A lot of companies, including salesforce.com, have found a huge benefit in segmenting their sales teams into 3 main roles: qualifying, prospecting, and closing. This blog post is focused on the first role -- qualifying. I’ve worked with some of our sales leaders to help craft these 5 clear tips to help you build a dream team of lead-qualifying sales reps.

1: The early bird gets the worm - Follow up on inbound leads as quickly as possible with focused information. If you know your lead viewed a certain white paper or video, have an email or phone call ready with some sort of a recommendation, based on what you know already about them. The faster you get back to a prospect, the better the chance is that you'll build a relationship with them and convert them into an opportunity before your competitors.

2: Mind your manners - I get it. Sales is super competitive but it doesn’t need to be cutthroat. It's incredibly important to develop Rules of Engagement (ROE) that determine who within your company should follow up with inbound responses, based on who they've engaged with most recently. Don't have multiple sales people reach out to the same person because that causes confusion for your prospect as well as for your team members. Remember, an unhappy sales person is a low-producing sales person.

3: Don’t settle for 2nd best - Having a rock star lead qualification team is a great opportunity to create a feeder network for all the other sales roles. Recruit the best and invest in their on-boarding and on-going training. Make sure you give them the opportunity to take presentation, sales methodology, and time management classes. Your Sales Reps of today are your Account Executives of tomorrow so make sure you get them ready or else you’ll be stuck with a sub-par AE army.

4: Create an environment of co-opetition - This means fostering competition among Sales Reps while encouraging them to share best practices with one another. You can accomplish this with a blend of fun team outings, friendly team sales competitions, and metric-focused dashboards. No small feat, but an incredibly important one if you can do it well.

5: Actively communicate with stakeholders -  Ensure you have open lines of communication with the marketing team that sends you leads and the sales leaders of the teams you're creating opportunities for. In our experience, having great relationships with both of these stakeholder teams is essential. Without quality leads, your reps would have nothing to call, qualify, and create opps with. On the other hand, if your reps are just creating crappy sales opps, you’ll be burning bridges with sales leaders and AE’s. Find the balance where you’re meeting everyone’s needs as best you can.

Takes these 5 tips and go out and build that dream team of sales reps you’ve been envisioning. Probably by the time a year passes, you’ll be on stage somewhere talking about your productive team and giving advice to others. If you need some more ideas about how to grow as a sales person check out 10 Tips to Up Your Sales Game.

Happy selling,

Nathan (@natespeak)