Next Steps

6. Managers-Determine whether you want your sales people to be in the business of qualifying leads or calling on people who are qualified? Sales people-you have a say in this too, so don't stop reading.

This is your choice. You can spend money on a highly qualified list or you can spend money by having your sales people's valuable time, their only truly limited resource, spent qualifying leads. You must decide. Now for a caveat. Sometimes you can't buy the list you need. You must create it by making a number of calls from the best list you can buy.

Example: One of the sweet-spots for our company is sales organizations with 10 to 20 people who do business development where phone, voicemail, and email are an important part of their process. Can I buy this list? NOPE! I have to buy another list and make a lot of calls to create the qualified lead list that I want. ( PS: If anyone has this list-I have a check waiting for you!)

There is an alternative. I can buy a good list and then train people to qualify the list for me. So you have one set of sales people calling a good list to ask qualifying questions and then passing those great prospects on to your very high priced sales talent. If you can buy these calls for twenty, thirty, or even fifty bucks an hour hour and your high-priced, very valuable sales talent can net you hundreds or thousands an hour talking to them once they are qualified then- you have huge leverage doing this!

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Sales People! Remember when I said that you have a say in this process? Let's talk about leverage. Let's say that your time, the time you spend talking to qualified prospects, is worth $200 an hour to you, net. Does this seem high or low? I will bet you, even for those earning under $50K a year and on your way up, that this number is low. Keep track of your time and then identify the time when you are actually talking to qualified prospects. Now compare sales resulting from this time to all other activities. I would be very surprised if this is not your most highly leveraged time. And therefore your most valuable!

And I would also guess that you only spend a few hours a week in your most valuable activity. Why? Because you are spending your time qualifying. If this time is worth hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars an hour to you, then what would it mean if you could double or triple that time? So, wouldn't it be worth reaching into your pocket for a small fraction of that amount to pay someone to spend a few hours a week to hand you qualified prospects?

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7. Once you have made the very important decision from number 6-make the mechanics of your call processing system as efficient as you can. When you put all the vectors together, good prospects are the most important single number. After you have good prospects, efficient process makes the mechanics bearable.

More efficient is less painful. So if it takes your people five minutes to process a phone call, find a way to put a system in place that cuts that down to four minutes and they can make 20% more calls in the same amount of time. For a wonderful analysis of what factors affect the efficiency of calling please visit our friend Bob Howard at Contact Science www.contactscience.com for a free webinar on calling efficiency. You will also receive a great free calculator that will let you change variables in process and see affects!

What other process can you improve and make less painful? If email is part of your customers development process, then how can you template it and automate it? If voicemail is part of your process, then make sure template your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and see-you-later voicemails? (we will cover voicemail in upcoming issues.) Have you automated and streamlined as many of the processes not having to do with making the call or knocking on the door as you can?

Look at each of area of pain, every area of wasted key-strokes, steps, drive-time and ELIMINATE IT! Before you can eliminate it, you must find it. You must track and measure and benchmark everything you do with the idea of making it as pain-free as you can.

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Each e-letter will encourage you to take immediate action to implement consultative selling skills and positive leadership principles. 

 

Action item's for part 2 of 9 ways to turn call reluctance into call excitement!

6. Determine if you are best served by making qualifying calls or sales calls to qualified people. Run the numbers! Do cost benefit. Find out if you can farm out qualifying and, if so, how much will it cost? Ask some providers of appointment setting or qualifying to give you a guaranteed return. You guarantee your products and services, don't you?

7. Look at mechanics. Look at process! How many keystrokes. How many things are flow charted and how many are template? How many decisions do reps have to make? How many areas can you help them make those decisions and take the pain away? This customer acquisition process, even if perfectly designed, will have pain! The less pain the more eager to call. The more eager to call, the more calls! The more effective calls, the more sales.

 

Thanks for reading. I look forward to speaking to you again in a few weeks with the last episode of 9 ways to turn call reluctance to call excitement-taking the pain out of sales calls.