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May 26th, 2010 by Barry Caponi
When cold calling for appointments, it is important to note that if we follow a ‘Best Practice’ that consists of a certain number of attempts to reach someone, there is a finite number of targets we can pursue in a year. Part 2 of 3.
In last week’s blog, we explored the concept that it was important to have a well designed ‘Best Practice’ for cold calling that leverages the limited resource our telephone prospecting represents.
This week we’ll examine the components of a ‘Best Practice’ or framework for what we call a ‘Cycle’. Here are some simple questions to ask ourselves when designing one. But before I do that, here’s an example of a Cycle.
4 x 5 x 90
The first number designates the number of attempts I will make in this particular Cycle. The second number indicates the number of business days between calls, and the third number tells us how many days we’ll wait until we start a new Cycle assuming we do not reach the person during this Cycle.
There is no ‘Science’ to the design of appointment setting Best Practices, but here are a few questions to ask ourselves when designing a Cycle:
1. What level of buyer am I calling into? The easier it is to get a hold of the person we’re calling does have bearing on both the number of attempts and the delay between calls.
2. How many targets are there in my universe of potential suspects? The more there are, the fewer attempts I might make during a cycle, the fewer days I might wait in between, and the more I might wait before attempting another round of calls because I want to reach out to more targets each year. If I have a very few targets in my universe, I would probably at least shorten the wait between Cycles.
3. When do I cross the line between being a persistent sales professional and becoming a pest or irritant?
Next week we’ll tackle the question of how many targets is the ‘right’ number to pursue in a territory during a given year.
For additional information, you might also take a look at my blog from May 12th of this year regarding when is enough, enough?
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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May 19th, 2010 by Barry Caponi
When cold calling for appointments, it is important to note that if we follow a ‘Best Practice’ that consists of a certain number of attempts to reach someone, there is a finite number of targets we can pursue in a year. Part 1 of 3.
Why is that important to understand? Several reasons:
1. In my blogs dated June 4, 2009 and September 16, 2009, I shared some statistics that indicate that most appointments (and sales) are set/made on the fifth through the twelfth attempts, not on the first. Therefore we should have a ‘Best Practice’ that includes reaching out to qualified suspects at least that many times.
2. There is also finite number of dials each of our reps has to invest each year. For instance, if our reps commit to calling one hour a day and leave voicemails, they can effectively make about 20 dials an hour if they use our recommended product, Klpz. Therefore, they only have the capacity to make 4,400 dials over a typical year (220 selling days). The concept should then be, how to best invest those 4,400 hundred dials. Waste not, want not, as the old saying goes.
3. Lastly, lead generation, or even list generation or list purchase, can be expensive. Sales reps by nature tend to be impatient. They try to contact someone a couple of times, aren’t successful and turnaround and ask, “May I have another please? That one sucked?” If we understand that it takes many attempts to get the appointment, it is wasteful to not have a ‘Best Practice’ in place that does not contain rules for multiple attempts to reach someone. It is also doubly wasteful to throw one away that has not been pursued adequately enough as we not only wasted the investment in attempting to contact the first target, but we also then turn around and unnecessarily invest in the acquisition of another one to replace that one.
So now that I’ve made this suggestion that we should have a ‘Best Practice’ for cold calling, you are probably asking:
1. What’s involved in the design of one of these ‘Best Practices’?
2. Is there also a way to figure out how many targets a rep could reasonably pursue in a year?
As I promised to keep these blogs relatively short when I began them back in 2007, we’ll tackle each of those questions over the next two blogs.
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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May 12th, 2010 by Barry Caponi
Sales people many times ask me how many cold calling attempts to contact someone are too many.
That question actually comes in several flavors. For instance, how many times should I call this person today if I don’t get through, or how many times should I call this person over time until the law of diminishing returns kicks in and I’d be better off calling someone else for the first time rather than calling this same person again?
The reason this came to mind today is that I am in Chicago where I gave a talk yesterday to the National Automated Merchandising Association. I’m staying with my dad who is retired. He went with me yesterday, so we were gone all day.
