#RelationshipsMatter | Employee Spotlight: Cory Carney

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 Cory Carney, an Account Growth Specialist at Incept.

TRANSCRIPT

My name's Cory and I'm an Account Growth Specialist here at Incept. It's lead generation at the core via inside sales, email campaigns, and social media. What I love most about lead generation specifically is I'm a very competitive person so it's really the hunt of going out there and being able to generate those sales leads. It's a lot of fun, it's a rush, and it's something new every day.

What I enjoy most about working here at Incept is that everyone's a mentor to one another.  They want to see you grow not only as a professional but as a human being as well. They want you to develop the skills you want to develop that also help the company. They like to see personal growth within their employees.

When having conversations is your job that follows you outside of work. What I'm looking forward to most in the next year, I'll be going to Hawaii solo for a couple weeks actually.  I found a shark research group and I'm going to be going out with them, learning about the sharks, seeing them in their natural environment, free diving essentially.  You're in the middle of the ocean with them and there's hundreds of sharks beneath you, it's going to be incredible. It's going to be a once in a lifetime experience, and I can't wait to do that.

Again, I'm Cory Carney, Account Growth Specialist here at Incept where relationships matter.

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

Want to get to know Cory 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. 

5 Things You Need To Consider When Selecting Your Appointment Setting Service Partner

Choosing an appointment setting service partner is a big decision.  You're handing over the internal control of your brand for top-of-the-funnel prospects and it's important to really make sure your appointment setting partner meets all of your most important qualifications.

Below is a list of 5 considerations we think are most important when determining who to partner with:

1) Expertise in your industry

Are you looking for appointment setters to ask basic questions and set up appointments for your salespeople? Or are you looking for appointment setters to have intimate knowledge of your industry so they can have real conversations with prospects about their problems and generate higher quality meetings for you and your team to provide a solution?

The answer to those two questions will help you decide if your appointment setting partner must have expertise in your industry or not. There are many service providers that are willing to ask the basic questions and will provide you with very top-of-the-funnel and only slightly warm leads, which fits the requirements of many buyers. But there are others that expect appointment setting service providers to deliver hot leads that are actively making their way down the sales funnel. If this is your expectation, make sure your provider has experience in your industry.

2) Proximity to your business

Is it important to you that you meet your sales representative or visit the company headquarters of your appointment setting partner? We think the proximity of your business to your service provider makes a pretty big difference in the success of partnerships. In fact, some of our most successful partnerships have been with organizations within driving distance of Incept. 

While it may be easy enough to jump on a flight and go meet the team before launching your project, not all businesses have this option. You'll want to decide if this is something important to you, and if so, add it to your list of considerations before choosing a partner. 

3) Ability to effectively use multiple channels to generate appointments

Are you just looking for cold callers or would you like to take a more account-based selling approach? The approaches and the outcomes they drive are considerably different. 

Account-based selling is a multi-touch, multi-channel strategy coordinated between both sales and marketing to pursue targeted, high-value accounts.  It uses content marketing, social media, website conversion strategies, and individual sales ownership in order to attract leads, warm them up and close them with a seamless experience. 

Comparatively, most exclusively cold call approaches use cold lists and an auto dialer to slam through as many calls as possible in hopes of finding a needle in the haystack.  While this approach can work well for certain projects, we've seen much greater success with the account based selling approach - a capability important to consider when determining the best partner. 

4) Direct communication with the lead generator

There are many appointment setting services that are run just like call centers. There are multiple sales representatives cold calling for your account. Everyone has a basic understanding of your organization and it's offering but no one knows it intimately. 

There are other appointment setting services that allow you to work one on one with your own lead generator.  Each day, you have access to that individual to discuss what went well, what needs improvement, and how to pivot the sales strategy. Essentially, this lead generator becomes an extension of your sales team, as if they were a part of your organization.  This kind of relationship leads to much more successful partnerships and is very important to consider when selecting a partner. 

5) Fractional pricing to ensure the quality of appointment

We meet with many organizations that are looking for pay-per-appointment pricing. While on the surface this looks like the most equitable scenario for both parties, we've seen that it actually can degrade the quality of lead an appointment setting service passes through.

When a service provider is tempted with passing through leads in return for a pre-agreed upon fee, it's more likely that you will be passed leads that hit your bare minimum requirements just so that the service provider can recoup on the time spent uncovering those leads as quickly as possible. You're more likely to have to weed through slightly warm leads in order to find the hot ones yourself.

When a partnership is based on a fractional agreement, where you pay the service provider as if they are a fraction of your team, the quality of the lead tends to be higher. 

If you're in the process of hiring an appointment setting service provider, make sure you consider these 5 things. What other considerations are important to you?

Outsourced Lead Generation Campaigns that Compliment Your Sales & Marketing Strategy

What if your marketers and sales reps had an extra 4-8 hours in the day to focus on what really counts, closing and converting new business? Incept Grows has worked with a variety of clients across a handful of different industries to help streamline top of the funnel activity that can often be a time-suck for your representatives. Here are a few ways we’ve been able to complement the efforts of marketing and sales to help increase efficiency.

