Inside Sales Managers: Get Out of the Weeds for 10-15% of Your Week

If you are managing an inside sales team or a business development team you’ve got a lot on your plate — and a lot of pressure to go along with it.
Each month it’s easy to get sucked up in the madness and to forget to think about big-picture strategy.

The Key to Effective Inside Sales Management

As a manager, it is imperative that you pull yourself out of the weeds for at least 10-15% of your week to strategize.

Ask yourself: What new initiative can I implement to help my team improve, and hit their number?
This chunk of your week should not be spent daydreaming. It should be spent researching, reading what industry experts have to say, talking to peers about potential strategies, and adding these ideas to your backlog of potential strategies.
From there, select the ONE initiative that seems to be the highest priority, and map out an execution plan. I say one, because it is really important that you don’t bite off more than you can chew. Select one initiative and give it your all.
Give yourself a month to implement this new strategy, test, and document the results. If after a month your team is not better off (i.e. increasing conversions rates, and moving certain levers to increase results) stop. If you really gave this new strategy your “all” and you got no increased results, then adjust the elements of this initiative, or select a new initiative to begin testing.
This is the name of the game with marketing — yes, while a BDR team may report to sales, at its core I would still consider it more of a marketing function because it is all about top of the funnel — always be experimenting. Determine what models work best for your business. Any successful organization iterated upon their marketing strategy many, many times before they got it “just right.”
So what types of initiatives am I referring to? Here are some examples:

• Developing a targeted account mapping strategy
• Piloting a new a technology to improve efficiency
• A/B testing initiative (script and emails)
• Establishing a peer-mentor program

What initiatives have you tried as an inside sales rep or business development manager to improve your team’s efficiency?