How to motivate our sales teams to cold call in a tough economy
All indications are that 2009 is a tougher year to find prospects than we’ve experienced recently, so with more people saying ‘no’ to us on cold calls, how do we keep motivated to keep making those dials?
This question came up during one of our free webinars this past week. There are three answers to that question depending on whether we’re interested in addressing the symptom or the cause.
Answer No. 1 – If we want to bury our head in the sand ignore the cause, here’s the ‘easy’ way out that we can use to motivate ourselves to keep cold calling.
First of all, remember, there are only three sources of Initial Appointments which start a buying cycle: marketing programs that generate leads for us, networking and referrals, and good old fashioned cold calling. If we’re not seeing enough leads and/or referrals, we have no other choice than to cold call. It is cold call or lose our job. If that’s where we are, and fear is not how we wish to motivate, then here’s an approach to put the most positive (motivating) spin on the situation.
For those of us who’ve been selling for a while, we’ll recall the old adage of every ‘no’ gets us closer to a ‘yes’, right? So here’s the positive way to look at that in a cold calling environment. Divide the average size of a sale by the number of dials it takes in order to gain that sale (you’ll probably have to guess in the beginning). That will give us the value of each dial we make. For instance, if our average sized sale is $5,000 and it takes 200 dials to get enough Initial Appointments that result in one sale, then each time we pick up the phone and dial, it is worth $25 to us. If we can make 20 dials per hour, we’re ‘making’ $500 per hour…not bad, eh?
Keep track of the value of those dials in a ‘virtual’ bank. We get to withdraw the balance of our account only upon making a sale, but in the meantime, we can watch the value of our virtual bank account go up with every dial.
Another approach is to make a game out of it and come up with an incentive program for the appointments (particularly if the buying cycles are long so that the final reward is way out there).
Answer No. 2 – If we really want to address the root cause of the challenge, then we’ve got to look at what can we do to reduce the time to make those dials (efficiency) and reduce the number of dials needed (effectiveness).
Hopefully without sounding self-serving, ColdCalling101 does exactly that. Benchmarks show the efficiency component to our solution provides the ability to make twice the dials in the same amount of time, even if we’re no better at converting those conversations we do get into appointments.
The effectiveness component steps us through a process in which we track and predict the most common negative responses and questions we’re hearing, craft answers to them and uses the techniques of The Formula to Counter them and turn more of them into Initial Appointments. The result is a reduction in the number of dials necessary to make a sale.
If you haven’t tuned in to one of the webinars where we discuss 2009’s most common ‘no’ (no budget) and how to handle it, go to Cold Calling 101 » Upcoming Events and register. (It’s free.) If you want to know more about how we help our clients simultaneously improve effectiveness and efficiency, give us a call at 214 483-5800.
Answer No. 3 – Back on August 22, 2007, I wrote a Blog about why more civilian marathoners run the 26 miles they set out to than Navy S.E.A.L. trainees who are asked to run until they can no longer go with no end in site. (It’s because the civilians know where the ‘end’ is.) Use our Activity Calculator (it’s free for the asking) to determine how many dials need be made each day. That way, at least our callers will have a goal in mind each day based on some form of logic.
And remember, nothing gets us more motivated than getting some appointments, but the toughest dial is always the first.
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