How much time does it take to set our required Initial Appointments through cold calling and why should we care?
So, how much time will it take? The answer requires us to know five metrics. If you don’t know them, don’t feel bad. Most people don’t. Estimate them for this exercise and then start tracking your results.
· How many Initial Appointments do we need set? (See last week.)
· How ‘cold’ are these names we’re calling? (The worse the list, the more time it will take just to scrub the list for the right names, qualify them, etc.)
· The third metric we call the Appointment Ratio: the number of Initial Appointments we set in relation to the number of conversations we have.
· The fourth metric we call the Conversation Ratio: the number of conversations we create in relation to the number of dials we make.
· The fifth metric is speed: how fast can we move from dialing the first digit of phone number for target A to the dialing of the first digit of the phone number for target B. Remember, for target A, we should leave a voicemail, send an email if I have an address, record the results of the call, record any comments from conversations, select the date for the next call, put it away, select target B, review the history, determine where we are in our Best Practice, and what to do next. Then, dial their number.
Our benchmarks show that on average, it takes anywhere from 2.5 minutes per dial to 5 or 6 minutes depending on your automation (or lack of it). So let’s say we need 96 Initial Appointments this year. Our Appointment Ratio is 25% and my Conversation Ratio is 8%. At 5 minutes per dial, I will need 109 minutes or almost two hours per day. With the correct automation, (we recommend a product called Klpz that front ends CRMs) that is reduced to 55 minutes.
Most of our clients didn’t realize using spreadsheets, Outlook or CRM software to manage calling campaigns could be that expensive in terms of time. And if we’re making $100,000 per year, that one hour saved per day are worth over $1,000 per month in lost productivity. And if that time could be invested in front of customers, the value can be come substantially bigger.
Next week, we’ll address another way to reduce the time it takes to set those appointments.
If you’d like a free calculator to help you see how these numbers work in your environment, send us an email at bob@coldcalling101.com
June 1st, 2011 at 9:17 am
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