BANDALIER - Bandalier - Blog

3 Tips to Boost Motivation Within Your Inside Sales Team While Working From Home

8/6/2020

As our team adapts to working remotely, we’ve been reflecting on what it takes to keep each other motivated. Here are a few tips and tricks we’ve picked up to keep on trucking!

Consolidate meetings
- When we transitioned to working remotely, we didn’t immediately think to change our pattern of meetings. In the office, teams were constantly communicating and catching up throughout the day. We moved those micro-meetings onto Zoom without a second thought. By the end of April, most of our team was suffering from Zoom burnout. In response, we shifted the structure of our meetings. Rather than catching up across so many brief meetings throughout the day, our ASMs led longer, less frequent meetings. Even though our team members spent the same amount of time in Zoom meetings, everyone preferred the new structure.
Build a better community
- It’s a tricky thing to do - how can you help your team stay connected when they have to be physically distant? At Bandalier, we started by splitting our existing teams into smaller groups. Our re-organization mirrors the in-person experience of sitting at a table with your co-workers.
Focus on fun
- Folks rarely have the same organic opportunities to converse with their coworkers now that we’re working remotely. A well-connected team is a happy one, so we started exploring options for our employees to stay in touch. In addition to encouraging casual Slack conversations, we host digital events for our team. From monthly game events to weekly post-work happy hours, we encourage our team members to enjoy their time together without discussing work!

At the end of the day, planning has been key to maintaining our outsourced inside sales team’s effectiveness. What steps has your team taken to stay productive while working from home?

Author

Abagael Rudock - Inside Sales Representative at Bandalier

Meet the Team - Nick Viviano

7/31/2020

We’re pleased to introduce the next Associate Sales Manager of our New Leaders series - meet Nick Viviano!

Nick joined Bandalier back in the winter of 2019. After studying Business Administration at SUNY Brockport, he started looking towards building a career. As a natural leader and extrovert, Nick knew he wanted to spend his days meeting new people. Throughout college, he took internships with financial advising firms. After graduating, he became an investment advisor himself. However, he didn’t find the experience he was looking for. As an advisor, he had to focus on selling himself, rather than pairing people with a product they needed. As time passed, he realized that he was looking for a different type of sales role.

Like many of our best employees - including Lydia and Zach - Nick was referred to us by a friend. After hearing about a startup in downtown Binghamton, he knew he had to apply. When asked, Nick said that “the start-up culture was a big reason I applied. I was part of building a business, not one of a million financial advisors. When you’re part of a small team, your ideas matter.”

At Bandalier, we deliver results by creating amazing teams. Nick is a prime example - shortly after joining Bandalier, he took the lead on communicating with his client. Building relationships was a key portion of his role as a financial advisor, and he used those skills to find the client’s exact needs and help his team meet them. He attributes his success to our company-wide dedication to training and transparency.

“My time at Bandalier has been great - it’s taught me a lot. Our sales training is really in-depth, more than anything I’d done in the past. Even after training, if something is going well, you’ll hear about it; if it isn’t, they’ll tell you that too.”

Congratulations again to Nick on his new position! We’re excited to keep building relationships together.

Author

Abagael Rudock - Inside Sales Representative at Bandalier

Meet the Team - Lydia Stewart

7/23/2020

Up next in our New Leaders series is our Associate Sales Manager, Lydia Stewart!

Lydia’s a people person by nature. When she started building her career, she knew she wanted a position where could “enjoy talking to people - and introduce them to things they need.” By day, Lydia developed her sales skills by raising money for a not-for-profit. To hone her skills, she picked up another job in the hospitality industry.

Lydia quickly realized that she was looking for a career in sales. When asked why she chose Bandalier, Lydia said that she wanted to “translate her passion and power in sales into helping other people build their business.” She was a perfect match for our team!

After finishing the Bandalier Bootcamp, Lydia hit the ground running. Her quiet determination made a big impression on our talkative team, and she quickly became one of our cornerstone reps. We’ve talked about her work with CrankWheel in the past - Lydia has carried that success into every program she’s touched.