When we got home last night, he printed out a list of calls he had received during the day off of his answering machine. There was one phone number on the list fourteen times. (I’m not kidding.) It was a stock broker who has never sold him anything, but has been calling him for a number of years. When he spoke with the broker today (you guessed it, he called again), he tried to sell my dad a twenty year bond. My dad is 85 years old. Do the math…my dad did.
There are two points to this story. 1) This guy has talked to my dad on numerous occasions. He has never asked my dad what his investing goals are. He only knows my dad is a pretty active trader. So when he calls, he’s most of the time trying to interest him in things that just don’t make sense or that my dad has no interest in. 2) Why did this guy call my dad fourteen times and leave NO messages? Did he think my dad wouldn’t know he called that many times? Did he think that what he wanted to talk about couldn’t stand on its own enough to get my dad to call him back? What kind of credibility does he have with my dad?
Moral of the story: 1) It takes time to make a dial and time is money. Spend those dials just like you would any other limited asset. Make sure it is worth it before you do it. Making another dial to the same number over and over again so that you kid yourself into thinking you’re busy is foolish. Calling someone and throwing mud at the wall to see if something sticks is also a waste of time. Record your activity and look at the outcome. If you don’t like the results, try something else. Don’t keep doing the same thing expecting a different outcome. It’s the definition of insanity.
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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May 5th, 2010 by Barry Caponi
How many times do we hear our sales professionals tell us they’re much better on the phone when they don’t memorize a script? Here’s what we should be telling them in response…
“No problem! I agree with you. What we really should be doing is internalizing it. Make it second nature so that it just rolls off the tongue. Let’s hear yours.”
Be prepared for, “Well I say something like this…” After they stumble through it, go back to the written scripts and ask them how that relates to what the company went through great lengths (not to mention expense) to develop. Then throw as many negative responses as you can at them and see how they handle them. Trust me; they’ll stumble through that as well.
When sales professionals use our methodology called The Formula™, one of the benefits is that they’ll limit the different types of negative responses they’ll hear, which will make their job easier.
So back to the original statement: It really isn’t necessary to ‘memorize’ the scrip, but they do need to ‘internalize’ it.
What’s the difference between memorization and internalization, you ask? Nothing really. But you can tell them that it means to take the script, put it in their own language (without changing the underlying message), and practice enough so that it rolls off the tongue just like conversation. Only then will they deliver the same message every time.
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.
Comments: 2
April 28th, 2010 by Barry Caponi
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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April 21st, 2010 by Barry Caponi
Four Best Practices ideas that sales management can actually apply when our charges are not setting enough Initial Appointments to hit our assigned targets.
First an observation. If we know we’re not setting enough Initial Appointments to feed that hungry beast, the pipeline, there is good news afoot! We have at least a minimal set of metrics or we wouldn’t even know that we’re headed towards disaster. As I have pointed out in the past, (see blogs August 19, 2009, August 26, 2009, September 16, 2009) consistency in making the dials does make a difference.
So if our charges just aren’t making the dials, what can we do if our selling model requires that the sales professional set their own appointments? Here are four ideas.
First things first, people are more apt to buy into a goal they help set. So, take each person through an Activity Calculator exercise (you can download it free from www.caponipg.com) allowing them to help determine what is the appropriate number of dials needed each day. Then get them to commit to that number in writing. If that alone doesn’t work, try these:
- Have them show you each week where they’ve set aside Call Blocks on their calendars to make those calls.
- If that doesn’t work, have them come into the office and make those calls during their chosen Call Blocks.
- If that doesn’t work, then have mandatory Call Blocks in the office at times of your choosing. This can be done in a couple of ways.
- One of our customers uses what he calls Touch Point Tuesdays – No one leaves the office until the appointed number of Initial Appointments is set for the coming week.
- A set aside number of hours each day until the appointed number of Initial Appointments is set for the coming week.
- There is a different approach that I’ve seen managers use effectively in managing remote sales people. Schedule a couple of days to go on calls with them in their territory and give them a minimum number of Initial Appointments and follow-up appointments you want to go on while you’re there. If they don’t set enough, tell them you’re still coming and it will be embarrassing to say the least, not to mention that they’ll have to sit there and make the dials in front of you during those times there aren’t appointments set.