1) Appointment Setting

The perfect place to start with appointment setting is with a lapsed customer or custom prospect list. There are only so many hours in the day for your representatives to be making office visits so the more appointments and less time on the phone for your team the better. An example of a conversation could be:

“Hi <name> this is Cory with <company>. I noticed it had been a little while since we’ve made contact so I wanted to circle back around to see how things were going. Do you have any availability on <date> <time> for us to swing by your office and say hello?”

Scripting is simple, lets the customer or prospect know the reason for the call, and still allows your sales rep to ultimately do their job.

2) Surveys/Market Research

You can email blast all you want, but a personal touch can go a long way in getting your customers or prospects to follow through and fill out the desired form. In addition, if they have any specific feedback then person to person communication is likely the only way to receive that information.

3) Event Promotion

We’ve attacked this scenario from many different angles in the past. Here are a few:

• Clients have come to us with a prospect “wish list” and our job was to bring in as many of those companies as we could to the event they were hosting.
• For associations, we’ll follow up with their members to ensure they’ve received all the newsletters and there aren’t any roadblocks in the purchasing process. This presents a data cleansing opportunity as well. In some instances, if the membership is on a corporate level then it’s very easy for contacts to move on without being updated accordingly.
• Driving attendance to webinars being hosted by your sales team.

Should You Consider Working With An Appointment Setting Service?

Choosing an appointment setting service partner is a big deal. It means giving up some control in order to use external expert talent so your sales team can gain efficiency and increase effectiveness.

So should you consider partnering with an appointment setting service for your business? There are three questions you should ask yourself:

1. Do you understand your target market?

Understanding your prospects in an intimate way is essential for setting up a successful campaign with an appointment setting service partner. Do you know where they work, what they do, who they hang out with, and how they make decisions? This type of information is imperative to not only your success but the success of an appointment setting partnership. 

If you don't understand your target market before partnering with an appointment setting service, it may not be the right approach for your organization. While it's true that an appointment setting service can help you hone in on your target market niche, it's probably not the most cost-effective approach. Instead, work with your marketing team to really uncover your buyer personas and then work with an appointment setting service to add a jolt to your sales funnel activity.

2. Are your prospecting systems/tools working well now?

Most businesses consider the use of an appointment setting service as a means to increase the number of leads their sales team is following up with. However, the best appointment setting partnerships start with an already effective prospecting approach.

When considering ways to increase productivity you have to look at what your current sales representatives are doing. Are they spending time really prospecting, digging in and being very intentional about your target market? If they are, now consider how much of their time they spend doing that? If that number is higher than you want but you’re seeing results then the good news is you probably have a prospecting system in place that can be duplicated and passed off to someone else, keeping your team filled with appointments, focused on closing new clients and bringing in revenue.

3. Does your sales team have a great close rate?

Often times, organizations reach out to appointment setting services to help fix their closing problem. Unfortunately, these types of services will not fix that and should not be a reason for working with an appointment setting service. Their job is to set quality appointments, but your sales team's job will continue to be closing deals. 

On the other hand, if your sales team does have a great close rate, this would be the perfect scenario for working with an appointment setting service. These services offer expert prospectors and will help fill the top of your funnel, allowing your team to do what they do best, and spend time closing new business.

So should you consider working with an appointment setting service? Answer the three questions above as honestly as possible and you'll determine if it's best to partner with an appointment setting service now or not.  Keep in mind that the answer could easily change as your internal team grows.

Tips & Tricks to Keep Your Lead Generation Team Motivated

It’s too easy for the daily grind to get the best of us. To keep sales reps motivated, you have to create an environment that’s mentally healthy for your workforce to achieve their goals. Here are a few tips to help create a culture that breeds success.

1.)   Create Healthy Competition

This can be as simple as the Operations Manager hopping on the phones for a couple hours. Nothing rally’s the troops better than seeing their leader out there with them on the front lines. You can also use gamification among your team encouraging each member to push one another to reach different goals that are specific and realistic. Be careful because if the goals are unachievable, this approach will have an inverse effect.

2.)   Give Recognition Where It’s Due

It can be incredibly frustrating to be crushing your goals and feeling like your efforts are going completely unnoticed. Identify who your best performers are and recognize them for their excellence. Managers often-times fall into a pattern where they ignore the best performers and put all their time and energy into those who are struggling or don’t care. This makes sense to an extent, but by not giving enough credit to those who are putting it all on the line for your company could eventually drive your best team members away.

3.)   Have a Strong Training Program

Ensuring your team is prepared for the task at hand boosts confidence which results in increased motivation and productivity. If the rep feels not ready or unsure of what they’re supposed to do then their performance will reflect that. A strong training program reinforces the employees trust in the company and the processes that are in place.

4.)   Trust Your Team

You hired each member of your team for a reason. They’re professionals. No one likes to have someone looking over their shoulder critiquing their every move. Guidance and direction are perfectly okay but once the rep has all the materials they need, trust them to get the job done until they’ve proven you otherwise.