 Graduation season is upon us, and the Bandalier team has a lot to celebrate this year! When we’re looking for new team members, we prioritize folks with grit, creativity and great communication skills. As a result, we’ve always had a healthy handful of college students on our team. Now that our team is full remote, we’ve been able to work with students from a variety of great schools - from Binghamton University, near our home office, all the way to Eastern Kentucky University! We wanted to take some time to catch up with our recent graduates and celebrate their accomplishments. Tristan Hogan Tristan originally began college as an economics major at SUNY Cortland, but soon switched over to communications after realizing he was much more of a people person. He’s always been business-minded, and after sharpening his skills at Bandalier, he’s taken a liking to sales as well. As a full-time student working with us, Tristan is used to having a lot on his plate, but has adapted quickly! When asked about his experience, he told us: I’m used to the overload of work, so I saw this as a great opportunity to dive into the professional world while being a student. I’ve learned to represent myself and communicate with the team effectively, and I’ll probably be using these skills for the rest of my life! Osmar Harris Graduating with his Bachelor’s in Marketing and Information Systems, Osmar will begin pursuing his MBA in January. He’s been wowed by the flexibility he’s been afforded by his management team that’s allowed him to work around his schoolwork and class hours. Not only has he excelled in college, but also in our version of university - he told us: The Bandalier U Academy has helped me advance my sales skills and my overall concept of sales in a much more detailed way! Osmar is looking forward to taking the skills he’s learned and moving forward in his sales career! Laura Horton Laura is graduating from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, where she studied marketing with a focus in professional sales. She’s often found herself applying the lessons she learned in school to her work at Bandalier, and sharing her experiences in the workplace with her professors and classmates! We asked Laura what some of the most valuable lessons she’s learned are. Her words of wisdom were: Emotional Intelligence and effective listening are the skills that I value the most. No matter where my career is going to take me, I know I can apply them every day. Renee Choong Renee just graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh with a Bachelors of Science in MIS, Management, Marketing and Business Administration. She’ll be continuing at Binghamton University for her Masters in Data Analytics, and plans to be a market research analyst in the future. Flexibility and the ability to work remote is something Renee says has helped her flourish. She told us: I’ve really been able to develop communication skills and professionalism. My team has been accommodating and helpful, and it’s nice that I’ve been able to feel like I’m in an office environment without actually having to be in the office! Lilia Nunez Guerrero As a Psychology Major at Berea College, Lilia has been able to apply her knowledge of psychology to the world of sales to produce results for her team. Working full-time while also a full-time student, she recognizes the importance of time management and prioritizing tasks. Lilia told us that the most important skill she’s learned while balancing school and working with Bandalier is resilience: Resilience is key. Sometimes certain tasks can be difficult, and I have to go about them differently than other people would, but I’m able to learn how to make everything work. All of these young professionals have had a great impact on Bandalier, and we’re sure that they’ll achieve amazing things in their future careers. Congratulations, and best of luck to our 2021 graduates! AuthorBrenden Gorman - Inside Sales Associate at Bandalier
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 Welcome back to the second installment of our newest series on our Junior Program Managers! To round out this section, we have three great leaders to introduce. Up first is Luke Graci! Luke joined our team near the start of the year, and he always has something interesting to share with the team. He shares music often, and always has great suggestions based on what other folks recommend. We asked his team lead, Dylan Smith, what it’s like to work with Luke, and here’s what he said: “Luke has taken the initiative to solve issues that come before him, while diligently working to improve himself and the team. He has brought great insight and additions to call reviews, roleplays, and trainings. He also led a workshop Wednesday session on Active Listening that was very well received by the team.” Next up is Jessica Kehoe! Jess joined our team last fall as a sales rep, but now works with our largest customer service client. She helps answer complex questions from the rest of the team - and field calls from frustrated clients. No matter what question you have, Jess is there to answer it with a smile. In her time at Bandalier, she’s exemplified kaizen - she’s always looking for ways to improve her performance and help the team improve, too. We asked Laura, another of our Junior PMs, what it’s been like to work alongside Jess: “I worked with Jess shortly after she joined Bandalier, and it’s been amazing to see her grow into her own leadership style. She was working on a few tough programs, but she always kept a positive attitude and showed up to meetings with a smile.” Last but not least is Jeffrey Sexton! He works alongside Jess answering questions and helping with complex calls. He has a wealth of diverse experiences, and has used all of them to drive his team towards success. Whenever the team has questions, Jeffrey is there to answer - whether it’s about navigating a specific platform, a detailed question about the client’s policies, or a more general question. Here’s how Jess describes working with Jeffrey: “Jeffrey is a very hard worker and great leader on his program. He is very reliable and attentive to the team. He also goes above and beyond for every single member. He makes every work day very enjoyable by sharing jokes and riddles with the team.” We’re looking forward to working with these Junior Program Managers as they grow fully into their roles! If you’re interested in working with outsourced inside sales team leads like these folks, submit your application at bandalier.co/careers. AuthorAbagael Rudock - Program Manager at Bandalier  Working in sales is tough, but great salespeople make it look easy. It’s not enough to be a good salesperson. If you are to gain sales success, you need to make great choices for your team. A great team is better than a single super-star. But, one poor decision can hinder your sales team from having an exceptional month or quarter. Let’s look at how you can skyrocket your sales by making some incredible choices for your team. 4 Top Strategies to Improve Your Sales Team Here are some game-changing decisions you can make to boost sales. #1 Using TaaS to save cost and time and leverage top talent on demand Talent-as-a-service (TaaS) is used in most major industries, and sales is not an exception. There are various advantages of using TaaS for sales organizations. With TaaS, you can get on-demand, flexible, and extraordinary sales talent with the required skill set to:
TaaS also gives you the advantage of adding new talent to your sales team and tapping into their rare experience working with different sales organizations and client-facing programs. You benefit from their cross-industry sales analytics, tactics, and expertise. Furthermore, TaaS enables you to quickly scale your sales team up or down as per your requirement, avoid the expensive cost of bad hiring, increase cost-effectiveness, boost sales efficiency, and handle unsteady sales workload. Some sales TaaS providers like Bandalier go the extra mile to benefit their customers. With Bandalier, you can get trained, pre-vetted remote customer experience and inside sales talent interviewed, onboarded, and deployed within 24 hours. They also provide on-demand custom analytics and data dashboards to review or analyze performance across different channels, messaging, lists, and team members. Moreover, you get to conduct bi-weekly/weekly strategy sessions with their client delivery experts. #2 Aligning sales and marketing teams to reach sales and revenue goals Sales and marketing alignment is a higher level of collaboration between the two teams. With better communication and transparency, they achieve the end goal of bringing in more sales and revenue. It facilitates increased conversion rates, sales productivity, and marketing ROI. Also, it allows simplified sales and marketing workflows, improves work culture, shortens sales cycles, enhances buyer experiences, and drives growth. 98% of sellers and 97% of marketers think that poor sales and marketing alignment negatively impacts the business and the customer. Other statistics show that aligning the two teams can help with 208% growth in marketing revenue, 38% higher sales win rates, and a 32% increase in YoY revenue growth. When your sales and marketing teams are out of sync, it takes a toll on your sales and revenue growth. Poor communication, missed sales opportunities, low-grade lead quality, sales reps not using marketing collaterals or guidance, and inconsistent sales and marketing messages indicate sales and marketing misalignment. Here’s how you can get your sales and marketing departments properly aligned:
#3 Gear up your sales team with advanced prospecting technology Sales prospecting can be quite a challenge if you’re not equipped with the right tools. Imagine having a foolproof prospecting strategy in place but not the tools required to execute it. All your efforts would be wasted. 9 in 10 companies use two or more lead enrichment tools to learn more about prospects. If you’re looking for affordable but effective sales prospecting tools, the free Chrome extension, RevDriver can be a great option. Your sales team can use it to collect 95% accurate, human-verified B2B data including contact and company information when prospecting across company websites or LinkedIn. As a freemium user, you can also export the data to your CRM or MAP. RevDriver speeds up prospecting by enabling you to quickly identify and reach decision-makers and influencers. Your sales team can also use website visitor intelligence as a sales prospecting tool. Once you know what type of prospects are visiting your website and their professional details, you can tailor prospecting or other sales efforts accordingly. VisitorIntel, an analytics-driven feature of SalesIntel, is a website visitor tracker that you can use to know what companies are visiting your site. This will help you reach prospects interested in your brand or product and customize your prospecting campaigns for them. #4 Use B2B intent data to reach potential buyers before they reach you Adopting a data-driven approach helps you take better control of the sales process. With B2B data, you can make highly informed sales decisions, whether it’s related to lead generation, nurturing, pricing, churn reduction, people management, closing, or post-sales. Buyer intent, firmographic, and technographic data are among the most-used forms of B2B data in the sales world. Combining them can significantly level up your sales performance and drive faster time-to-revenue. Intent data reveals businesses and individuals showing high interest in a brand or product and people increasingly researching a keyword or key intent search term. It does so by giving deep insights into their online behavior or activities and buyer intent signals. You are informed if a prospect is in their buying cycle or intending to buy from you, even before they reach you. According to SalesIntel, intent data can deliver up to 4X pipeline expansion and 300% marketing ROI. Sales teams can use buying intent signals to:
Wrapping Up Besides making these informed choices to gain sales success, you can start investing in regular training for your sales team. The ROI for sales training is 353%. Further, effective sales coaching can help a company improve win rates by as much as 29%. Your sales training should include important elements like an introduction to sales, modern sales tactics, client-specific training, data integrity training, systems training, role plays, and certifications. Bandalier University’s signature training boot camp, Inside Sales 101 is a perfect example to look at. Made available to the public for the first time, this is the same course Bandalier has been using to train their inside sales team. AuthorAriana Shannon - Marketing Director at SalesIntel  One thing that’s great about working for a startup like Bandalier is the chance to be able to grow alongside the company. Fortunately for us, we’ve been able to see some recent expansion, which brings opportunities for our outsourced inside sales reps to step into more leadership roles. For this week’s New Leaders Feature, we’re going to highlight four of them! Two of our youngest part-timers, Jarrod Pine and Matt Doscas, have recently stepped into Team Lead roles. Jarrod has worked with several SaaS clients in different industries since his start in Summer 2020, facing a lot of new challenges along the way. When asked about the most important thing he’s learned from these experiences, he said: “You have to be persistent. Even if you strike out, you want to slam the phone down, you never know what can happen next. When you keep smiling through it and stay positive, good things will come!” Matt, on the other hand, has been grinding out results for his client since his start with us in Fall 2020. Although he’s been with the same client this whole time, he’s had the opportunity to work under a couple of our seasoned Program Managers. He told us: “Seeing the different personalities and styles of our different leaders has been really cool. Everyone kind of has the freedom to operate how they like, but the similarity between our different teams is that everyone is driven and willing to help each other.” Jasmine Jordan, another Summer 2020 addition, was also recently promoted to a Junior Program Manager role! When we asked Jasmine about her experience transitioning from a rep to a junior program manager, she responded: “I’m excited for the opportunity to keep growing. I’ve had a number of jobs, and they all felt stagnant to me! At Bandalier, I’ve been able to grow with the clients I’ve worked with and also connect and grow with everyone here.” Lastly, another rep we’ve seen grow into a Junior Program Manager role is Laura Gordon. Laura is a bit different than some of our other reps in that she came into the job with years of sales experience prior to joining us. I asked Laura how her time at Bandalier has been different than her earlier sales roles, and she told us: “It’s been so much more collaborative than what I’m used to. Teaching, coaching, and working together are some of my favorite things to do. It’s been fantastic!” With so many new leaders emerging at the company, it’s an exciting time at Bandalier! It’s been amazing to see how they’ve all continued to crush it with their clients while assuming more responsibilities, and we’re looking forward to seeing what they’ll be able to accomplish in their new roles. If you’re interested in working in a collaborative space with young professionals