Congratulations again to Lydia on her new role! We’re excited to keep growing together.

How Outsourced Sales Teams Differ from Call Centers

7/22/2020

What’s the Difference Between an Outsourced Sales Team and a Call Center?

‘Call center’ has become almost a dirty phrase in the outsourced sales industry. This isn’t totally well-deserved: call centers employ millions of people in important work, and many of them provide excellent, much-needed services to their clients. But it’s true that the nature of the work they perform is quite different from that of other outsourced customer-facing organizations, and there’s often significant confusion about the differences. Here are some of the primary differentiators we see:

Channel usage. Though there are some outbound call centers that have branched out into using e-mail and social media, many remain true to their name and stick to calls as the primary or only channel for performing outreach. There are advantages to this, of course: retaining a singular focus on phone outreach allows for greater emphasis on call tactics. But it also prevents many call centers from assuming the multi-channel focus necessary for success on outbound inside sales programs. As an example, Bandalier generally makes use of outbound e-mails, calls, social media touches, and even handwritten notes on our managed outsourced inside sales programs.

Scripting / A/B testing. Call centers usually make use of a single script or small handful of script variants. This approach works really well for established companies that are trying to create a single experience for prospective customers with minimal variation. By contrast, Bandalier’s recruiting process identifies creativity and out-of-the-box thinking as an imperative trait for all new hires. Similarly, our culture encourages all team members to regularly come up with A/B tests on their own and try out new scripts as warranted to generate better results for clients. This approach tends to be a better fit for growing companies that are looking for innovation in their sales or customer experience strategies.

Flexibility. Call centers tend to be built around structure - with good reason. They often have made significant investment in fixed infrastructure and management processes that pays off over years of running highly structured and pre-defined outbound and inbound programs. By contrast, Bandalier - and many companies that offer outsourced sales as a service to start-ups - focuses on agile processes that allow us to modify programs as needed. Many of the fast-growing companies we partner with look for partners that can help them identify what’s working and what isn’t and modify strategy or processes accordingly. Through training and flexible process design, we prepare our teams to modify their focus and activities on short notice.

Different organizations have different needs, and there certainly is and will remain a place for call centers in the sales / customer service industries. But if you’re looking for a partner that can leverage multi-channel capabilities, test new strategies and script, and adapt based on changing needs, we believe our approach to outsourced inside sales is likely to be your best bet. To learn more, schedule a call here.

Adjusting to a New Workplace : Building Remote Relationships

7/15/2020

Remote relationships are at the core of Bandalier’s business. Where folks are skeptical of using outsourced inside sales teams, it’s often because they want the experience of working “across the room” from their team. Of course, these days in many parts of the world that is impossible regardless of whether you’re working with an in-house team or a vendor.

But as a result of the need to forge close relationships between our team members and the clients they work with, we’ve spent three years hypothesizing, testing, and then re-assessing different methods to forge successful relationships when working remotely. Here are three learnings:

Start with the right people. Working remotely requires a great deal of self-motivation. The interview process for our outsourced sales teams relies on behavioral questions that tease out past cases where candidates may have felt demotivated and had to take steps to bounce back. This category of questions has historically been among the most predictive of success in our inside sales roles - and is especially important now. When you don’t have a gong ringing in the background or a boss right next to you to congratulate you for success, that inner sense of accomplishment matters a great deal.
Context matters. Many people view outsourced vendors, or even their own employees, as mercenaries tasked with completing a specific task within their organization - and nothing more. That mentality might work OK when you have a temporary, one-off project. But when you’re building an ongoing relationship with a team you intend to work with for some time - say, an outsourced inside sales team that you view as a critical sales engine for your business - it’s helpful to provide context behind why they’re doing what they’re doing and how it fits into the larger picture. Many of our most successful clients include our teams in regular strategy and messaging meetings.
Regular, live check-ins. There are plenty of reasons to avoid live communication - especially in the days of Zoom fatigue. Everyone is busy these days, and it’s a lot shorter to check in via e-mail or Slack than it is to have a synchronous conversation. But there is simply no substitute for live conversation for relationship building; daily or weekly stand-ups help build rapport and foster long-term success. Over the course of the last few months, we’ve explored new ways to foster these, including walking meetings, which allow participants to catch up while getting some much needed exercise.

