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Are there really gazillions of negative responses our targets use on a cold call?

January 28th, 2009 by Barry Caponi

 

My wife, Nancy, and I love to hike in the mountains and a while back we were in Sedona, Arizona doing just that. (It’s beautiful, by the way if you like rocks. Many, many rocks. They even have mountains named as rocks like Red Rock and Cathedral Rock.) Anyway, as we were hiking up this one trail, I stepped on a fairly smooth rock and my boot lost a little traction, causing me to slip. Being a conscientious hiker, I proceeded to kick it off the path after regaining my balance as I certainly didn’t want someone else to have the same experience. But as I did it, I noticed that there were hundreds; no make that gazillions more of them, so I quickly gave up on my crusade to make hiking through Sedona safe for everyone.
 
So what does this have to do with appointment setting, you ask? Great question, and thanks for asking! Many times in my workshops on appointment setting, I’m told by our intrepid cold callers that it is just impossible to prepare for every potential negative response that can occur when making those calls. Those pesky suspects seem to have gazillions of them (like that tie in?). Anyway, for some unknown reason, that usually happens right after I assign a little exercise asking them to prepare a list of the most common ones they hear.  
 
While there is some truth that I am still surprised by a new one from time to time; the old 80/20 rule applies here as it does most places in sales.   The good news is that there are really only five categories of what I like to call Conditioned Responses (remember Pavlov and his dog? We all have our favorite response to get that caller off the phone when we’re cold called). The bad news, of course, is that several of them come in multiple flavors. But you can use the same approach to each category when countering them. That means that you only have to identify which category they fall into order to handle them effectively. Here are the categories:
 
·         Direct questions or statements
·         Already got one
·         Don’t need one
·         I’m really busy right now
·         Send me some information
 
And here’s some suggested homework. Start tracking the Conditioned Responses you hear when talking to the person you think you want the appointment with. I’ll be that 80% of them are the same and they will all fall into these categories other than, “I’m not the right person”. Once you’ve done that, develop how you’ll handle each of the five categories and you’ll increase your effectiveness when calling!
 
If you’ve got one you’re really struggling with, share it with us and I’ll attack it in the following week’s blog.

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How to motivate our sales teams to cold call in a tough economy

January 19th, 2009 by Barry Caponi

 

All indications are that 2009 is a tougher year to find prospects than we’ve experienced recently, so with more people saying ‘no’ to us on cold calls, how do we keep motivated to keep making those dials?
 
This question came up during one of our free webinars this past week. There are three answers to that question depending on whether we’re interested in addressing the symptom or the cause.
 
Answer No. 1 – If we want to bury our head in the sand ignore the cause, here’s the ‘easy’ way out that we can use to motivate ourselves to keep cold calling.
 
First of all, remember, there are only three sources of Initial Appointments which start a buying cycle: marketing programs that generate leads for us, networking and referrals, and good old fashioned cold calling. If we’re not seeing enough leads and/or referrals, we have no other choice than to cold call. It is cold call or lose our job. If that’s where we are, and fear is not how we wish to motivate, then here’s an approach to put the most positive (motivating) spin on the situation.
 
For those of us who’ve been selling for a while, we’ll recall the old adage of every ‘no’ gets us closer to a ‘yes’, right? So here’s the positive way to look at that in a cold calling environment. Divide the average size of a sale by the number of dials it takes in order to gain that sale (you’ll probably have to guess in the beginning). That will give us the value of each dial we make. For instance, if our average sized sale is $5,000 and it takes 200 dials to get enough Initial Appointments that result in one sale, then each time we pick up the phone and dial, it is worth $25 to us. If we can make 20 dials per hour, we’re ‘making’ $500 per hour…not bad, eh?
 
Keep track of the value of those dials in a ‘virtual’ bank. We get to withdraw the balance of our account only upon making a sale, but in the meantime, we can watch the value of our virtual bank account go up with every dial.
 
Another approach is to make a game out of it and come up with an incentive program for the appointments (particularly if the buying cycles are long so that the final reward is way out there).
 
Answer No. 2 – If we really want to address the root cause of the challenge, then we’ve got to look at what can we do to reduce the time to make those dials (efficiency) and reduce the number of dials needed (effectiveness).
 
Hopefully without sounding self-serving, ColdCalling101 does exactly that. Benchmarks show the efficiency component to our solution provides the ability to make twice the dials in the same amount of time, even if we’re no better at converting those conversations we do get into appointments.
 
The effectiveness component steps us through a process in which we track and predict the most common negative responses and questions we’re hearing, craft answers to them and uses the techniques of The Formula to Counter them and turn more of them into Initial Appointments. The result is a reduction in the number of dials necessary to make a sale.
 