like them, head over to our website! AuthorBrenden Gorman - Inside Sales Associate at Bandalier  Each week, Bandalier runs a handful of SPIFFs to keep things entertaining. Origins of the acronym vary - but long story short, our SPIFFs are games that we run to help keep our team engaged. Here are a few of our favorites! Trivia is one of our most popular. We start by choosing topics in our company-wide huddle first thing in the morning - those have included trivia about our team members, alongside classic categories like sports, movies, and geography. Team members earn questions by reaching a certain number of activities or booking appointments for their clients; they pick the topic, but anyone can answer the question. It's a great way to see what your team's interests are - turns out we have a lot of folks who know their capital cities. We recently tried a new SPIFF designed by one of our new junior program managers, Jarrod Pine. It was a digital version of Scrabble, and players earned letters by completing activities. The goal was to spell the longest word. Our winner managed to spell "acquaintanceship"! While it might not work out for a normal Scrabble board, it was a great game to break up the week. Some days, we focus on fun for our SPIFFs! The best example is what we've taken to calling "The Gif Game". One of our program managers posts a prompt every hour or so, and team members respond in a thread with their most relatable gif. The team votes with reactions, and the person with the most reactions wins the thread. Another favorite was "Guess the Pet" - our managers shared pictures of team members' pets, and other folks on the team had to guess the owner. Our SPIFFs can get intense - most of our team members are competitive! If you're a driven sales person looking to join our team, head over to bandalier.co/careers to apply. AuthorAbagael Rudock - Program Manager at Bandalier  Next up in our New Leaders series is Abby Rudock! If the name rings a bell, it’s probably because you’ve seen her name at the end of many of our recent blog posts. Abby has been a mainstay at Bandalier since 2019, working on several programs in different types of industries – but she’s always been more than just a gifted outsourced inside sales rep. Aside from consistently grinding out results for her client, Abby has been there to provide great insights to less experienced reps. As Bandalier’s go-to writer, she also runs regular workshops on business writing and effective note-taking as well! One of the primary traits Abby possesses that makes her an excellent leader is her genuine excitement to see others do well. She loves mentoring new reps and learning about their different perspectives. When asked what she was looking forward to most about transitioning into management, she said: “I’ve really enjoyed getting to work with all of the new team members. It’s really fun to work with people on different programs, and people working in different parts of the world. I’m excited to keep building new programs, too! All of our programs are so unique that we have to keep trying new things.” We recently had the chance to catch up with Laura Gordon, who has been working on a program with Abby for several months. She said of Abby: “I’m so impressed with her all the time. Being able to see her growth every single day has been amazing!” Aside from wow-ing team members on a daily basis, Abby is also an impressive trivia player and has an aptitude for solving riddles. All of our new leaders bring their own unique styles to the table, and we look forward to seeing how Abby grows as a leader at Bandalier! If you’re interested in working with a team of driven young professionals like her or would like to know more about us, head over to our website! AuthorBrenden Gorman - Inside Sales Associate at Bandalier If you were following our blog over the summer, you might remember our series of posts on our new leaders. We’ve been fortunate to continue growing over the last few months, and with three new project managers in training, we’re taking time to feature two of them this week! Connor Riley and Alex Boucard are probably familiar names at this point, especially for long-term blog readers. They joined Bandalier in the summer of 2019, and they’ve been cornerstones of our team ever since. Both reps have worked on a wide variety of programs, cold-calling every industry from hospitality to tech companies! With Connor’s relentless work ethic and Alex’s constant drive to improve, they consistently deliver excellent results for their clients. Alex always shares his tips, tricks, and techniques with the team - and follows up with folks to see how they work on different programs. Connor is great at asking questions to get to the root of the problem when folks need help. As these two have stepped into their new leadership roles, Alex and Connor have been focusing on fine-tuning their skills. They’ve been working closely with Zach Keck, their current Program Manager, to learn through experience. These three have been exchanging tips since the fall - as Zach said, “a lot of November was me teaching them what I knew about management, and them teaching me what they knew about