Cold calling is about more than just making dials.
The appointment making process is not just ‘a numbers game’. Most of us sales managers believe it is. Make enough dials and you’ll get sales! And when our sales charges aren’t setting enough Initial Appointments, we respond with another platitude, “Just make more dials!” Let me explain why this is a dangerous thought through a story.
A colleague of mine, Stu Schlackman (http://www.competitive-excellence.com) related the following story to me recently. When he was a young pup, he was hired by a sales training company, handed the yellow pages and told to get on the phone. In his first week, he literally made 1,000 dials (how many of us could do that?), left 650 voicemails, had 50 conversations of which 49 said no and he gave up, got one appointment and one sale (to an existing customer who told him they were going to call him and buy again anyway).
What if he would have had a set of proven Best Practices and a process to follow? What if he would have known how to ‘Counter’ those 49 ‘nos’ he heard? How about if he had had good voicemail scripts so that at least some of the 650 would have returned his calls? What if he would have had good solid questions to ask (we call them ‘Bridge Questions’ http://www.caponipg.com/The%20AM%20Formula%20Description.htm) that would have gotten his targets to stop and think for a moment and enter into a meaningful conversation? And lastly, what if he had been able to make those 1,000 dials in half the time? See http://coldcalling101.com/how-we-help/ for an example of the value of improving those key ratios.
He didn’t last very long there. And, by the way, who do you think the rep that followed him called? Probably started right at the front of the same yellow pages and called the same people, expecting the results to be different.
Now think about the time and money that was wasted recruiting him, vetting him, training him on what he was selling, and finally, paying him to make those calls. We have the tendency to think that our time is not ‘real’ money. We’re there anyway, so it doesn’t ‘cost’ any money out of pocket to repeat this process over and over, right?
Our company, Coldcalling101 www.coldcalling101.com, also must rely on the cold call, but our sales team would have had 36 Initial Appointments out of that 1,000 dials, and done it in half the time. Plus, I would have had real time visibility into the calling, so I could have taken corrective steps before Stu would have burned himself out and left.
The appointment setting process is a very expensive one, even if your sales team is commission only.
By the way, there’s also another self-serving story here. Most sales training company’s expertise lies in the pipeline, or back-half of the selling process, not the first half. They try to apply the same concepts that work well in the pipeline, in the appointment setting process. We eat, sleep and think about this process 100% of the time and we’ve gotten pretty darn good at it.
(See the four part blog beginning on April 8th of this year to read about why the techniques, tools and process that work to get prospects through the pipeline, don’t work getting them into the pipeline.)
Caponi Performance Group and Contact Science jointly market the telephone prospecting and cold calling solution called The Prospector’s Academy™. 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.
Leave a Reply