Overcome Your Fear of Lead Generation

If you’re new to an inside sales position, picking up the phone can be intimidating. It’s human nature to fear the unknown and you don’t always know who is going to be on the other side of the phone or what objections you’re going to face. These feelings are perfectly normal and the only way to truly overcome them are repetition and experience.

Here are a handful of tips to keep in mind as you begin your inside sales journey.

Everyone is Human

You’re doing nothing more than trying to connect with another human being. How do you think they started their business or got the job? They had to sell themselves as well at one point to get to where they are today. Even if we don’t realize it, we’re all in sales.

The Worst You Can Hear is “No.”

That’s literally it. What’s the worst that can happen? Each “no” is one interaction closer to a “yes.” No matter it be on the job or your personal life, we’re programmed to respond negatively to rejection. You just have to keep grinding and move on to the next prospect.

Keep a Positive Mindset

Hopefully, you have a defined target market and a product or service you believe in. If so, you’re doing nothing more than helping your prospects. Each minute you wait to call is another minute they don’t know you exist. Reach out, say hello, make an attempt to understand a little more about who they and what they do to further qualify whether or not they’re a good fit.

Embrace Your Interactions as a Learning Opportunity

No one is an expert at anything the first time they try. Not the top sales rep, your sales manager, or your CEO for that matter. They earned their positions by trial and error, learning over a period of time. You will have to go through the same learning curve to understand what works and what doesn’t about your approach.

Have Fun!

Celebrate your victories and learn to laugh off your failures. You won’t ever be able to please everyone you interact with. Keep a smile, joke around with your peers when you run into someone particularly rude or if you happen to stumble over your words, then move on to the next.

B2B Lead Generation Using Facebook

Struggling to add new leads to your marketing funnel and drive revenue for your business? If you haven’t thought about using Facebook to help generate leads for your B2B organization, it’s time you considered it.

The Facts

• 72% of adult internet users use Facebook.
• Facebook continues to have the most engaged users -- 70% log on daily, including 43% who do so several times a day.
• 74% of people say they use Facebook for professional purposes.
• Content consumption on Facebook has increased 57% in the past two years.
• 90% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses. 

The Process

There are many different ways to generate B2B leads using Facebook depending on your business objective. One of the most effective strategies we’ve used is outlined below:

Added Value

When this approach is paired with our fractional lead generation service, you end up with an account-based sales (ABS) strategy. Account-based selling is a multi-touch, multi-channel strategy coordinated across marketing and sales teams to pursue a target number of high-value accounts.

When marketing and sales teams work together from the very start and throughout the revenue cycle, you’re much more likely to generate high-quality leads and close them faster to grow your business.

#RelationshipsMatter | Employee Spotlight: Sarah Nelson

Incept is a place where relationships matter. We're a creative, diverse, and engaging community uniting more than 200 team members with Fortune 500 companies, blood centers, and B2B sales teams across the United States and we want to share some of the stories from the people that make this team great every day.

Today we bring you Sarah Nelson, Incept's Marketing Manager.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, my name is Sarah Nelson, I'm the Marketing Manager here at Incept.  I manage our digital and online brand, and I also work with many of our clients to manage their digital campaigns through alternative channels.

What I have enjoyed most about working in the contact center industry is that everything revolves around one conversation. If you can figure out how to drive that one conversation, make it meaningful for you and for the person on the other end of the phone, or on the other side of the computer, and make a difference in their life, change their thoughts, encourage them to go out and make a difference, that's been pretty cool to be a part of.

The thing I enjoy most about working here at Incept has to be the people. Clearly they've made culture a priority, so it is fun coming into work, I feel energized. I feel like I'm able to come in every day, work at being the best possible version of myself, whether that means in my current role, with my current responsibilities, or pushing the boundaries and being a part of some of the bigger conversations being had here at Incept.

The most exciting thing that's happened in the last year for me is that I found out my husband and I are going to be having a little boy!  It's going to be a big change, but we're super excited, and so ready to meet him.

Again, I'm Sarah Nelson, Marketing Manager here at Incept, where relationships matter.

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

Want to get to know Sarah a little more? See if you can spot which one is the lie in a game of Two Truths and a Lie:

Think you know the answer? Find out here.                    

The Science and Art Required for B2B Lead Generation

As we evaluate the world of B2B lead generation, we see two prevailing schools of thought - science-based verse art-based lead generation.

