Month: November 2019

How To Improve B2B Cold Calling Success Rates

Posted on by hiredna

Cold calling has been one of the major selling tactics over the years, requiring reps to approach complete strangers and win them over through excellent interpersonal skills that persuade the prospect to covert. Cold calling can be very challenging, but there are some tactics that could help improve your success. Here are some thoughts on how to improve B2B cold calling success rates.

At HireDNA, our sales evaluation and training systems are the results of 20 years of experience. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help to improve your sales team. Talk to an HireDNA expert.

How to Improve Cold Calling Success Rates

If done effectively, cold calling can yield great success. Take the technological giant Uber for example. Did you know what laid down the foundation of Uber and ultimately the entire trend of the sharing economy? A cold call.

According to founder, Travis Kalanick, he dialed a number of people he found on Google when searching for ‘San Francisco chauffeur’ out of which three replied. The rest, as they say, is history.

With so many organizations deriving great returns from their cold calling strategy, if it’s not working for you, chances are that you may need to tweak your strategy. Don’t worry! This article will offer tips that can help enhance your cold calling success:

Improve The Quality Of Your Data

62% of organizations rely on prospect data that can be inaccurate or incomplete by as much as 40%. Not only does this result in wasted effort, it also costs your business valuable resources. According to a report by Harvard Business Review, ‘bad’ data costs businesses more than $3 trillion each year in the United States alone.

As consumers become increasingly aware of sales tactics, they tend to only respond to products and services that are tailored according to their needs. If your sales reps are reaching out to prospects based on incorrect, inaccurate, or incomplete data, you are bound to get underwhelming results.

Consider investing in solutions like SalesIntel that allow you to analyze your database and identify any lacking information that adversely affects your quality. Additionally, optimize your prospect data collection strategy. Adding relevant questions to your forms and allowing prospects to express their answers in detail can significantly improve the quality of your data.

Talk Less, Ask More

The art of converting prospects through cold calls is heavily dependent on what you do after the prospect picks up. You can have the most suitable product that can solve your consumer’s problems, but if you don’t have the right tone, chances are you might not close the deal.

The number of questions and the relevancy of your posed questions also play a big part. An extensive survey that analyzed 519,000 cold calls found a directly proportional relationship between the number of questions posed by the sales rep and the percentage of closed deals. To put it simply, it was found that asking 11-14 questions over the course of your call significantly increases the chances of your success.

However, be careful to not overdo it. Sales reps who asked 15+ questions only fared marginally better than sales reps that asked 7-10 questions.

HireDNA offers advanced training tools and customized content-based training methods to enhance your sales performance. Learn More.

Take Rejection As A Learning Opportunity

Regardless of how much value your product can add to your prospect’s business, the fact remains that cold calls often result in rejection. And over time, rejections can become demoralizing. The hallmark of a successful sales representative, however, is their ability to take these things as part of the business and continue to tweak their sales strategy to counter such rejections.

If you are giving up too easily, then cold calling will never bear fruit. You need to be motivated to pick up the phone with a defined purpose every time. Whenever a prospect hangs up on you, ask yourself, would it be any different if you hadn’t tried calling them?

Focus on the key takeaway: why did they hang up? Did your opening statement fail to catch their attention? Did you not address their pain points adequately? By learning from such challenges, you can quickly turn such prospects into paying consumers.

Explore our blog on How to Motivate Your Sales Team When Sales are Down for strategies to inspire your team even in the face of defeat.

Hire Top Talent

Beyond training your existing reps, bringing in highly skilled sales reps can be a quick and easy way to improve your team’s overall B2B cold call success rate. When you hire top talent, they will often have a track record of success. If cold calling is a priority for your business, be sure to make that known in the hiring process, and consider including interview questions or posing scenarios centered around cold calling when vetting candidates.

HireDNA predictive sales candidate assessments allow you to predict success before hiring with proven data and science, not impressions and instincts. Learn more.

Train Your Sales Reps For Unprecedented Success

Cold calling is far from dead. But many organizations need to work on their strategies to enhance their effectiveness. That’s where HireDNA comes in.

We offer sales performance evaluations to uncover skills gaps in your team, and we deliver advanced training through a customizable cloud-based learning platform to improve performance. Not only do we customize our learning offerings according to the skill gaps found in each individual salesperson, but our interactive approach ensures your team absorbs every bit of it with quizzes, role play scenarios, guides, and action plans.

