Over time as I continue to work with one company after another I have found a few ways people create problems for themselves when implementing InsideSales.com. The most important step for setting up InsideSales.com is planning. After you've planned things out go back and trim the fat to keep things simple.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to plan every step of the way. This step will save an exorbitant amount of time. You cannot possibly know how you are going to set up an e mail campaign without first knowing what you want to say to people in your e mail, how often you want to e mail people, and who will receive the e mail. You must know those things BEFORE you start trying to set things up.

The same concepts apply when setting up a dialing list, an automated workflow, the lead flow process, and even what information you will be tracking on a lead. It is very important through every step.

Secondly, keep it simple. Over and over again I've seen new users get excited about what InsideSale.com can do and they try to take it all on at once. They add every option, every bell and whistle. The problem with this is the complexity it adds. Without exception, these users feel overwhelmed with all the options, setup, and misunderstanding how these things work together.

I am all for companies using all aspects of InsideSales.com, but you must walk before you can run. Take it one step at a time. Most often you will find yourself going back to square one and re-designing everyting to keep it simpler. Do yourself a favor and start there.

Approximately every four to six weeks InsideSales.com performes system upgrades to release new features and fixes. These upgrades are typically done between the hours of 12AM to 4AM so as to not interrupt service during typical business hours.

These updates come free of any upgrade charge, are throughly tested, and provide users with new features based on cusomer feedback and requests. Sometimes these updates are small, others they are fairly significant.

For the month March, 2010, InsideSales.com has focused on improving the Reporting Engine. This feature allows users to create custom reports from most any data point in InsideSales.com. Some added features this month include:

- Automatic Report E mails
- Added Custom Field Reporting
- Ability to add Categories to keep reports Organized
- Various other fixes and upgrades.

I will try to keep everyone updated on new updates each time we have a system upgrade.

Thanks

Check it out. Our company president, Ken Krogue, has decided to start a blog for users of InsideSales.com. He posts best practice tips for the inside sales industry. Its pretty good stuff and can go hand in hand with this blog. Insider Blog

For the past 8 months or so our development team has been busy working on a new dialing technology for salesforce.com. It will soon be released on the salesforce.com AppExchange. The new interface is a step up in simplicity from our previous offering.

Learn more about it HERE

Here's the Second Session of training material for Administrators.

1. Dialer Initiatives, Step 1
2. Dialer Initiatives, Step 2
3. Dialer Initiatives, Step 3.1
4. Dialer Initiatives, Step 3.2
5. Response Loop Setup - Basic Options
6. Response Loop Setup - Advanced
7. Response Loop FAQ

The following are topics every InsideSales.com system administrator should master. I get asked a lot if there is some place these topics are stored. Here they are. Each topic is a like to more detailed information from the InsideSales.com Community Site.

Training 1 - System Basics

1. Logging Into InsideSales.com
2. Basic Site Navigation
3. Tasks and Events
4. Advanced Searches
5. Mass Update Feature
6. Exporting Lists
7. Importing a file Step 1, Preparing the spreadsheet
8. Importing a file Step 2, Uploading a file
9. Layout Groups, Basics
10. Layout Groups, Step 1
11. Layout Groups, Step 2
12. Personal Information
13. Company Information
14. Billing Information
15. E Mail Manager
16. VoiceMail Manager

Keeping the interest of a lead after conversion is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome for any business. There is a balance between providing leads with enough information to make an educated choice, and just annoying the heck out of someone. The goal is to find the middle ground.

The first idea to keep in mind is the person who just converted from your website did so for a specific reason. They wanted to download a case study, they want a free trial, or they wanted to see how much your product costs. In each of these situations they are willing to give you their contact information for something of value. This means their information should hold value to you as well. So the real question is, how do I configure my e mail and phone response to this lead to get the most value out of it, every time?

Through practice and experience I have found the answer to that question. There is little variation to when and how often you should be contacting new web leads, regadless of the industry or business you are in.

First Contact

Your first contact should be no longer than five minutes after conversion, and by phone. This means you need to require a phone field on your web form. Do not respond by e mail first, unless you do not plan on responding by phone at all. Most companies have automatic e mail responders. A recent study of the Alexa top 250 shows 47% of companies responded to web inquiries through e mail. 7.5% responded by phone. Only 0.6% of those that responded by phone did so within five minutes. By being the first to contact a lead, while your company is still on their mind, you are positioning your company with a true competitive advantage. The same study showed the odds of qualifying a lead increase by 21x if attempted within five minutes versus 30 minutes.

Succeeding Contacts

After the first contact you should have a standard strategy for contacting leads. Don't be too overbearing by attempting to contact them every day for three months. Don't be bashful and only attempt one call and give up. There should be balance. I've found the following strategy to work the best.

Calls

Your calling strategy will depend on your bandwidth. The more resources you have available for lead generation, the more success you will see down the pipeline. The first day you should attempt to contact a lead through calls up to four times the first day, leaving one voice message. The next four days you should attempt to contact through calls a maximum of twice per day, leaving one voice message per day. After the first week, you should attempt contact once every other day by phone, until the lead is a month old. At a month old, it should then be moved into a never contacted status, attempt contact once per month by phone. Keep in mind these limits are for leads that you have not yet been able to contact. Once contacted and dispositioned, the strategy changes.

E Mail

In today's world E mail contact is just as important as giving someone a call. After the first e mail response you should be e mailing less than calling. People can keep track of your e mail trail much better than a missed call trail. Don't become spam.

