Lead Generation, Prospecting, Appointment Setting, Cold Calling Training – Cold Calling 101

Setting the basic activity objectives for the selling process.

January 25th, 2012 by Barry Caponi

The basic activity component to the selling process is the dial. Do you know how many dials you need to make today so that you can measure your progress?

The last of the 2012 goal setting blogs is about setting activity objectives. If you went through the GOSPA exercise, you know that the Strategy piece of the process is very powerful. When you figure out how you’re going to accomplish a particular objective, then ‘do the math’ in terms of the activity necessary. You will sometimes realize that a particular objective is unrealistic, or you might discover you need to try to accomplish it in another manner. Regardless, the exercise itself is worth the effort to see if you really can accomplish what you want to in the way you think you need to.

If one of your objectives for the year was to sell more to new customers, you’ll need this blog as it will help you determine how many dials per day you will need to make in order to attain a certain revenue number.

Here’s what I suggest you do to be able to determine your daily activity levels. Ask yourself the following questions:

What is my revenue goal?
What is my average sized sale?
How many sales do I need to hit my goal, considering my average sized sale?
How many Initial Appointments do I need to generate one sale? In other words, what is my closing ratio?
How many conversations with decision makers do I need to have in order to generate an Initial Appointment? In other words, what’s my appointment ratio?
How many dials must I make in order to get a conversation with the decision maker?

If you don’t know the answer to these questions, use the following ratios as a starting point and begin measuring your own results to determine your metrics.

· Closing Ratio (Initial Appointments to closed business) – 15%

· Appointment Ratio (Conversations to Initial Appointments) – 18%

· Conversation Ratio (Dials to Conversations) – 8%

If you can answer those questions, you can begin to measure whether or not you’re doing the right things each day—and if there are enough hours in the day to do it the way you think you will do it. You can also determine the right amount of time to set aside for the all-important appointment-making step (use 6 minutes per dial, if you’re not using Klpz to manage the process).

My guess is that after you’ve run these numbers, you’ll be depressed as to the number of dials and the time you’ll need. Better to know than not, though, so you can adjust. Just set out to improve how efficiently and effectively you do it—or lower your goal.

If you’d like a tool to help you calculate that, let me know. We’ve developed an activity calculator that will do exactly that.

Caponi Performance Group and Contact Science jointly market the telephone prospecting and cold calling solution called 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 817 224-9900 or at barry@coldcalling101.com. You can also find answers to many of your challenges in our books: Contrary to Popular Belief, Cold Calling DOES Work! Volume I: Effectiveness, The Art of Appointment Makingand Volume II: Efficiency, the Science of Appointment Making.

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The most powerful way to accomplish goals.

January 18th, 2012 by Barry Caponi

The mind cannot tell the difference between what is imagined and what is real.

Any self-help book worth its salt will talk about envisioning yourself where you want to be, doing what you want to be doing, and being what you want to be as a very powerful part of the process of accomplishing what you want out of life. The reason for that is simply this. Years ago, scientists discovered that the human mind truly cannot tell the difference between what is imagined and what is real.

Let me tell you a story of how I employed this practice to attain one of the biggest goals in my life.

In the fall of 1977, (I know, I’m telling my age), I moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. The leaves, in their beautiful shades of red, orange and yellow were gently drifting on the rapidly cooling breeze as I got moved into my new place. When that occurs in Indiana, basketball season can’t be far behind. And not only any old kind of basketball, but high school basketball. It’s almost a religion there. Kind of like Texas and high school football.

That year I began a 30-year odyssey of refereeing basketball that took me from working junior high games in my early years all the way to Division I college basketball in the Southwest Conference as my career advanced. In 1977 though, I began that career working a steady diet of those junior high games. I fell in love with it. So, as that first season came to an end, I scored myself a ticket to the biggest game in town, the Indiana State High School Championship game at Market Square Arena.

