Cold Calling B2B: Part 3

"What you focus on is what grows"

I recently let a sales person go.  It was a bummer because the guy had so much potential.  So much.  When he was reassigned to be under my care versus his previous boss, I pulled out a 90 day plan to turn his sales around.  It obviously didn't work.  Why?

I could not get him to see that he needs to measure his own activities.  His low sales, according to him, was the fault of operations, the low economy, tight budgets, everything except his performance.  I asked him to measure just three activities and report them at the end of the week to me.
         #1, how many cold calls are you making a day?
         #2, how many appointments are you setting a week
         #3, how much business was closed that week.

Since he didn't want to track his own activity, he refused to send in his weekly reports and therefore, the amount of activity that generates sales was far too low.

When we track what we do, we can set goals for expansion and determine how effective our activities are.

I have studied systems of cold calling ever since I worked in a cold call center in 1994.  Unless you are a large company designed for cold calling with the technology to back it up, the best system is not a 100% technology based system.

At today's current technologies I haven't seen a software or web  application that can tally the result of the call as fast as the system I will give you.  Most of them require at least two clicks of the mouse.  My system is a swipe of the pen.

Many of the small and midsize companies use applications like ACT!, Goldmine, and Saleforce.com. Larger companies Microsoft's Dynamics CRM, Oracle CRM, and SAP.  I'm a BIG believer is using these applications.  One of the biggest reasons for failure of sales reps is not utilizing their CRM program.  They fail to put the results of meetings, conversations, and scheduled activities in it.

The objection I hear over a manual tally system is, "Mike, our software can pull the reports so we can find out how many attempts, conversations, and follow up activity or appointments were mad.  Why should we bog down the sales person with a manual activity tracking system?"

First, the system I am about to share does not bog down the sales person.  It is as fast as a slash with the pen on a piece of paper and can be done while the sales person or computer is dialing the next person.

Second, a computer generated report does not push the sales person to make 5 more calls.  After you have called 20 people you don't know if you have made 20, 25 or 15 dials.  If the daily goal is 50 dials a day or 10 contacts a day the report generated an hour, a day, or a week later, does not help the sales person know how many more calls they need to make right NOW!

So here is the system 

This system I found in the book Prospecting Your Way to Sales Success by Bill Good.  Highly recommend the book to you.  One of my sales mentors, Jim Leslie, once said, if there was only one book on phone selling or cold calling that he would recommend to his kids, this was it.  I agree.

I have a template I print out that has 20 columns and five rows.  Thus in each space I record a call.  I can dial 100 calls and know what my results are.  If I dialed a full row and three on the next row I immediately know I made 23 dials.

In each space write a "/" for each dial you make.  When I get a hold of the person I am calling for I slash a "\" across the first mark making an "X". 

• If the contact says, "Not interested," I thank them for their time, I write "NI" for "no interest" next to their contact information on my list and go on to the next call. 
• When the contact tells me they want more information sent to them, I draw a box around the "X" to signify this became an "information" lead and write "Info" on my contact list.
• When the contact agrees to an appointment, I write an "A" in front of the "X" showing  "AX".  I then write "A" on the list and the date and time of the appointment.

At the end of the day I can quickly, and "quickly" is the key word here, see how many dials I made, how many information leads were generated and how many appointments I made.  Depending on your companies needs, those numbers can either be manually entered in a spreadsheet or you can run a report from your CRM software to get your weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual numbers.

At the end, and "end" is the key word this time, of your cold calling time, go back to your contacts and start entering only those leads you made some contact with.  Enter them as no interest with a future call scheduled at a time appropriate to your business.  Enter them as an information lead and send that information to those leads.  Enter your appointments and sales with those who set appointments or bought from you.  Do all the follow up activity produced in during your cold call time after your calling activity.  If you don't you will get side tracked in your calling and will not make as many calls.

Before you trash the system, try it.  If you would like a copy of my template I am happy to send it.  Simply connect to me via LinkedIn by clicking this link:  Mike's LinkedIn Profile and send an email asking for it.

Let me know how it goes.  Next time we will discuss whether you should use a script or not and how to figure out what your are going to say to get them to buy.