Meet the Team - Zach Keck

7/15/2020

We’re pleased to introduce the next person in our New Leaders series - meet Zach Keck!

Zach is an entrepreneur at heart. While wrapping up his master’s degree in Material Sciences and Engineering at Binghamton University, he joined the Southern Tier Incubator’s Accelerator Program. As he and his business partner worked to get ZAG Labs up and running, they kept hearing about another startup down the hall. After receiving a host of recommendations from folks at the Incubator, Zach applied to join the Bandalier team.

“It was a no-brainer. I lived nearby, and my lab is in the same building. I love start-up environments. I love the ability to make change. If you see potential in a 500-600 person company, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get things done. At Bandalier, if I have an idea, I could just talk to my managers. They listen and give good feedback on it.”

When Zach started at Bandalier, he had no plans to join our leadership team. He was excited to support another start-up while building his sales experience. Once Zach started making calls, he quickly optimized his strategy, delivering excellent results for his client. Before long, he was hungry for a new challenge. He knew that he could offer more to Bandalier if he had the opportunity.

His team lead helped him find one. Zach has a passion for teaching and was glad to share that passion by training new team members. It’s often said that the best way to learn is by teaching others, and Zach put his improved sales skills to the test by reaching out to prospective clients for Bandalier. Over time, he picked up more responsibilities and became an informal leader within his team. When the opportunity arose to formally apply for the position of team lead, Zach jumped on it.

Since you’re reading this post, you can guess how his application turned out! Congratulations to Zach and our other new leaders - we’re excited to keep growing with you!

If you want to work with driven young entrepreneurs like Zach, we’d love to chat with you! To learn more about Bandalier, visit us at our website. To learn more about ZAG Labs and how they’re working to revitalize running shoes with their premier product, Edge Spray, you can reach out to Zach by visiting his LinkedIn page.

Author

Abagael Rudock - Inside Sales Associate at Bandalier

Rob Rangel - Connecting Talent to a Unique Opportunity in the Tech Industry

7/9/2020

Usually, we write our blog posts about current employees. This time, we’d like to introduce one of our former employees: Rob Rangel, Director of U.S. Sales at Nivoda! While at his previous job working at UPS, Rob learned about Bandalier through a friend and current employee. He was on the hunt for a company to grow with, and Bandalier presented a rare opportunity in Binghamton.

As one of the fastest growing start-ups in Upstate New York, we offer local residents the rare opportunity to connect with growing tech companies around the world. Never one to let an opportunity escape him, Rob joined our team as an inside sales representative.

Rob had never made a sale before joining Bandalier. Fortunately, he’s a quick learner, and leveraged all of the resources he had at his disposal. As Rob said, Bandalier gives you the opportunity to “learn from other reps, your ASMs, and the directors … there was a wealth of knowledge at my disposal, and I didn’t have to worry about the chain of command when looking for feedback on my ideas.” As a natural innovator, Rob had plenty of ideas to share!

Within his first few weeks, he was known as ‘Rob the Wrangler’ around the office. He built out his skill set, learning to analyze his outreach efforts to determine what brought him the best results. Over time, he wrangled progressively larger sales, working his way through the traditional funnel - from setting appointments at the top to closing deals at the bottom, Rob learned how to do it and excelled. He credits Bandalier’s sales training and mentorship with expediting his ability to excel in the field.

Less than a year after starting as a sales rep at Bandalier, Rob has become one of our clients. His experience has come full circle as he coaches new reps to use the same techniques that he learned. They hold loose discussions focused on problem-solving and pause often to ask and answer each other’s questions. Rob has demonstrated the grit, determination, and drive that Bandalier looks for in their employees, and we’re glad to keep working with him!

