Tracking results, coaching and Cold Calling activity.
Telling your charges to, “Make more dials” when their Cold Calling isn’t working isn’t going to cut it.
Having your sales professionals just ‘make more dials’ when their activity isn’t generating enough new appointments is actually counter productive. Why?
First, it is discouraging when the dials are being made with little results. At best, it’s a waste of time and at worst, it can cause turnover on your sales team. Secondly, it takes more time away from servicing customers and from pipeline selling activities. So what to do, you ask?
If the team lives and dies by finding new business each month and must set new appointments with each prospect to do so, efficiency is a must. Keeping a few targets a month straight can be done in a spreadsheet or in a CRM. But if there are more than 10 names per week to be called, I submit that we must have a tool that is designed for this task.
I have personally tried the paper system (lots of folders), ACT! (invested a lot of money optimizing it), an internally developed CRM, commercially available CRMs and Excel spreadsheets. In each case, I could not find enough time to keep track of everything that is necessary in order to continuously call a set of targets. Each time, with each tool, I became hopelessly lost, forgetting who I was pursuing, what progress I had made, and fell further and further behind in the process of documenting activity to the point that I gave up.
We suggest a tool called Klpz, which was developed specifically for this task. Benchmarks show a minimum of a 2:1 improvement in the number of targets that can be pursued effectively in an organized manner in a given amount of time.
Here’s an example from one of the benchmarks. Prospecting 10 targets in a row using SalesForce.com took 48 minutes. Klpz took 18 minutes. Since most sales managers bought SFdC thinking it could be used for this purpose (among the things it is good at), I know this sounds like heresy, but it’s very true. Refusing to examine this can have catastrophic consequences. Check out the 8 minute video that is located on the home page at www.contactscience.com. I promise it will be one of the best 8 minute investments of your life.
But back to the problem at hand; fixing an ineffective appointment setting team. One of the ancillary benefits Klpz will provide is accurate and granular reports as to where the team is failing. That at least will give you a place to start to examine how to fix the specific challenges with each individual sales professional.
Caponi Performance Group and Contact Science jointly market the telephone prospecting and cold calling solution called The Prospector’s Academy™ under the brand name Coldcalling101. It is the only comprehensive solution to solving the biggest barrier to success in most selling organizations – the inability to secure enough Initial Appointments to begin the selling process. We accomplish that through simultaneously addressing both the efficiency and effectiveness of the process. We can be reached at 214 483-5800 or at barry@coldcalling101.com.
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