Science-Based Lead Generation

The first school of thought revolves around lead generation being very scientific. Proponents of this theory focus strictly on the numbers - if you need this many leads, you get this many contacts, you'll convert this many people into X and Y responses, and then be able to calculate the pipeline value.

It's very systemic, sterile, and quantified and does an excellent job of pointing out that it's critical to have a great set of numbers to understand how your campaigns will play out. Everything is a controlled experiment so the process is significantly more important than the person.

Art-Based Lead Generation

The other version nearly goes to the complete opposite end of the spectrum.  This group focuses on the art and skill of the lead generator - that they have this intangible characteristic and charisma that just can't be quantified, but “you know it when you see it”. These artists can generate leads in a way that others don't have the ability to and their skill seems impossible to replicate exactly. 

We have these two opposite beliefs and they tend to attract like-minded people, polarized at the two ends of the lead generation spectrum. While these two beliefs compete, lead generation firms tend to attract those that feel strongly about one end or the other. The problem with this is that what we see every day from our lead generators is that the most successful campaigns use nearly an equal combination of both science and art.

How Can We Bring the Two Together?

Like most things in life, success comes with balance and we see the most successful campaigns are derived when there's a combination of quantitative goals and a really controlled environment coupled with some special, charismatic people that have the soft skills to really make it work.

For us, it's not a focus on science versus art, it's the combination of the two that makes our lead generation campaigns so successful. To do that, we build our campaigns to use a combination of scientists and artists in the places their skills are the most needed. 

When setting up a new campaign, we really need the scientist to control the experiment.  The project management, campaign setup, the script development, and execution plan are held to very tight controls. Because of this, we use somebody who can maintain this plan and make sure everybody's following all the right steps. It really is somewhat more sterile in the fact that we must make sure that all of those things are being evaluated for what they are at the very beginning.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the person that is delivering the calls, we believe really does have to be more of an artist. They need tools so that they know how they're performing, they need dashboards so that they see where their success is, but for most of their role, if given the right set of tools, they need to just be the executor. They can focus on having some freedom and really delivering whatever the prospect needs at the other end.

In short, successful lead generation campaigns need both the skills of a scientist and artist, as long as both are asked to execute only on the items that map directly to their greatest strengths.

Where do you fall on the lead generation spectrum? Do you think the most successful lead generators are scientists, artists, or some combination of both?

5 Tips on How to Coach Yourself as a Lead Generation Specialist

There are a lot of articles from a manager’s perspective when it comes to coaching & training. What if you wanted to take initiative yourself to further your skill set? We can’t always have an expert over our shoulder 24/7 critiquing what we’re doing right or wrong. Here are a handful of tips to help you become the best lead generation specialist at your company.

1. Find a Mentor

Take note of the best performers on your sales team. What about their approach yields consistent results? You don’t have to pull them away from their job for the day, just be a fly on the wall and observe.

How do they prepare? Sit next to your mentor and you’ll begin to understand why they’re so good at overcoming objections and specific conversational transitions that keep the prospect engaged. After listening for a while you’ll begin finding ways to implement these techniques into your own strategy.

2. Listen To Your Recordings

This was something I picked up in my college public speaking and sales classes. We’d had to record ourselves giving speeches or mock negotiations/sales calls and re-watch them. It’s amazing all the quirks you might not necessarily notice in the moment. Once you can see yourself on film or hear through a recording you’ll begin to pick up on a lot of these things. All the “um’s”, fidgeting, or bad eye contact tendencies are brought to light & can be adjusted accordingly.   

3. Write Down Every Objection

Don’t be caught off guard. Make a running list of all possible objections you can think of as well as corresponding rebuttals. Just like anything else, being smooth takes practice. By having a bank of every reason anyone has ever said no to you it will lessen the learning curve of the project you’re working on. The next time you’re in that same situation you’ll know how to handle it immediately.

4. Conduct Mock Calls

In most instances, I’m sure your manager would be happy to help you out with this one. Sit down face to face and have them play the role of the prospect while you go through your cadence or script. They’ll throw different scenarios at you in a no pressure environment and this will help you adapt to unexpected dialogue on the fly.

5. Identify Industry Thought Leaders

Start learning who the industry thought leaders in your field are and follow them on social media. YouTube especially is a gold mine for short 1-2 minute training videos. Don’t be afraid to engage back, either. Others are watching those videos for the same exact reason you are so it makes for excellent learning & networking opportunities as well.