Get in touch to learn more about our sales recruiting, evaluation, and training offerings. Create your winning sales team today!

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Strategies To Improve Your Sales Onboarding Process

Posted on by hiredna

Modern sales organizations are always in the process of hiring, whether you need to replace team members or increase sales capacity. That’s why an effective sales onboarding process is crucial. The success of your team comes down to how quickly your new hires can pick up the necessary skills and become a productive part of your sales team.

With industry reports stating that the average new hire can take as long as nine months to ramp up, sales managers are always searching for strategies to improve their onboarding process and reduce training costs. Consider these tips!

HireDNA can help you identify training needs and ramp up your new hires more effectively. Talk to an expert.

4 Strategies To Improve Your Onboarding Process

As employee turnover rises, companies face the pressure to speed up their sales hiring and training process to maintain their revenue. According to a CSO Insight survey, 45% of sales leaders place reduction of the sales onboarding time as their topmost priority.

Here are four proven strategies to improve your sales onboarding process:

Invest In A Comprehensive Training Process

Onboarding isn’t something that can be completed within a week. Depending on your niche and business complexity, it may take several months before a new sales rep is ready to take on new clients alone.

By creating a comprehensive training program with daily, weekly and monthly checklists, organizations can remove the guesswork from the onboarding process, giving every sales manager a precise idea of how to ramp up a new hire.

As you improvise with each hire, you will gradually formulate an exhaustive training process that allows new salespeople to integrate with your organization seamlessly. This includes everything from incorporating them within your workplace culture to educating them about your products and finally helping them to understand your target audience.

This training process can be used for both new hires and existing salespeople. HireDNA can help you identify and resolve weaknesses and skill gaps limiting your sales results, then deliver comprehensive training to close those gaps. Learn more.

Modernize Your Communication Channels

Traditional onboarding tactics made frequent use of charts, books and other items that have been duly replaced by our smartphones and laptops. As managers continue to interact with an increasing number of millennials sales reps, the onboarding training channels should evolve to maintain a process that is effective and efficient.

Make use of explainer videos, online training modules and interactive case scenarios that allow sales reps to apply what they have learned in real-life settings. Additionally, organizations can provide relevant product guides and descriptions to new sales reps during their training period. This increases their interest, resulting in higher retention and an effective training process.

At HireDNA, we use Rapid Learning Institutes’ (RLI) Micro-Learning Platform , which features a library of training videos, modules, role play scenarios, quizzes and more—all of which can be customized to meet your unique training needs. Learn how we can help you reduce onboarding time by 50%! Learn more.

Enforce ‘Shadowing’ As A Focal Training Process

While newer communication channels are a must-have in any sales organization, they don’t negate the importance of some evergreen training methods, such as shadowing.

Consider encouraging new hires to shadow veteran salespeople as they go about their usual routine—prioritizing prospects, conducting customer outreach, giving demos, etc. This allows the new hire to pick up vital traits, and is a more hands-on way to introduce them to the company culture and related procedures.

The ideal mentor should be an experienced salesperson who has the capacity to teach the skills required to make it to the top level while also possessing the temperament to answer any questions the new hire may have. Organizations need to identify the right mentors as well as develop the right training regimen to optimize this technique even further.

Don’t Rush Your Training Process

Impending team quotas and organizational pressure can get to the best of sales managers, resulting in new hires being rushed to their workstations before going through the entire training process.

While you may be recruiting experienced sales professionals with a history of achieving their quotas, you must understand their prior experience is of a different workplace culture, dealing in different products or maybe a different industry altogether.

To become a valuable member of your organization, every new sales hire needs to receive adequate, personalized training that can allow them to integrate with your organization’s sales process. While rushing sales reps through the hiring process may look like a beneficial step in the short run, the long-term implications can be unsatisfied team members who might not want to continue. This is why it is important to allow sales reps to complete their training in due time.

Train Your Sales Reps More Effectively With HireDNA

As sales managers continue to ramp up new hires, they face challenges that hinder sales reps from learning effectively before being moved on to the next phase. At HireDNA, we utilize modern strategies and innovative tools to cut down on your training time by half.

Leverage a modern cloud-based micro-learning platform that provides custom mapped training content tailored to the skill gaps for each individual sales representative. With interactive learning, quizzes and real-world simulations and more, we make sure your new hires are ready to perform in no time.

