If cold calling, how many targets can a sales rep pursue each year?
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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