With the holidays in the rear-view mirror, we can reflect on the time-honored tradition of gift giving. Whether you’re someone who gives a single gift or twenty gifts to your loved ones, the premise is the same. Figure out what they would like, find it, buy it at a store or online, get it home, wrap it, and put a bow on it. On Christmas eve or Christmas day, you present the gift. That’s the difference between getting ready to give a gift and the act of gift-giving. Getting ready requires a lot of thought, time and work, while the act of gift giving takes only a moment.
A similar scenario where salespeople spend time getting ready before conducting an act happens with prospecting for new business.
While not all salespeople are required to prospect, those who do often follow the gift giving ritual where they spend quite a bit of time getting ready before making their calls. It should be the complete opposite of that, which reminds me of this great scene from Seinfeld.
Getting ready should take almost no time, and the actual prospecting should take most of the time. So it’s the opposite. Watch my short rant about getting ready before you continue reading below.
Should you have a list? Yes.
Should it be filtered by your targeted audience? Yes.
Should it have phone numbers? Yes.
Should you have a wish list? Yes.
Should you have a plan? Yes.
Should you do any of this during business hours? No.
Get out your calendar and schedule an appointment for the time you need to prospect. Depending on what your plan (see below) requires, that could be one hour, two hours or three hours each day, for eternity. Treat that appointment as you would a sales call and don’t cancel it or reschedule it.
You should have a plan that identifies the number of attempts, conversations and new meetings you must schedule each day in order to meet your new business goals based on your current win rate. For example, keeping the math simple, if you need to close $100,000/month in new business, you have a win rate of 50%, and your average sale is $25,000, then you must close 1 sale per week. Go ahead, do that math, and we’ll continue.
To close 1 per week, with a 50% win rate, you need 2 qualified opportunities, 4 prospects, and 8 new suspects per week. To funnel (see what I did there?) 8 new suspects (new meetings) into the pipeline each week, you must calculate your phone conversion rate. Let’s say it’s 20%. That means you must have five conversations to book 1 new meeting. Scheduling 8 new meetings will require 40 conversations per week. To make it less overwhelming, that’s 8 conversations per day. If it takes 10 call attempts to have a conversation, that’s 80 call attempts. A dial that goes straight to voicemail where you don’t leave a message takes about a minute. So that’s 80 minutes. The 8 conversations should take no longer than five minutes each or forty minutes. That comes to two hours per day with your goal being to get 8 no’s. (You might screw up twice and get a couple of meetings scheduled).
In summary, spend a night getting ready, call your ass off each day, and quota-busting sales success will be yours.