E mail two should happen on day two, right after the call and voice message. E mail three should come on day three, right after the call and voice message. E mail four should come on day five. E mail five should come just after one week, so day eight. You should then be e mailing a maximum of once per week until the lead is a month old. After a month old, you should e mail a maximum of once per week.

To sumarize, you should send at least four e mails in the first week, with one e mail per week in each successive week. At a month old you should e mail a maximum of one per month, into perpetuity.

Again, keep in mind this assumes the lead is dispositioned as never contacted. Once this status changes these strategies change.

The overall goal is to get the most out of your leads. Be plesantly persistent. Don't be overbearing. Don't be shy. But attempt contact enough to give yourself a fighting chance.

In a time when the economy is facing uncertainty, companies are looking for more and more solutions to lower costs. Companies want to discover new ways to do more with less. The days are over, for now, when money for capital investment is plentiful. Weather you are one person, or a top Fortune 500 player, the objective is similar. How can we save money? How can we do more with less. I propose a solution that may seem counter intuitive yet has a more dramatic effect than most others. Add new sales reps.

You may be asking, save money, hire a new sales rep? How is that logical. I'll show you.

The structure of most sales organizations is designed such that the individuals involved can focus on one or two aspects of the sales process. The idea of segmentation in the sales process is a fairly aged concept. Most organizations don't realize they are neglecting, and possibly even skipping, the most essential roles in the sales process.

The Fronter

As new leads enter the sales funnel, most organizations route these leads based on some type of routing rule. The most common, and least effective, is region based. When a sales representative gets a new lead, he or she initiates the evaluation process. They start to ask themselves qualification questions based on prior experience. It's like getting judged when you walk into a new car dealership based on the current car you are driving, the clothes you are wearing, and how good looking you are. Everyone of us has had this experience. It is a biased disqualification. But why should a sales representative waste his or her time on a lead they think will never close? This is a fundamental error in most every sales team in every company in the world. The objective is to take the pre-qualification step away from the sales person and give it to someone who's goal is not to close the lead, but to qualify the lead. Thus, we further segment the sales process.

By moving the qualification step to a separate individual, we pass on only those leads who are interested and qualified. Because the goal and compensation of the fronter is based on qualifying and setting appointments, they are highly motivated to do so. In a recent study done with MIT it has been found that close rates increase by almost 7% by simply adding this step and combining technology to increase a fronter's dialing capacity.

This is just one step a sales organization can take to do more with less. In most organizations the current sales staff will be unable to handle the volume of appointments handed to them by a quality fronter. This is one of those good problems to have.

I've read many articles about how to do this or that to get more out of your marketing or sales efforts. There are a host of sources available if you want to pay someone to learn how to do either of those. In my searches I've found that services offered in this realm are fairly segmented. In other words, there is no one place I've found that will outline the entire lead lifecycle, and how to get more value out of each step.

All leads start with some sort of impression. These days impressions are all over. By the time you get to work in the morning you may not have realized you have already been exposed to hundreds of impressions. Billboards, logos on shirts, clothing brands, computer brands, drink labels, and so on. The point is a person is exposed to thousands upon thousands of impressions per day. In the business world, how does one stand out and take advantage? The best place to start, depending on your industry, is to do some sort of web marketing. SEO, PPC, etc... Google is a good place to look for driving both SEO and PPC tools.

In terms of web marketing an impression, hopefully, becomes a click. Clicks aren't free. Everyone listed on the first search page in Google has paid some price to be there. All of the time or money spent to get there is simply in an effort to drive traffic to their web site. As a business owner I would want as much traffic as possible. I would seek ways to drive my site listing to the top of search listings as fast as I can.

Once people are visiting my website, I will somehow want to get information from that visitor. When a website visitor fills our a form on my website to get more information, it's called a conversion. Driving conversions is one of the most misunderstood sciences in web marketing. Just like other areas of web marketing, there are rules to the game. Probably the biggest mistake by most web marketers is not properly aligning offers with requiring visitors to fill out their information, or convert. This is a transaction of value. The website visitor wants something of value, and you want your information to try and sell to them. These two aspects must be properly aligned. Companies like Omniture can help drive more conversions.

Once you have converted leads is when the sales process really begins. It is the role of the sales team to then qualify and close the lead. Again, there are many sources of information on how to do this better. InsideSales.com provides tools for automating this process and making sales people more efficient.

With all the information on the web about marketing and selling I've found this outline to be the simplist way to understand the true life of a lead. Hopefully it helps you.

In the business of helping people get through their leads faster we commonly run into this question. We've created a gatlin gun for calling through leads. Most companies are used to using a musket, with manual reloading and all. Handing someone these tools, especiall to someone who is unprepared to grow, can be shocking.

What typically happens is companies turn on the high powered gatlin gun to go through their leads and soon find thier lead database is running low. They are used to getting through their leads rather slowly. I inevtibly hear the question "how do I get more leads?"

I offer three simple ways:
1. Go to current customers for refferals. This is your always warm list.
2. Charge up your Web PPC & SEO efforts. There are hosts of outsource companies and sites devoted to helping companies get more from both PPC & SEO.
3. Create lists. The best list is one nobody else has. Don't always settle for buying lists. That's what everyone else is doing. Get creative and find your group of buyers and market directly to them. Who has a need for your product. Don't stop until you get that list of leads. It's more work, but will always pay off. That's the exact reason nobody else has that list, it's work. If you're having trouble creating custom lists lookup a company called Incoho. They specalize in custom list building.