How many times do you follow up on a target or prospect?
Only 10% of all sales professionals will make more than three appointment making attempts to contact a target, yet 80% of all sales are made on the fifth through twelfth attempt.
My partner, Bob Howard, calls this the ‘drive by shooting’ approach to appointment setting. We’ll try once or twice and if we don’t get through, we discard that name and look for another one.
We suggest that everyone have an ideal pursuit plan to pursue each target. It is part of what we call Best Practices. In a B2B selling environment, the one we recommend most often is the 4x5x120. That means we’ll make 4 attempts to contact the target during this pursuit. We’ll wait 5 days in between attempts and, if we don’t succeed in contacting them, we’ll try again in 120 days. That means that we’ll make two attempts over a 365 day period.
Do you have an ideal pursuit plan that you follow, or do you haphazardly call a target when you have time? …or when you get ‘around to it’?
May 20th, 2010 at 4:41 am
[...] 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) [...]