Building B2B outsourced sales teams for our telecommunications & wireless clients is always a welcome challenge for our team. In these engagements, we build sales teams that target small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB’s). SMB’s have grown comfortable with mobile technology, are increasingly more educated about their specific needs and demand custom solutions that answer those needs.
The good news is that our direct selling programs for telecommunications products & services benefit from Sales Partnerships’ experience. Selling into hundreds of different territories has armed us with the ability and techniques to tailor B2B sales solutions that work for your SMB sales goals.
General Characteristics of the B2B Selling Terrain in Telecommunications & Wireless Services
- Short-sales cycle – Door to door B2B reps need to close in 1 to 4 visits.
- The name of the game is activations – 35 to 45 activations per month is a general goal subject to the demographics and size of the territory.
- Fixed plus variable commission models seem to work best with business to business telecommunications reps.
- Inside sales call support and appointment setting can dramatically increase ROI of the outside team especially in territories with a large percentage of 50 line+ accounts.
- Brand sensitive. Sales Partnerships offers tight controls in the very brand-centric world of telecommunication.
- Field sales reps can meet challenges transmitting closed deals. Sales technology and consulting eases this challenge and makes sure on-boarding preserves the sale.
- A good sales staffing ratio for telecommunications B2B teams is one sales manager directing 5 to 7 reps.
- Mobile phone/tablet based CRM improves sales activity in terms of gross sales calls and area targeting.
Benefits of Outsourced Sales for Telecommunications & Wireless Providers
Three primary benefits an outsourced sales team provides for a B2B wireless initiative are:
- Better lead coverage
- Improved service in the field
- Targeted sales training for B2B selling
Better lead coverage means following up on SMB leads more quickly thus increasing the chance of a sale before a competitor gets in the door. Immense lead generation efforts are a norm for all the major telecom players. Just look at a list of the top advertisers in 2013 as proof. Their equity and stock performance, for better or worse, are tied to new activations. B2B leads can get lost in the shuffle of the B2C focused call center. When dedicated B2B reps are working the leads and accounts, closing rate and order size typically increase.
Improved service in the field is a natural perception that is augmented when you have more B2B reps in the field. Even if customers are likely to call the national call center for follow-up service, we’ve observed that business owner satisfaction goes up after a face-to-face meeting with our reps. Most businesses need to invest in telecom and wireless products and services. One differentiator that Sales Partnerships brings to the table is we train reps to be aware of accounts in which phone and data are truly mission-critical.
An example would be a cable package. While probably not mission-critical for most businesses, for a local sports bar whose most lucrative days are Saturday and Sunday during football season, the cable package is mission-critical! A well-trained rep can discuss and recognize unique small business issues will close higher and deeper.
Targeted training for a B2B sale yields more creative solution-making and lower turnover. What we’ve found is that the skills to close a 50-line account are different than the skills used to close a 5-line account. We train team members on the well-defined buyer personas that exist in the SMB telecommunications space.
Inexperienced B2B reps with little to zero training, under-perform on quota, have lower order totals and see higher cancellation rates on their deals. Good field sales training should guide reps to target high volume businesses first, for example, remote service companies, sales, legal, and high-tech firms.
Training also means an on-going commitment to delivering intelligence to reps in the field. For example, we take the time to understand the unique opportunities in each metropolitan area that we build a presence. Quickly identifying zero probability businesses and high probability businesses are key in this hyper-competitive market.
For example, using data captured by reps working a high-density urban area (New York City), we saw that the areas immediately surrounding subway stations were being over-worked by competing sales reps. By coaching our team to begin their calls just a little further away (about 3 blocks) yielded much higher-probability prospects and increased territory sales.
In telecommunications activations are the name of the game. Sales Partnerships is expert in building a flexible, B2B program that:
- Accounts for rapidly changing product offerings and promotional offers
- Promotes close communication between the direct selling partner and Sales Partnerships
- Guides reps to higher probability prospects
- Increases B2B market-share, an important task that telecommunications and broadband providers frequently outsource for fear of de-focusing their internal sales teams on new initiatives
If this is something you’re working on, we’d love to talk to you more about your needs.
