Inside Sales and Appointment SettingBuild or BuyOne of the questions I hear the most is how can we get more leads so we can build our business. Well, there are a few ways you can do it, and today I want to share with you my experiences with telemarketing or appointment setting. At our MSP we have experience in both building an in-house inside sales program and more recently outsourcing it to an industry-specific appointment setting service.

In the next two episodes of the IT Provider Network Podcast, I'm going to be talking about the ugly truth behind appointment setting, inside sales or telemarketing or what every term you use for dialing for dollars.

Today lets talk about building an inside sales operation.

Building your TeamAs I am recording this February is coming to a close. We have had a wild two months so far this year at our MSP. We have two new people on our sales team, and my a-number-one closer has been promoted to our chief revenue officer.

It's always great to promote from within, but it presents some level of risk as well. What if your best salesperson is not a great leader? Have you just simultaneously lost your best salesperson and made a bad hire? It happens all the time. Like any hire, you want to do your best to make sure the candidate you're considering is the best candidate for the job.

Lucky for us, this internal promotion is working out great. He is building a team and doing his best to do what he always does take care of our customers and help us build the company.My First SalespersonIf I flash back to 2008, I hired my first salesperson for the MSP side of our business. It was an older guy that was seasoned in sales or though I thought. It's hard to remember the details now, but I know my thought process was "let's bring on a sales guy" and build an MSP. One guy can handle everything, cold calling, networking, proposal generating, and closing.

In reality, he wasn't a great salesperson, and I was nuts to think that any one person could be truly proficient in all those sales activities. Luckily both of us knew we needed some help and this "older guy" and I say this in quotes, recruited one of his former co-workers. This former co-worker was now out CRO and in late 2008 my inside/outside sales team was born.

That's what I called it inside and outside sales. Inside sales were responsible for two main things cold calling and database maintenance. Outside sales were responsible for everything else. Everything after the 1st appointment was scheduled, that was the responsibility of outside sales.Building an Inside-Outside Sales ProcessThere were a bunch of things we had to do to get this inside-outside sales process to work, and I guess it started with finding and buying a cold list. Back in 2008, we decided on using Hoovers for our list purchase because they had an offering that was pretty unique at the time. Instead of just buying a list with some defined criteria, we could use a data selection form and just export records from Hoovers into our PSA. In our case, this was ConnectWise Manage. As our needs changed we could change our export criteria.

Hoovers is now part of D&B, and they seem to offer the same type of service. I haven't purchased anything from D&B Hoovers since 2016, but back then it was about $5000 a year for 10,000 downloads.

About two bucks a record if you manage to extract all 10,000 leads. For the 5k you were able to have up to 3 users and use more functionality. For me though all I wanted was the data extract.

We also have bought "lists" from places like the local chamber of commerce, the local TIP club, and other vendors but the bulk of our original list which we still mine today is from Hoovers.

Whatever service or list you buy know that it is a cold list, meaning that these companies and contacts have probably never heard of you and the data in the list is going to need some work to be useful.