The Sales Development Blog

Your place for the latest scoop on sales trends, techniques, and career advice.

memoryBlue Insights – 11/16/2020

memoryBlue logoBelow is the memoryBlue client bulletin, delivering sales development insights every Monday to our entire slate of high-tech partners. The updates span all five memoryBlue offices, encompassing 100+ sales development campaigns and 150+ SDRs working relentlessly to generate net new revenue for these businesses.

This week memoryBlue will cross the 250 employee threshold for the first time in our 18 year company history. We are seeing all-time highs as a business in the number of SDRs we employ (over 175), the amount of inbound job applications we receive on a monthly basis, and the strong interest in our Academy, where cohorts are kicking off every other week close to capacity.

As our campus talent team meets with the faculty leaders of professional sales programs across the country (at the university level), it has become clear that the interest and passion for careers in professional sales has never been higher among undergrads. It’s great to provide high-energy individuals with a meaningful path to a long-term, successful career in high-tech sales while our clients reap the rewards of this growing pipeline of talent.

Notable Numbers

  • Leads booked via phone last week averaged an 8.30 lead quality score. Lead quality remained high across the board for the week with an average score of 7.91, but phone-based leads (which accounted for 56% of all leads) stood high above the other channels. Maintaining a great phone prospecting game remains a central focus across our business.
  • memoryBlue Academy NPS (Net Promoter Score) continues to surge, topping 60 for each of the last four cohorts. Tracking and measuring how likely Academy participants would be to recommend our program to someone else is a critical endeavor for our training team. With an NPS of 40 or better widely considered a “best in class” mark, we’re thrilled to see our signature sales training course achieve such positive feedback.
  • Prospect conversion rate clocked in at a sensational 9.9% last week, making it the single best week of the year so far. Our SDR teams keep pushing this number higher and higher, as they turn more and more prospect conversations into tangible next steps meetings. This number has been strong for the last two months, but last week stands as a new high water mark.

Highlight of the Week

Libby Galatis, Campus Recruiting Manager, spent the past several weeks keeping memoryBlue represented through involvement at several regional and international collegiate sales competitions. In particular, we played a role in the California State Sales Competition, the Northeastern Intercollegiate Sales Competition, the Texas A&M Sales Competition and the International Collegiate Sales Competition (ICSC).

The ICSC, hosted annually by Florida State University, is also known as “The Collegiate World Cup of Sales” and it draws a massive crowd of enterprising undergrads every single year. The competition featured 80 different university sales teams and six memoryBlue leaders served as judges for multiple events within the week-long program. Staying intimately involved in major collegiate sales programs helps us create and maintain ongoing access to the best and brightest future stars in the professional sales universe.

Spotlight on Training

Trevor Shan, a Delivery Manager based out of our Silicon Valley office, led a staff training last week centered around the psychology of selling. In particular, he discussed the importance of actually engaging a prospect in the conversation as opposed to being focused on the urgent push for a specific outcome from the discussion (i.e. landing a booked next steps sales meeting).

Staying centered on engagement and opening up ideas of possibility with a prospect is incredibly effective. And without question, the best way to create engagement is to ask strategic, open-ended questions. Trevor’s session highlighted the importance of those questions and he created breakout space during the session for the team to work on building better inquiries. Ongoing training sessions like this are one more reason why prospect conversion rate and lead quality are both on the rise.

Lead Scores

These client-based lead scores stood out last week:

11/13/2020 – 4:01PM – 10/10 – Caitlin
“Richie is exactly who we are looking for – a cloud guy, with a cloud mission. We are already talking about a pilot install with the first call.”

 

11/13/2020 – 12:47PM – 10/10 – Jon
“Extremely well targeted lead. Your organization provided direct access to the best point of contact within a global organization. Excellent lead.”

 

 

11/12/2020 – 11:47PM – 10/10 – Nick
“Solid lead. Nick has nurtured Jon quite well around the process. Next step is Jon bringing in the CISO and CIO. Great work, Nick.”

 

Tech Sales is for Hustlers Continues to Shine

The memoryBlue weekly podcast, “Tech Sales is for Hustlers,” is starting to gain traction as more listeners tune in on a regular basis than ever before. In October, we counted close to 900 episode downloads – the largest single month of listeners since we debuted the show back in March of this year.

Every episode features a member of our alumni group sitting down for an unfiltered discussion with company Co-Founders Chris Corcoran and Marc Gonyea. These revealing conversations are littered with outstanding sales career advice, practical sales strategies, and important lessons learned over the course of the typical one hour show duration.

Our alumni have been eager to take part in the production and our staff benefits from the ability to hear directly from those who have come before them in the professional sales world. Keeping those two audiences connected through this show is motivating and inspiring to everyone here at memoryBlue.

Learn more about Tech Sales is for Hustlers and catch an episode at memoryblue.com/podcast.

Kevin Harris is the Director of Marketing at memoryBlue. A seasoned professional with over 23 years of experience in public relations, marketing and content management, Kevin oversees all major internal and external communications programs for the firm. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Communications from James Madison University.

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