If you’d like to learn more about how Nivoda has modernized the process of buying and selling diamonds, you can check them out at https://nivoda.net/. To learn more about how Bandalier can help you connect with people like Rob, visit us at https://www.bandalier.co/.

Meet the Team - Desirée DeNinis

6/30/2020

Meet Desirée! She’s been a cornerstone of our team ever since she joined Bandalier - now that she’s earned the position of Associate Sales Manager, we wanted to reflect on her journey.

Des is a force to be reckoned with. Once she sets her mind to a task, she always finds a way to accomplish it. “If you really want something, you need to find a way to make it happen. Look for your own leads, build your own lists … don’t whine about having bad prospects if you aren’t doing anything to fix it. If you want to win, you'll find a way. Excuses are just a way out.”

Her drive for success is contagious. Simply hearing her on a call is enough to motivate new reps - the effect is even stronger if you ask for help. Whether you ran into a rude prospect or botched a booking, you can always ask Des where it went wrong. With her wealth of sales experience and no-nonsense attitude, she can quickly pinpoint your misstep - and help you learn from the experience. It’s a great demonstration of Bandalier’s focus on kaizen!

Congratulations are due to Des on her recent promotion. We’re excited to watch her grow into her new role as a team leader! If you want to work with Desiree and driven young professionals like her, head over to our website to learn more about our current opportunities.

Why Empathy is the key to Selling During COVID

6/23/2020

We’ve spoken in the past about Selling During COVID-19. As our team works hard at home, we’ve found one thing makes a big difference in our call outcomes: empathy.

Selling with empathy simply makes sense. After all, no one likes a pushy salesperson at the best of times. Empathizing with prospects has always been a key portion of Bandalier’s sales process, but our classic questions weren’t doing the trick. Far from it, in fact - standard rapport-building questions like “How is your day going?” elicited highly negative responses shortly after the start of the pandemic. Our teams realized that it was time to ask better questions.

In a stellar bout of A/B tests, each team prepared new questions and tracked the responses they received. After two weeks of testing, Zach Gaskill’s team emerged with a clear winner: “How are you holding up?”. It’s a simple, casual question that leaves plenty of room for creative responses - both from our reps and their prospects. Our simple rephrasing acknowledged the challenges that we were all coping with. Asking folks “how they were holding up” received positive responses up to 70% of the time. Prospects opened up about their experiences working from home, and our reps did the same. Call times lengthened and results improved.

Empathetic listening has been key to Bandalier’s success over the past few months. By focusing on the prospect’s need for social interaction, our reps were able to hold better conversations. As we continue to adapt to the idea of a new normal, our best questions change - but our commitment to selling with empathy hasn’t.

Author: Abagael Rudock

Bandalier - Inside Sales Associate

Meet the Team - Connor Riley

6/19/2020

We’re proud to introduce Connor Riley. As his one-year anniversary approaches, we took a few minutes to talk about his experiences at Bandalier.

Connor has always been a hard worker. Before joining Bandalier as an inside sales associate, he worked as a promoter, field marketer, photographer, bartender, caterer, and golf club retailer. “I used to hold six different positions at once … Bandalier has given me a great opportunity to hone all of the skills I picked up along the way.” After completing his sales training, Connor quickly produced amazing results for some of our toughest clients.

If he isn’t busy crushing it on sales calls, Connor’s helping his team. He’ll answer any question with a smile, whether you need help with call techniques or just want to know which local watering hole is the best. When a dozen employees needed professional headshots, Connor volunteered to put his photography and editing skills to use.

“It’s been amazing to see Bandalier grow and adapt. I had the opportunity to work with multiple clients at the same time, and it really showed me how unique each program is.” From staffing to software (SaaS), he’s sold it all! For more information on how you can work with Connor and the rest of our amazing outsourced inside sales team, check out our careers page and apply now!