Name: Scott Inks
Industry: Higher Education and Sales
Use Case: Sales Pipelines, Contact Management, Sample Data
Title: Director of KSU Center for Professional Selling
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/scottinks
Scott Inks is the director of the KSU Center for Professional Selling where he develops undergraduate and graduate college students into outstanding sales professionals, with the focus of helping students connect with organizations from all over the country looking to hire the best sales talent. Scott also helps other companies develop the sales skills of their existing sales force.
to Become Salespeople
In order to keep educating his students, Inks needed a number of capabilities. The number one capability is for students to use, followed by maintaining relationships and keeping track of deals, tasks, and tags. To accomplish this, Inks has his students create automated tags in a pre-qualifying workflow, and adds them to pipelines so students can learn the structure of a sales process.
Inks likes to combine all these main functions to run his sales course successfully. It allows students to do everything from checking when to reach out to someone, tagging and organizing contacts, and setting up tasks so he always stays up to date on the leads.
Inks shared with our team that the missing part of his business was the functionality of using dynamic sample data and automated tasks to encourage the students to easily move contacts through the sales process.
“The challenge I and everybody has is when you teach students who have live data that is dynamic and moving through the pipeline”
Ink’s process of educating his sales courses is qualifying and moving leads while showing that a CRM tool is more than just contact management.
“My primary goal for using Nimble with my students is to understand what the capabilities of a CRM tool are.”
Inks has his students learn how to qualify leads using Nimble Prospector and then move them into a pre-qualification Workflow, where students use Workflow Automations to learn relationship management by building templated emails to be triggered at a certain stage.
His class is also focused on how Nimble takes the manual process out of managing relationships. Such as automatic tagging and notifications, where students set up their flows to do the work for them.
“Often times salespeople tend to have some resistance doing admin type work, so vendors will often look for ways to make it easier for salespeople, and that’s where Nimble comes in.”
From the workflows, Inks has his students move leads into a deal pipeline, where they can assign probabilities based on pipeline stages and do basic reporting with Nimble Reports. His course is encouraged by sample data and mock pipelines, so that students can easily identify what a real-case scenario of a sales opportunity would look like. Inks notes that using this type of sample data can give students a real-life interpretation of how some opportunities win.
“I have students enter a few contacts every day and have them progress those leads into a new stage of the pipeline every day, with the idea to show the migration of leads through multiple pipelines and how they progress, and demonstrate how some win.”
Inks argues that Nimble is a valuable tool, not just for other educators looking to teach their sales courses to adapt to easy-to-use CRM tools, but for other sales professionals. As Inks not only uses Nimble as a practicing CRM for students in his classes but implements it as part of KSU’s Professional Center for Selling to manage activities and business operations.
“Nimble saves a salesperson a measurable amount of time in the sales process and makes it easier, therefore, more palatable to do.”
It’s no surprise that Inks’ students easily adapted to the social integration of Nimble, like Prospector, but encourages other salespeople to use it as their lead-qualification strategy. From the process of qualifying leads with the social portion of Nimble all the way to nurturing the relationship through Workflows and ultimately closing a sale in Deals. He notes that using Nimble takes out the manual process of entering information into a database, such as sending emails, tagging contacts, and setting reminders.
“Nimble displays a good example of showing salespeople how easy it is to use a tool that does the work for you.”