Why Choose Us?

  • Employees ramped up by HireDNA provide 33% more sales opportunities
  • Our proven, data-backed methods increase top-line revenue by 25%
  • Our innovative techniques cut down the training period by up to 50%

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Top Reasons to Hire Millennials in Sales

Posted on by hiredna

You’re likely always on the lookout for exceptional salespeople to join your team. Inevitably, you will find yourself reading a lot of resumes from new graduates. There is a stereotype, however, that millennials are apathetic, entitled, and lacking drive. Not only is this stereotype ill-founded, but if believed, it can deprive you of the most ideal candidates that your organization needs. In this post, let’s take a look at some of the top reasons to hire millennials for sales.

At HireDNA, our sales recruiting experts can help you find, hire, and train the perfect sales candidates for your team. Contact Us.

Millennials Are The Most Dominant Demographic

According to PEW Research, millennials make up 35% of the workforce, which is more than Boomers (25%) and Gen Xers (33%).

In other words, when you begin headhunting for a valuable addition to your organization, there is a 35% chance that you will run into a millennial. Considering they meet your requirements, are you willing to let them go just because they were born in a certain era? With an Ernst & Young study predicting that millennials will constitute about 75% of the workforce by 2025, your team would be better prepared for that future if you start integrating millennials as core members of your team as soon as possible.

Technically Savvy

Millennials have grown up with computers and smartphones. They are quick to learn and adapt to new sales technologies, which can be very valuable in the workforce. Many millennials also have very high social selling skills, which could be a result of having to learn varying online communication methods.

Highly Purpose-Driven

Millennials successfully navigated through the post 9/11 economic slump, the 2008 stock market crash, and other major incidents due to their persistence and dedication. They are driven by their purpose, which in a salesperson’s case, would be providing clients with the best possible solution and closing a high number of deals every month.

As such, many millennials are focused on making an impact. This drive has seen them put off marriage and children longer than any of the previous generations.

Thanks to our data-backed recruiting process, candidates recommended by HireDNA have an 80% placement success rate. Learn more.

No Need for Micromanagement

Millennials don’t like being chased around by managers and being micromanaged every step of the way. As a sales manager, you probably don’t like to run around employees and bind them to hard and fast rules, either. And so, hiring employees from this generation might be the best option for you.

Remember, the millennial generation is keen on learning and tailoring their ways in the face of new challenges. Ready to adapt in the face of changing consumer patterns, millennials can prove to be a real asset.

They Appreciate Feedback

Ever had a sales representative who took feedback way too personally? As a sales manager, your job is to correct where they are wrong and provide constant advice on how to manage the challenges they face when dealing with customers.

Even though some salespeople do not take constructive criticism in the right way, it is a crucial part of becoming a high performing employee. When dealing with millennials, you are less likely to see such behavior.

According to a Deloitte study of the five most important factors when evaluating jobs, millennials view the potential of professional development and training programs as one of the top factors they value. Because of this drive, millennials may be more open to criticism if they believe that correcting their behavior can help them to progress within the organization.

How to Recruit Millennials

To attract millennials to your organization, you need to focus on what matters most to them:

  • Impact. How can you present the work that your organization is doing as meaningful and impactful?
  • Work-life balance and flexibility. Is there a possibility to work from home? Are salespeople tied to their desks all day?
  • Collaborative work environments. How does your team work together? How will new hires be able to contribute?
  • Continuous learning opportunities. What opportunities are available through your organization for continued improvement?
  • Clear career paths. Millennials want to be rewarded for their hard work. They want to see a clear progression, or they may lose motivation.

With a science-backed predictive hiring assessment, you can find the right candidate with far greater accuracy than relying on impressions or instinct. At HireDNA, we can help you to create a custom assessment based on your hiring criteria and unique sales environment. Go beyond personality traits to assess candidates’ true sales DNA and potential in the role.

Learn more about our Predictive Hiring Assessments.   

Create A Successful Sales Team

At HireDNA, we can help you recruit the perfect candidates for your sales team. Let us help you grow your organization with the right candidates for the right roles, backed by proven data and science.

Why Choose Us?

  • 20 years’ worth of hiring experience
  • 8m candidates assessed
  • 50% faster new hire ramp-up
  • 70% candidate retention

Are you ready to hire top quality salespeople for your organization?

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