Last week was a whirlwind kind of week. I would have done anything just to have a few extra hours in each day. Along with my regular tasks, list needs and requests from clients were at an all time high. Calling on brand new lists is always exciting to anyone in inside sales because they bring a fresh audience to target. But, adding new lists to your database comes with much more work on the front end before the list is ready to call on. The lists need to be populated with new contacts and scrubbed against the existing database to avoid creating duplicates. It will also needs to be properly formatted in excel prior to importing to keep fields in your CRM clean and consistent. These tasks are ones that an inside sales rep nor an inside sales manager can accomplish alone, which is why I wanted to blog today about how appreciative I am for our internal list development team.
Internal list development teams bring value to all levels of any sales organization – from managers to sales reps to top level executives. I pooled thoughts from these three perspectives to provide the top reasons why we love our internal list team and why you should consider hiring a team.
- The Management Perspective: Having a team devoted to list development provides managers the ability to interact more with their sale reps instead of being stuck in offices hunched over computers working on lists. More time should be spent listening in on a rep’s cold calls, or helping them tweak messaging in order to improve. Furthermore, reps are more productive when working with a list with a higher accuracy rate.
- The Inside Sales Rep Perspective: Reps love the support because they don’t have to spend time searching the internet for new contacts all day. Instead, they can focus on having quality conversations with the right contacts. One rep uncovered two additional leads this month from having a list development associate assist her with finding contacts for just a couple of days! Imagine how a designated internal team could impact the volume of opportunities your inside team sends to your sales team on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis.
- The C-Level Perspective: Having a list development team in place is necessary to allow inside sales teams to accomplish their job and do what they are best at – staying on the phones. Inside sales reps are not hired to manage excel or enter data, they are hired to talk to people and uncover qualified opportunities to drive company revenue.
The only downside to having an internal list development team is that you wish you could hire even more individuals to join the team. The value list development provides is crucial to the success of any sales organization. Having a team like this in place will increase inside sales productivity. Thank you to our list development team for all that you do!
