals.
Multitasking with Insufficient Tools
Does your sales team rely on spreadsheets, sticky notes, and databases that may or may not be up to date? This results in spending far too much time shuffling paper and correcting inaccurate information. Time they should be using on productive sales conversations. Any wise sales director knows that staff is only as good as their tools enable them to be.
Plenty of modern tools orchestrate calls, emails, and provide reports that give confidence that the prospect data they are using is current and correct. Results include a sales pipeline that is more predictable, sales team members who can focus on selling, and their directors who aren’t pulled off-task to help the team members solve low-level problems.
Meeting quotas doesn’t have to be a process fraught with complications and unexpected detours.
Don’t Forget the Sales Quota
On top of all this, the sales director is tasked with ensuring that the team meets quarterly sales quotas. This is an enormous responsibility in itself. Ideally, a well-trained sales team understands individual responsibility. They also ideally know how to prioritize tasks and work methodically through prioritized task lists. This is so that each day everyone progresses closer to that sales quota.
Unfortunately, the sheer number of tasks required to make a prospect into a satisfied repeat customer can be daunting. On top of that, knowing what to prioritize isn’t always easy. The good news is that lead generation companies exist to take care of much of the legwork involved in moving sales conversations forward.
Powerful Lead Generation Companies Can Take Care of the Juggling
When the team members have the right tools, meeting sales pipeline milestones becomes simpler and more straightforward. Sales pipeline software should enable the team to develop strong value propositions, thoroughly analyze deals, secure commitments, and collect valuable analytics for reporting and future analysis.
There is no substitute for excellent communication among team members, between team members and sales directors, and between sales professionals and customers. Therefore, sales professionals can sell. Sales directors can direct sales.
Conclusion
Lead generation companies can provide a cost-effective, meaningful solution for sales directors looking to nail their numbers. Highly professional firms that operate as an outsourced arm of your sales team doing the mundane and thankless work of research and outreach in order to land qualified appointments—the kind that make the rest of your sales team much more effective.
CIENCE’s meticulous outbound solutions take care of your lead generation. You get personalized copywriting targeted to your ideal customer profile. Also, customized outreach through email, phone, social networks, and offline methods, offering reliable appointment setting. We’re effective because we use cutting-edge technology plus human intelligence. We encourage you to book an appointment with us. It will make a difference where it really counts, keeping all the balls in the air without dropping any.