Welcome Back to SHP Inhouse, A Listen Letter!
This audio drop is designed for internal team members, clients, past clients, prospective users, and the sales community as a whole to learn about what’s going on with Superhuman Prospecting, internal updates, improvements, and also things, we’re learning to help advance the sales profession and provide education on how to have successful sales conversations in the 21st century. Thanks for listening!
All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of SHP Inhouse, a Listen Letter. I’m Ryan Pereus, the CEO & Founder of Superhuman Prospecting. So, today we have a guest who is also a part of our internal team here at SHP, Trai Greer. Welcome to the show, Trai.
Trai: Thanks for having me, Ryan.
Ryan: Absolutely. Trai is our Inside Sales Manager here at SHP but he didn’t start out as that position. You started out as a client SDR back in the day, is that right?
Trai: That is correct!
Ryan: And when was that? How far along? I think that was pre-pandemic. I mean, that adds, like, five years, I feel like.
Trai: How long ago? Yeah, it was the fall of 2019, about two and a half years ago. I was in college, and I was looking for some side income while I was in school.
Ryan: Yeah, and I remember you had some sales experience before this, that’s why we brought you on, and it just turned out that your work ethic and some of the success you’re having – we wanted to bring you into a new role that we had opening up. That was for our Inside Sales department.
So we label Inside Sales, since we are an outbound agency, as a service, as those additional functions that you can add on to your call campaign that either increase efficiency, save you time or effectiveness, increase touch points and conversion.
And so we needed kind of this special teams manager because not all campaigns are created equal, and we have a lot of different options that we can customize depending on what the client needs. And so we needed someone who was detail-oriented, good with working with clients, and also had some background in maybe writing and sales in order to deploy a lot of these skills and tasks appropriately. And it just so happened that you had some experience in writing, I believe.
Trai: Yeah, when I was in school, I studied English, as well as communications, and communications entailed a lot of social media and digital communications in addition to verbal. So, yeah, this was on my alley.
Ryan: Yeah, that’s perfect. So naturally, the email prospecting side of things fell into Trai’s lap since he was a proficient writer, and using his sales skills, and applying that to the writing portion. It just made the perfect combination for someone to manage those email prospecting campaigns for our clients. So that’s awesome. You really started the role kind of right when the pandemic started, so now that you’ve been here for two years, I would love for you maybe share a little bit about what our Inside Sales team does and what you manage within the department.
Trai: Absolutely. So, as Ryan said before, we’re in charge of making sure those additional touch points happen. Our primary function is cold calling with our SDR team. But over here in Inside Sales, I am responsible for making sure follow-ups happen.
If a meeting is scheduled for an SDR, I make sure the confirmation calls are made to confirm that those prospects are indeed going to show up to the meeting. In addition to that, if a prospect wasn’t able to make the meeting, I’m responsible for making sure those reset calls are made. That basically means our Inside Sales callers call back to reschedule that meeting.
There’s also the warm follow-up. So, if someone says that I’m running late for a meeting with a specific date and time, but they’re open to seeing some information and having us call back – I’m also responsible for making sure those callbacks happen.
In addition to that (as I said, we wear a lot of hats here) there is also the CRM side. If clients want to make sure their leads are organized and documented in a platform that they use, we make sure that those happen, make sure that all of the documentation and the organization of those leads are kept on file, kept on record, so they remember who was interested.
And lastly, we have our email prospecting side, as Ryan mentioned before. That’s primarily me writing sequences, writing copy, as just another way to reach prospects outside of cold calling, in case that’s not the best way to reach them.
Ryan: Yeah. I’m just thinking like it just requires so much dynamic going into that role. I imagine on top of the skill set there is also task switching, which I know is a challenge too. Switching your brain from the writing hat to working with prospects or working with your team of confirmation specialists. So, just thinking of all those things just certainly requires a certain level of focus and then switching from that focus.
And those services are so valuable because, for our clients, the cold call is essential. But what happens after that? Are there additional touches to kind of take the chill out of the cold call and warm them up a little bit? Are there confirmation calls to confirm the appointment?
And that’s something I wanted to ask you as well. What is the impact of the confirmation calls, in your opinion?
Have you seen that really increase the show rate, or at least the confirmation rate when you call or people already say, yeah, I already planned on going, what is it that you see in the value of those appointment confirmations and even resets?
Trai: Absolutely. The huge because time passes, people forget. If an SDR schedules a meeting two weeks from now, who’s to say that they remember that they scheduled that meeting two weeks ago when the time comes? When our inside sales calls follow up, it most likely brings it back to the top of our minds. Whereas otherwise, we don’t call, we don’t follow up, they forget, they don’t show up.
Ryan: Absolutely. Yeah. Especially in outbound too.
When we’re reaching out to somebody who wasn’t necessarily looking for the service and we instilled some kind of belief about the product or service that we’re selling for – and we have to continually spoon-feed them in order for them to see the value more and more so that they would either want it or realize that they need it. Right. I imagine that consistent outreach allows those prospects to not just believe more, but even just remember because it can just fall off the top of their mind so easily.
Trai: Yes. You also mentioned Ryan, about the reset calls in addition to the confirmation. It’s basically the same thing. We follow up and these people are like oh, I forgot about that meeting, or I forgot that I had it. So, the resets are another touch point to bring it back to the top of mind because like you said, they’re not looking for our service. We reached out to them. So, it’s not their responsibility to be responsible for that. That’s on us to make sure that that’s top of mind for our prospects.
Ryan: I love that you said it’s our responsibility because that’s a mindset and outbound.
Inbound people, it’s so much easier to get away with not doing those things because those people reached out to us. They showed interest, they had done all the work for us. And we just had to show up. This is the opposite because they didn’t necessarily express interest. So, we need to continually follow up with them. The huge benefit of that though is many times these prospects weren’t looking for somebody else.
And so we have much more control. We don’t have to stave off competitors or other forces outside. Their eyes are on us and we can control that relationship.
Trai: Exactly
Ryan: Very cool. Well, I’m sure we could go into each and every other one of those tasks, but just for the sake of time, we’ll kind of wind it down here.
Anyone who’s listening can always reach out to learn more about our Inside Sales, such as the CRM integration, updating the leads in real-time to the different email prospecting sequences, and the new memes that we’re adding as well. We could do a whole segment on that so I’m sure we’ll have your back Trai?
Trai: Yes, I’m looking forward to it.
Ryan: Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Trai. Have a good rest of the day.
And thanks, everyone, for joining!
