How to Establish Business Hours with Your Sales Team

Welcome to Inbound Sales Journey. If you want to hone your sales skills and learn from the leaders on inbound selling, you've come to the right place. This episode of inbound Sales Journey is brought to you by the agency sales System, the online course designed specifically to teach you how to build a rock solid agency sales system inside your HubSpot CRM. Learn more at dotinbound.com salescourse now here are your hosts, Ryan and Gray.

Welcome back to inbound Sales Journey. This is episode 111. This is Ryan joined by Gray. And we are going to be talking today about sales business hours. So talking a little bit about the expectations of your salespeople, how long it takes for them to get back to people, if they should get back to people later at night versus just waiting till the next day, what that means for consistency across your teams? Is it an individual preference? I think this is really important, Gray, that people think about this and that there is a little bit of consistency across the entire organization. And we'll talk about why, but I'll let you, Gray, I'll kick it over to you and just have you open us up here talking about your experiences and how you feel about it.

Yeah, I think this one's a pretty. I don't have a lot lengthy to say here, but I do have a couple of things based on the experience we've had from Guava Box to do. Inbound and agency life and setting expectations. Number one is you're in sales, you're trying to close deals. And across the board, every study that's ever been done says the faster you get back to people, the higher your chances of closing the deal. The flip side of that is you're also trying to guard against the expectation that every time a prospect or customer sends you an email or gives you a phone call that you'll answer in five minutes or pick up the phone and talk to them right then. So here's my philosophy. I'm just going to say my side rather than getting into the theoretical. I'm just going to say what my approach is. I'd love to hear what your take is if you agree or disagree. And then ultimately this is a decision that every agency owner, agency salesperson, agency team has to make for themselves what they want to do here. So my approach is this, you get a lead, you get back as quickly as you possibly can to that lead. That's number one. Number two, you try and set some consistency between you. Make sure that you have a conversation with the entire team to talk about this and what expectations you're setting. Because as we're going to talk about in an upcoming episode, I do believe that your internal team is more important than your customers. Obviously you don't have the need for an internal team without customers. You need customers. There are compromises, decisions that balance the needs of those two groups that need to be made on a consistent basis. But I do think at the end of the day, you got to take care of your internal team and on the big issues, prioritize their needs over the needs of the customers. So what I would say is this. You set an expectation, whether verbally or in writing or some way of what your business hours are. Hey, just so you know, typically, and a lot of times this even happens during the sales process. I'll tell a customer, hey, just so you know, I'm going to get back to you, we've done an episode on this before, asking the client how long, what's reasonable to expect from them, but from your side, communicating to them. Just so you know, I work normal business hours and typically do my best to get back to you within one business day. So that's kind of setting the expectation. You're never going to go more than two days without hearing from me unless it's, you know, unless something comes up or whatever. And if it's during baseball season when I'm coaching, I'll tell people early on, hey, just so you know, I coach high school baseball. You know, I'm out for the day by 2:30. And so you might look for a reply for me that like, I'll try and get back to you either tonight after baseball or I'll get back to you in the morning and just set the expectation for people early on around what the schedule is and what you've got going on. And that helps them. One of the things that I've learned is telling them that helps them understand why they'd be getting an email from you at 9 o' clock or 10 o' clock at night during the spring. And that might not necessarily happen during the rest of the summer or the rest of the year. So I think setting that expectation, whether in writing or verbally up front is awesome. And then I have no hesitations, it doesn't bother me at all to then exceed that expectation whenever possible. So if I'm up at 10:30 at night or I'm up at 1 in the morning with my 6 month old and there's somebody who has a question about something and I can't sleep and he's awake I don't have a big problem with answering that at 1:30 in the morning. There's a lot of people who say that's terrible. You're training your customers to do that. And I think if you haven't, if you haven't set some expectations ahead of that and there's nothing there that, hey, here's what business hours look like for us, here's what you can expect, I think then you are in trouble, you are training them. But if that's not the case and if you have set those expectations well initially and that doesn't need to be, you don't need to remind them of that every single time you get in touch with them. But that's kind of clearly stated. Then anytime you can exceed that for the most part, why not? So those are my thoughts on business hours. It takes 30 seconds to convey what is going on and I think that that's, that's a good way to handle that and that's what's worked best in my experience. I think we can also talk about, I'll let you kind of tackle this one in addition to your thoughts, Ryan, but how do you then balance that between the sales team and the servicing team? Like if the sales team's always going to get back to you within one business day, can that, does that need to be the same expectation and service level from the client servicing team?

If you, it depends on, I guess who your client servicing team is and what like that expectation just needs to be set as a company ahead of time.

Do you think it should be consistent?

I think it should be. So, I mean, I think like realistically this day and age, if you're a client facing person, we're all connected by technology. You know, you're not sending someone a piece of mail, you get things instantly. You could send things instantly. A 24 hour turnaround is, I mean that should just be what, what the expectation is. So whether it's sales or client servicing.

That'S almost something where you don't have that much of a choice as an agency owner. Like if that's what, that's what everybody's expectations are. Yeah, I expect, and especially if I see that you open my email, I expect that I'm going to get a response within a day. Unless I asked you a super complex question or you have a huge project and you don't need to, I somehow said that you don't need to get back to me and say, hey, I'm working on this for you.