If you haven’t tuned in to one of the webinars where we discuss 2009’s most common ‘no’ (no budget) and how to handle it, go to Cold Calling 101 » Upcoming Events and register. (It’s free.) If you want to know more about how we help our clients simultaneously improve effectiveness and efficiency, give us a call at 214 483-5800.
 
Answer No. 3 – Back on August 22, 2007, I wrote a Blog about why more civilian marathoners run the 26 miles they set out to than Navy S.E.A.L. trainees who are asked to run until they can no longer go with no end in site. (It’s because the civilians know where the ‘end’ is.) Use our Activity Calculator (it’s free for the asking) to determine how many dials need be made each day. That way, at least our callers will have a goal in mind each day based on some form of logic.
 
And remember, nothing gets us more motivated than getting some appointments, but the toughest dial is always the first.

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How much time does it take to set our required Initial Appointments through cold calling and why should we care?

January 14th, 2009 by Barry Caponi

 

So, how much time will it take? The answer requires us to know five metrics. If you don’t know them, don’t feel bad. Most people don’t. Estimate them for this exercise and then start tracking your results. 
 
·         How many Initial Appointments do we need set? (See last week.)
 
·         How ‘cold’ are these names we’re calling? (The worse the list, the more time it will take just to scrub the list for the right names, qualify them, etc.)
 
·         The third metric we call the Appointment Ratio: the number of Initial Appointments we set in relation to the number of conversations we have. 
 
·         The fourth metric we call the Conversation Ratio: the number of conversations we create in relation to the number of dials we make. 
 
·         The fifth metric is speed: how fast can we move from dialing the first digit of phone number for target A to the dialing of the first digit of the phone number for target B. Remember, for target A, we should leave a voicemail, send an email if I have an address, record the results of the call, record any comments from conversations, select the date for the next call, put it away, select target B, review the history, determine where we are in our Best Practice, and what to do next. Then, dial their number.
 
Our benchmarks show that on average, it takes anywhere from 2.5 minutes per dial to 5 or 6 minutes depending on your automation (or lack of it). So let’s say we need 96 Initial Appointments this year. Our Appointment Ratio is 25% and my Conversation Ratio is 8%. At 5 minutes per dial, I will need 109 minutes or almost two hours per day. With the correct automation, (we recommend a product called Klpz that front ends CRMs) that is reduced to 55 minutes.
 
Most of our clients didn’t realize using spreadsheets, Outlook or CRM software to manage calling campaigns could be that expensive in terms of time. And if we’re making $100,000 per year, that one hour saved per day are worth over $1,000 per month in lost productivity. And if that time could be invested in front of customers, the value can be come substantially bigger.
 
Next week, we’ll address another way to reduce the time it takes to set those appointments.
 
If you’d like a free calculator to help you see how these numbers work in your environment, send us an email at bob@coldcalling101.com

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How many Initial Appointments do we need this year (and this week in particular) and why is it important to know that?

January 7th, 2009 by Barry Caponi

 

It is important to know how many Initial Appointments we need each year, month, and week, in order to make our “2009 new revenue” quota. Why? Because it is the easiest activity based goal that can be monitored, measured and managed on a weekly and even daily, basis. Don’t have enough Initial Appointments on your calendar for next week? Get on the phone and fix it today before you get too far behind the proverbial ‘8’ ball. 
 
We suggest that this is the most important question we have to answer each year and it takes four quick steps to calculate it.  
 
  1. First, take the revenue that must come from new customer sales in 2009 and divide it by the average size of those sales – that will give us the number of new sales we will need.
  2. Next, we need to estimate our Close Ratio. We do that by measuring the sales we make divided by the number of Initial Appointments we need to go on in order to close those new sales.
  3. Now, take the number of new customers needed (answer from question number 1) and divide it by the Close Ratio we got from answering question number 2. That will give us the number of actual Initial Appointments we need to go on this year.
  4. Lastly, we’ll take that number and divide it by the number of selling weeks we have available to us this year (44 in most cases).
 
For example, if my quota of $240,000 is divided by $12,000 (Step 1), it equals 20 new customers. When 20 is divided by a 25% Close Ratio (Step 2), the result is that I need 80 Initial Appointments. If there are 44 full selling weeks in a year (typical selling calendar believe it or not), I need to average 2 per week (actually 1.8 to be precise).
 
It’s much easier to manage to that number than to keep looking at that $240,000 quota and wonder where it will come from.
 
If you’d like a calculator to help you with these calculations (as well as a few more), send Barry an email at barry@coldcalling101.com. It’s free and the newest version has just been released for those of you who’ve used it before!
 
The new calculator can now help us figure out the number of leads we need from various sources (next week’s Blog topic, by the way), so we can work in an empirical manner to reduce the number of ‘Cold Calls’ we’ve got to make in order to hit our specific goal of Initial Appointments.

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