Imagine yourself there with me and 15,498 of our ‘closest friends’ experiencing one of the most exciting games in years between a big city perennial power from Gary, playing an upstart suburban school from just outside of Indianapolis, Carmel High School. With five seconds left on the clock, there is a time out. You glance at the scoreboard as the teams head towards their benches and you realize that the score is tied. The building is alive with excitement as the crowd anticipates the conclusion to the game. You begin to look around the arena to soak in the moment. You see the excitement in the faces of your fellow fans, the cheerleaders are leading their respective fans in a cheer encouraging their players on to victory. As your eyes fall on the court, you see one of the referees standing with his hands clasped behind his back near one of the free throw circles waiting for the teams to return to the floor and you notice he is doing the same thing you are. He is also soaking in the experience, and as you wonder what’s going through his head, his eyes, that have been scanning the crowd, seem to lock on yours for a moment. In that instant, you can read his mind. He’s thinking that all of the sacrifices he’s made to get to this moment, the long hours in the car coming home from games late at night, the time away from his family, the thousands of terrible basketball games he’s officiated, the countless hours studying the rule book—they were all worth it. This is what it’s all about. This moment, right here, right now has made it all worth it.

Well that happened to me that night, and that referee, whom I’ve never met, spoke to me and inspired me to that 30-year journey. I realized in that instant that I wanted what he was experiencing that moment. So on the way home that night I set myself a goal of working a state high school basketball championship.

For years and years, each night when I went to bed, I imagined myself in that game at Market Square Arena. I could hear the crowd; I could see the players’ faces, the fear in some of their eyes, and the supreme confidence in the eyes of others. I could feelthe excitement. I would even get chills down my spine just imagining it, again and again. Driving to and from games, I would daydream the exact same image. I never tired of it. And as I did it more and more, I had no doubt that it would happen.

I won’t bore you with all of the details, but suffice it to say that I got my chance. As a matter of fact, I had the honor of being selected to work more than one of those games, although they wound up being Texas State Championships, not Indiana, and that ain’t all bad!

My point in sharing this story is that I learned a very powerful lesson from this without anyone ever sharing the practice of visioning with me. The experience I had, whether it was the actual state championship games themselves, or any of the many exciting and equally important games I had the privilege to work during my career were exactly as I imagined them. And as I reminisce writing this blog, I can feel it again as if it were happening once again, right here, right now. It is incredible how powerful this approach is.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve focused on the importance of setting the goals you want to accomplish in life. We’ve even explored how to do that. This week’s lesson is all about the power of envisioning yourself having already accomplished those goals.

One of the most powerful ways to accomplish that, and keep it in front of you every day so you do not lose sight of them, is through Vision Boards. Mine is a 20” x 30” foam backed board that has pictures of what I now have set as my goals along with an affirmative statement below each describing what it feels like to have already accomplished it.

It is leaning up against the mirror in my bathroom so I see it every morning. I take a moment before my day gets going to do some of that visioning I did in my basketball career, knowing that I will accomplish every one of those goals I now have in front of me.

If you’d like a document describing how to build your own vision board, send me an email to bcaponi@caponipg.com and I’ll send it to you.

Caponi Performance Group and Contact Science jointly market the telephone prospecting and cold calling solution called 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 817 224-9900 or at barry@coldcalling101.com. You can also find answers to many of your challenges in our books: Contrary to Popular Belief, Cold Calling DOES Work! Volume I: Effectiveness, The Art of Appointment Makingand Volume II: Efficiency, the Science of Appointment Making.

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A simple way to set goals.

January 11th, 2012 by Barry Caponi

A powerful and easy to implement goal setting process that works in both our business and personal lives.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” In practical terms, what he’s saying is that if we don’t have a written set of goals that we’ve made public in some fashion (to help us stick to them), it’s just too easy to let life’s events lead us down a road to a destination different than the one we envisioned.

Last week, I talked about how to make our goals ‘public’, through the use of Vision Boards. This week, I’ll tackle the process of actually setting the goals.

Years ago, I learned a simple, yet powerful method to set goals. The process is called GOSPA and I believe it came out of IBM. My wife and I use it every year to set our business and life goals. It is very much a part of the fabric of our life now.