- If those ideas don’t work and others are setting the required number of Initial Appointments, there are two additional arrows left in the quiver – get someone else to make the appointments for them or, well, you know what to do…
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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April 14th, 2010 by Barry Caponi
For those of us who have buying cycles of at least 60 days, it is pretty much too late to influence Q2.
The moral of this story, if you will, is that our appointment making activity is a very accurate predictor of sales. If my buying cycle is 90 days, then Initial Appointments I have today will close on approximately July 14th.
Most managers we run into are nervously concentrating their efforts on what is going to close this month. That is obviously necessary. But to also not concentrate on the effort our sales professionals are putting into setting more buying cycles into motion this month will make us nervous nellies in July as well.
The basic element (and therefore predictor) of an Initial Appointment is the dial. We all should be able to tell how many of those are necessary to generate the necessary number of Initial Appointments we need each month. We all should also be able to accurately determine how many of these precious dials are being made each day. Can you?
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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April 7th, 2010 by Barry Caponi
What are they and how do we improve them? Part four of four – Science (efficiency and improvement).
Are you like a lot of us ‘Hooked on Hopium’ when it comes to the success of your new prospect acquisition strategy? Do you concentrate most of your energy and focus on pursuing prospects that are already in the pipeline? After all, that’s how we get paid, right? We don’t get commissions for finding prospects; we get paid to close them. Our teams are good at closing, but suck at consistently filling the pipeline with quality prospects.
This series of four blogs focuses on the four main elements of a prospect acquisition process and how to improve move the needle in a positive direction on each.
The four parts are:
- Target Acquisition (who do we call?)
- Art Skills (what do we say and how do we say it)
- Best Practices (process and messaging)
- Science Skills (efficiency and improvement)
Part 4 – Science
Science is all about speed in the ability to pursue Targets using the prescribed set of Best Practices, organization and improvement.
Our creator has given each of us the same number of hours each week to attain our goals. In the world of telephone prospecting that is usually stated in terms of each of us has only so many dials in us each year. How we expend those dials is directly proportional to our success. For instance, our product, Klpz, was designed specifically for this task. Therefore, our benchmarks show (and our customers report) that a caller can easily double the number of dials being made per hour of calling. So if we can either increase the number of attempts being made without increasing the time commitment, or make the same number of attempts in half the time, should we not sell more?
Those that do take the time to design and institute a set of well thought out Best Practices generally would like for their charges to be able to follow those Best Practices accurately. Science is the way that is enforced.
Have you (or any of your charges) forgotten to call someone back in a month, or a quarter or whatever they requested? Unless you (or your charges) are super heroes, the answer is yes. It’s why organizations invest a lot of money in CRMs, contact managers and the like.
Lastly, science helps us improve the process by measuring the results and doing so in a way that we are provided the necessary data in a meaningful way (information).
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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March 31st, 2010 by Barry Caponi
What are they and how do we improve them? Part three of four – Best Practices (process and messaging).
Are you like a lot of us ‘Hooked on Hopium’ when it comes to the success of your new prospect acquisition strategy? Do you concentrate most of your energy and focus on pursuing prospects that are already in the pipeline? After all, that’s how we get paid, right? We don’t get commissions for finding prospects; we get paid to close them. Our teams are good at closing, but suck at consistently filling the pipeline with quality prospects.
This series of four blogs focuses on the four main elements of a prospect acquisition process and how to improve move the needle in a positive direction on each.
The four parts are:
- Target Acquisition (who do we call?)
- Art Skills (what do we say and how do we say it)
- Best Practices (process and messaging)
- Science Skills (efficiency and improvement)
Part 3 – Best Practices
The concept of Best Practices contains a lot of different disciplines, but let me address at least a few key ones:
- Are you managing your particular area of responsibility with the concept of territory management in mind? In other words, regardless of who is in a specific territory (virtual or geographic), are you employing a process that will leave the territory better defined and warmer a year from now regardless of whether your current sales professional is even still here or not?
- Do you have a Best Practice that defines the number of times a Target will be called, how frequently, and if no contact is made, how long will you wait to begin the cycle again?
- Do you have your team professionally disengage, asking for permission to check back again in the future if the Target is not ‘in the market’ right now, or do they take the no they hear as a never?