their program.” Alex is looking forward to stepping into his new role - he says: “I remember how awesome my Bandalier ASMs were to me. What I love about our leadership structure is the opportunity to mentor someone who’s starting their sales journey - watching them grow and seeing their improvement each week!” In spite of their experiences at Bandalier, Connor and Alex have still been surprised by their experiences as they move towards management. When we asked, Connor he said: “I think what has surprised me the most so far is how you need to fine-tune your time management skill. There's a lot more that goes on behind the sales curtain that you don't see when you're a rep. Its opened my eyes to the level of collaboration and team effort that goes into building and launching a new account. I'm excited to get further into the role - and continue to learn and absorb new skills as I advance.” Each of our leaders takes a unique approach to managing their team, and we’re excited to see how Connor and Alex grow into their new roles! If you want to work with a team of driven young professions like them, head over to our website to submit an application or learn more about our service offerings. AuthorAbagael Rudock - Jr. Program Manager at Bandalier Bandalier Founder/CEO Jeremy Ruch appears on "No BS Sales School" Podcast with Walker McKay1/27/2021  Who doesn’t like a good podcast? Our CEO, Jeremy Ruch, recently sat down with Walker McKay to talk about Bandalier’s hiring process. You may have picked up hints about our analytical hiring process for outsourced inside salespeople from our past blog posts, but this podcast fully illuminates our methods for discovering top-tier talent and how we evaluate candidates.
Have a listen to the podcast in its entirety here, and let us know what you think in the comment section below!  We’re delighted to announce a few new members of our leadership team! After a little more than a year at Bandalier, Connor Riley, Alex Boucard, and Abby Rudock have all started the transition into their new roles as Junior Program Managers. Over the next few weeks, they’ll be working with their team leads to learn the ins and outs of sales management before they fully step into their new roles.
If you’ve been following us on social media, you’re probably familiar with these team members already! Connor was featured as part of our Side-Hustle Series this fall. He’s well-known within the office for his work ethic. Though he used to juggle half a dozen different roles at the same time, Connor has narrowed his focus, and is using his experience to help improve Bandalier’s outreach process. Whether you’re looking for tips on getting in touch with hard-to-reach DMs or need a little pick-me-up in the form of cute cat pictures, Connor is the guy to talk to! Alex Boucard has been featured on our blog a few times over the last year. He won this year’s kaizen award, and has only continued to improve in the months following. He approaches sales as a team effort, and is always in the middle of a conversation as to how he can keep improving his sales process - and he’s ready to lend a hand to anyone who is looking for guidance. Abby Rudock works a bit more behind the scenes - but you’ve probably seen her name at the end of our blog posts. As the team’s resident writer, she’s helped our team members improve their business writing skills and tweak scripts to improve their results on calls. Abby is one of the more introverted members of our team, and has been working closely with Lydia to learn more about coaching the team. With their wealth of diverse experiences, we’re excited to see how our newest leaders help shape the Bandalier outsourced inside sales team! If you’re interested in working with driven young leaders like these folks, head on over to our website to get in touch!  Welcome back to our Talent as a Service Spotlight! This week, we’re featuring two of our team members - Jake Viza and Jake Silverstein. They joined our team shortly before the new year, and have been working hard to deliver results for their client amidst the holiday season. Jake Viza and Jake Silverstein have both had a lot to juggle since joining Des’s team. They work with Project DADO - you may remember them from our past blog post about Christian Finch, and are constantly jumping between calls, training with the Bandalier team, and conversations with DADO’s team about best practices for outreach to their clients. Like Christian, Jake Viza and Jake Silverstein joined Bandalier with very little sales experience. Thanks Bandalier’s Sales 101 Bootcamp, they were up and running within a few weeks! Plus, they had the benefit of building on experience by collaborating with Christian and their team lead, Desirée. With tips from Des on how to handle tough gate-keepers and guidance from Christian on talking with decision-makers, they’ve been able to quickly deliver results! We’re excited to continue working Jake Viza and Jake Silverstein as they develop their sales skills! If you’re interested in learning more about how Bandalier makes SaaS sales outsourcing simple, head over to our website! AuthorAbagael Rudock - Jr. Associate Sales Manager at Bandalier |