Which that's why setting expectations again in this day and age is so important. Because if people have expectations that are different or quicker, because some people might even have faster expectations than that, that they're getting more instant type of replies. If you don't say, look, these are the hours that I work and I will do my best to always get back within 24 hours unless something, you know, real crazy is going on. That's. That's what I'm gonna try to do for you. And then again, like we had in that episode, you know, it's that. Are you in agreement that. That same for. For you to me, which is something that's really helpful. But like you said, gray, especially with do inbound, I kind of handle sales and customer support. And there it's not. It's published right there. People know, like, when we're there and when we're not. Just trying to exceed expectations as best I can. Like from a sales side for sure. You know, trying to get back to people quickly. And from a support side, like, if I'm using a piece of software and I ask a question at 5:00pm, you know, and I know that's when their hours are and someone gets back to me at 8:00pm, like, that's awesome. And that's really cool. And we don't do that every time, like, by any means. Like, sometimes, like, we all have things going on, but if I am at my computer and I have the ability to do it, or you or Andrew or anyone, we'll just do that. And we do it just to delight our customers a little bit more. And I think that should be something that everyone's really striving for. And it's not necessarily the reason that it's okay and is because you set the proper expectations. If you don't set proper expectations, do not do that, because then you're making bad habits. There's a crazy difference in people's minds with expectations who have been set. One is, they didn't respond in six hours. This is really unacceptable. The other is, wow, they just responded in six hours. They told me 24. This is great. And it could be the same exact person that has that, but it's all about how you communicate it to them upfront. So I think this is just such an important topic and something that I think that we have gotten better at, thankfully, but weren't always that good at. So I thought it was important to share with everyone.

No, it absolutely is. And it is really important, I'd say, too, for your team. There are a lot of people who this complaint honestly is going. I hear this complaint way less than I used to because I think people are just used to it now. But there was a complaint of I'm expected to be always on. I'm expected to handle stuff for work on nights and weekends. I used to hear that complaint a couple years ago a lot and now I don't. I think people are just either used to it or figured out a way that works for them to filter for it or just realize everybody has the same job and the same problem. So there's. We don't complain about it anymore. But I think communicating to your team what the expectation is like, hey, if you're going to work, you know, you're working 40 hours a week, whatever it is, and assuming that you work those during business hours eight to five, my expectation is not then to that you're answering emails for me or support tickets or whatever else at 10 o' clock on weeknights or over the weekend. But on the flip side, I'm willing to give. Like as a team leader, I'm willing to have give and take where you have the opportunity to have a little bit more flexibility during the week because the natures of our jobs and most agency jobs, you've got a little bit of flexibility and if you're available, it's no big deal if you're not. But if you're right there and can take care of something for somebody and it's no biggie to spend a couple extra minutes to get back, even if that's just to say, hey, I saw your request about the website changes and we'll tackle that tomorrow, we'll tackle that on Monday. Just so you know, that'll be done by Thursday or Friday. Just take the extra couple minutes to do that. And I think that that's a cultural thing and a mindset thing and figure you obviously need to make the decisions about how you're going to balance that. But that's kind of my approach to it. One other thing I'd say is one thing that holds a lot of people back from responding is having to respond and say I don't know or I don't have an answer for you. But most of the time when somebody submits something, they just want to know that they've been heard and that somebody's working on it. And there's a huge, just like Ryan said, there's a huge difference in the emotional response to I haven't heard anything for 24 hours versus I heard back from them within two hours. And they said like, if you Give if you don't say anything for two days, then it's fixed two days later. That's a totally different level of frustration and stress and emotional response than if you get back to them within a couple hours and say, we can't get to this right now, but just so you know, we're have this done in two or three days. And then they get that same email at the end that says, hey, we got this done. They know at least what to expect roughly, and know that you're working on it. So if you can just reply and say, I'm working on this, or hey, I appreciate you asking, I'll get back to this tomorrow. I guess understanding the nature with maybe with a customer support question that would take three minutes to answer, but you don't have three minutes right now. Maybe that's one that you leave till after office hours. But a request from a customer who's got something going on and they're obviously feeling some stress and some pressure and typically there's other people involved internally. So the more information that they have, even it's just, hey, I got ahold of them and they said they're working on it and hopefully they'll have me something by Friday. That's a totally different feel and response. So I think that this is something that you want to bring up and address internally, early, and it's not something that needs to get addressed all the time, but should be something that people do get reminded about and that you help lead the way for. As a agency owner, as a sales team member, I think that goes a long way towards helping people balance things well and have some semblance of balance between work and their life and also making sure that you have the best chance at closing deals and retaining clients.

Well said, Gray Wind it there. Next week we're going to be talking about hiring and this is a question that has actually been asked of us a few times. People trying to make decisions about hires and they're wondering, look, I've got someone with agency experience. Whether they've been in sales or not, they at least have experience in the industry. And then there's some people that don't have any industry experience. What do you think you know about that? And that's something that we've had to go through. So we will chat about our feelings on it. Love to hear yours as well. That'll be next week. So until then, good luck selling.

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