- Do you have your team leave voicemails? Are they different for each attempt in the cycle? It is a great way to leave a commercial message if it is crafted well. And who knows, if the messages are different, sometimes we actually do hit on a hot button by varying our value proposition between several of our strongest.
- Does the Target know that the last attempt is the last attempt for a while? In other words, are you giving the Target a last chance to respond if they want to but are busy?
- How do you on-board new sales professionals? How do you provide them with the Best Practices that are working for your current team?
- Can you tell within the first 30 to 45 days whether your new team member has the aptitude and attitude to succeed or do you wait for the revenue attainment (or lack there of) to tell you that several months down the road?
There are actually a lot more questions I could ask here that we step our customers through to determine how best to tackle this key part of the selling process, but any more at this time I’d either bore you or depress you!
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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March 24th, 2010 by Barry Caponi
What are they and how do we improve them? Part two of four – Art Skills (what do we say, when do we say it and how do we say it).
Are you like a lot of us ‘Hooked on Hopium’ when it comes to the success of your new prospect acquisition strategy? Do you concentrate most of your energy and focus on pursuing prospects that are already in the pipeline? After all, that’s how we get paid, right? We don’t get commissions for finding prospects; we get paid to close them. Our teams are good at closing, but suck at consistently filling the pipeline with quality prospects.
This series of four blogs focuses on the four main elements of a prospect acquisition process and how to improve move the needle in a positive direction on each.
The four parts are:
- Target Acquisition (who do we call?)
- Art Skills (what do we say and how do we say it)
- Best Practices (process and messaging)
- Science Skills (efficiency and improvement)
Part 2 – Art Skills
We just began asking participants who register for our webinars the question of which of these four categories of challenges pose the greatest challenge for them. The answer was overwhelmingly, number two; Art Skills. Most sales professionals just don’t know what to say to open the conversation, let alone what to say when the Target says ‘No’.
There’s not a whole lot I can do to help you fix this challenge in a single blog. However, I can help you identify whether it is something you, as a manager, need to address. Here’s what I would suggest:
- Invest in Klpz as a process engine for telephone prospecting because it will (among other really neat things) automatically provide you with two key ratios to determine whether your charges are struggling with Art.
- The first ratio is the Conversation Ratio – how many dials does it take to produce a conversation with the decision maker our sales professional wishes to meet with. In addition to this being a list problem, a low ratio here suggests we test how well our charges are leaving voicemails, sending coordinated emails and how well they handle gatekeepers.
- The second ratio is the Appointment Ratio – how many conversations does it take to produce an appointment. A low ratio here has only one root issue – what they say, when they say it and how they say it once they are speaking with the person they wish to meet with.
- Okay, maybe number 1 is a bit self-serving, but it really does work. So let’s try this if you’re unwilling or unable to do step 1. Ask your charges to begin writing down the results of their appointment setting process. First, have them record the time they begin and end making dials. Then have them make a tick mark each time they:
- Dial the phone (D)
- Complete a conversation with the person they wish to meet with (CC)
- Leave a voicemail (LVM)
- Get a returned voicemail (RVM)
- Schedule an Initial Appointment (IA)
Trust me, it won’t be exactly accurate, but it will begin to paint a very valuable picture for you as you’ll begin to see patterns and gain insight into the process you’ve never had before. You’ll begin to see things like they are not making as many dials as they say they are because the time they say they are making calls doesn’t match up with what you know they are doing with their days. (BTW, figure on at least 6 minutes a dial if they use a CRM or contact manager; more if they are using spreadsheets or hand written lists. We’ve benchmarked it.)
- In your next sales meeting, ask your team what is the number one negative response they are hearing when they get the decision maker on the phone. Then role-play how they are handling it. The lower the Appointment Ratio, the more you need to be prepared to cringe when you hear what they are saying.
- In a subsequent sales meetings ask them to role-play:
- Leaving voicemails
- Handling gatekeepers
- If you feel overwhelmed at the result – call us. Our typical customer will double or better the number of appointments their teams set.
Okay, sorry for the second commercial in this blog, but the point is if you will do at least steps 2 through 4, you’ll have a really good idea of whether or not Art is something you need to address.
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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