Is your sales team just going through the motions when making Cold Calls, or are all of those calls resulting in new business?
I received a call from one of our customers this week. He was very excited because for the first time he could see exactly what his teams were doing in terms of cold calling. He’s a regional sales manager with several sales teams that were trained before the first of the year through one of our appointment setting Prospectors Academies™.
He told us that his reps had been truly pounding the phones now for a couple of months since the training which fixed his lack of activity problem. He also said that the activity was very consistent across his districts. He was also pleased with the fact he was now able to start deep drilling on the process and results a bit more instead of just focusing on the activity levels as he had to do in the past.
Reading his weekly Klpz reports had gotten him to ask why some of his guys were setting appointments like crazy and some were not. As a matter of fact, he was able to see that the ones that were being successful were all in the same districts. He told us that when he role-played with the different districts, they sounded pretty much the same. He told us that the teams that were not setting the appointments were getting discouraged and so are their managers.
Here’s a synopsis of what we found:
· We ran a report that found that his districts that were not performing differed in one key area from those that were having success. To put it frankly, their lists were awful. The successful districts were seeing about a 35% removal rate of names and the unsuccessful ones were seeing a more than 80% removal of names.
What this means is that after following the four steps in the process of contact we set up (we call them Cycles), the rep has three choices of what to do with the target: Recycle them for 120 days and try again; declare Success (they met with them and began a Buying Cycle); or Remove them from the list. After speaking with the District Managers, it became clear that the managers that had taken the time to put some effort into defining the lists their charges would call into (call it a semi-qualified list of suspects if you wish) were experiencing the most success. The ones that did not were filled with targets that were not good fits (for a variety of reasons). The targets were too small, the reps were not getting through to decision makers because a quick conversation with the gatekeeper determined the company was not a good match for their products, or once talking with the decision maker they determined the same thing.
There are two morals to the story. First is that by adding what we call ‘Science’ (Klpz (www.contactscience.com), to the challenge of prospecting for new customers, managers gain access to valuable information none of us have ever had before to help improve our prospecting processes for the first time. Second, we’ve talked about the value of investing time in refining lists and building territories over time in this Blog before (see January 20, 2010, November 4, 2009, March 26, 2009, March 19, 2009, March 11, 2009, and April 23, 2008), so we know the importance of this.
And by the way, just imagine the potential consequences of what might have happened if he hadn’t been able to define the problem. Would have some of his reps quit because of the frustration? Would he have incorrectly assumed he had a closing problem or a rep problem instead of a management problem?
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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