GOSPA stands for Goals, Objectives, Strategies, Plans, and Activities. The simple way to explain the process is that Goals are our dreams. These can be qualitative, so they don’t necessarily need to be time bound. This step is where we want to let our imaginations run free. As a matter of fact, Jim Collins, author of, From Good to Great, coined the acronym, BHAG—Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Make those Goals BHAGs to get you excited.

Objectives, Plans, and Activities are measurable, time bound and assignable. Objectives are annual, Plans are quarterly, and Activities are monthly.

What makes the GOSPA process so powerful, though, is the Strategies section. After setting qualitative goals and quantitative annual objectives, it causes us to think about how to accomplish our Goals and Objectives. This step involves a lot of thought that sometimes may even cause us to go back and change a Goal, but many times changes the timeline (Objectives) as the how we’ll accomplish things gets fleshed out. I believe this is what separates this process from other goal setting approaches I’ve seen before. It helps us be more reasonable when setting our measurable and time bound expectations.

It would take too long to describe the whole process here, but I do have two documents that describe both the GOSPA process and how to create a vision board if you’re interested. Just send me an email at bcaponi@caponipg.com with GOSPA in the subject line and I’ll send you both.

Caponi Performance Group and Contact Science jointly market the telephone prospecting and cold calling solution called 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 817 224-9900 or at barry@coldcalling101.com. You can also find answers to many of your challenges in our books: Contrary to Popular Belief, Cold Calling DOES Work! Volume I: Effectiveness, The Art of Appointment Makingand Volume II: Efficiency, the Science of Appointment Making.

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Two simple steps to make this year the best year of your life.

January 4th, 2012 by Barry Caponi

“The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way.” Tony Robbins – Awaken the Giant Within

The beginning of the new calendar year always brings new energy and excitement for each of us. This will be the year! I’m going to accomplish so much. This year will be different. I will not allow myself to continue with those bad habits that suck time and positive energy out of my days this year.

Sound familiar? And does March, or even February still hold the same energy and excitement? If you are like most people, “Not so much,” as the saying goes. So how can you remedy that? Here are two simple steps to start that process in a way that is sustainable.

Start by making a commitment to break your old patterns that start your day. In his book, Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins talks about how to break old habits that sabotage us. He says that we must find ways to break the patterns of the old habit. I’ve never spoken to anyone that does not have a ‘ritual’ that starts their day. Find a way to break those old patterns and establish a new ritual that contains these two steps.

1. I review my Vision Board (more on that in two weeks) each morning before I do anything else. It is leaning against the mirror in my bathroom (sorry for the visual…). I take a moment and look at each life goal depicted on it before I do anything else. It regenerates excitement about where I am going and recharges my energy level so that by the time I’m done with breakfast and in my office, I am focused again on the things that are important in life. It keeps me from doing the things I’d rather do before doing the things that I need to do first thing. My days seem to snowball in the direction they begin, regardless of whether I get started down the right or wrong path.

2. Read 10 pages of a self-improvement book each morning before you start your day. I do this in my office before I do anything else. If you’re looking for a suggestion of where to start, try Tony’s book.

During the month of January I will be dedicating this blog to getting off to a great start in 2012. Next week I’ll introduce you to a powerful, yet easy to use goal setting process I learned from IBM years ago. In week three we’ll then talk about the Vision Board I mentioned above and the power they bring to those that use them (don’t succumb to the ITC disease—I’m Too Cool—because there are scientific studies behind why it works). In week four, I’ll cover how to determine the weekly and daily activity levels necessary to be successful in attaining your quota this year.

Caponi Performance Group and Contact Science jointly market the telephone prospecting and cold calling solution called 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 817 224-9900 or at barry@coldcalling101.com. You can also find answers to many of your challenges in our books: Contrary to Popular Belief, Cold Calling DOES Work! Volume I: Effectiveness, The Art of Appointment Makingand Volume II: Efficiency, the Science of Appointment Making.

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Setting the basic activity objectives for the selling process.

The most powerful way to accomplish goals.

A simple way to set goals.

Two simple steps to make this year the best year of your life.