Traditionally, the salesperson handles the sales process all the way from prospecting to closing
and potentially even implementing. This makes logical sense. It is called the “sales cycle,” after all, and they are the “salesperson,” why shouldn’t they handle the whole thing?
Well, as you may have guessed, times they are a’ changin’. There is a better way. Salespeople can’t assume they are the most knowledgeable person in the room anymore. This means a prospect can’t be swindled and will know if you are trying. Aaron Ross is a big proponent, in his book Predictable Revenue of creating an effective team around their sales person. He calls it customer success. According to Ross it is a waste of time to have your sales people prospecting. They hate it and they are probably really bad at it. It is far better to have a prospecting team, who only search for qualified prospects using email and inbound leads. This frees up the salesperson and maximizes your time prospecting.
This way your salespeople can focus on what should be their most important skill, finding customer need. With a team around them, the speed with which clients move through the sales cycle increases and the percent of prospects who turn into customers increases. It may seem like taking a step back to create a more elaborate system than one person doing it all, but it will pay off in month after month of high predictable revenue.
BoweryJE22
I wonder how the success rate differs from using Aaron Ross’s techniques versus the traditional cold-calling of prospecting. It would be interesting to see if the interest grew with Ross’s methods because the prospect felt less invaded in the impersonal realm of technology.