Call Quantity or Call Quality?
Every outside/field sales person has heard “the old chestnut” about the law of averages and how sales is “just a numbers game.” According to the law of averages, if you make 10 calls, you’re going to get 3 opportunities to pitch your offer and out of those three offers, you’ll make one sale.
But this doesn’t explain how some field sales representatives consistently outperform their colleagues.
What’s the difference and how can you join the high performers? Do the big producers simply make more calls or do they make higher quality calls?
Ah, the old chestnut!
In this article, we’re going to crack the old chestnut of call quantity vs call quality with three rules that will help your growth in activity and results:
Rule #1: Know How Call Quantity Impacts Call Quality
Call quantity can have either a positive or a negative impact on your call quality. It all depends on how you approach your calls. If you treat every call simply as another notch in your belt and focus only on getting through your 10 calls for that day, your calls will end up rushed, impersonal and of low-quality.
However, a low call quantity can also lead to poor quality calls. This is because call reluctance can fill your mind with doubts and negative self-talk. Inevitably you become the architect of your own underperformance.
Your fears and negative thoughts can’t be overcome by affirmations and positive thinking alone, you have to drown them out with actions that outweigh the fears. Additionally, by making consistent sales calls, you sharpen your communication skills in front of an interested and qualified prospect.
So here are four daily habits to help you use call quantity to keep your mind sharp and to create the momentum you need to perform higher quality calls:
- Instead of giving yourself a sales quota, work on a call quota. Make a commitment to achieve this quota every day, no matter how many sales you’ve made.
- Put importance before urgency. Start the day with acting on the most important calls to build a sense of early achievement. This will get you in the frame of mind for prospecting and set the pace for your entire day. Avoid going to the office first up as it is potentially a major distraction and time robber
- When you make a sale, don’t take a break to celebrate, keep moving until lunchtime and use that positive momentum to your advantage.
- Just before you would normally finish for the day, make one more sales call and give it everything you’ve got.
Rule #2: No is a Better Goal than Yes
The leading cause for low quality and low quantity calls is fear, negativity and procrastination. To overcome this fear, you have to step into it by having a positive attitude about getting rejected. The mistake many sales people make is becoming too emotionally involved and even obsessed with hearing the word yes.
This makes “no” a painful word, which can be debilitating when attempting to make lots of calls in a day knowing that a proportion may end in a no.
It’s impossible to remove rejection from the sales equation. Instead work with it.
Every experienced sales person knows that for every yes there will be a number of no’s. So if you budget for the no’s being a reality of a life in sales, you will find that you no longer associate fear or failure with the customer declining to proceed. In fact you can reframe the no as being one step closer to the yes!
So no moves from being a negative construct in your mind to a positive because the law of averages means you are one step closer to the yes. So set a budget for the no’s.
Rule #3: Separate Work from Learning
It’s important to learn and to master your craft as a sales person by analysing, refining and perfecting your pitch and by assessing your progress in achieving sales objectives. Don’t make the mistake of mixing up your learning time with your working time, thus getting only a fraction of the benefit you could be getting from both.
The best way to keep up your momentum and achieve call quantity AND quality at the same time is to just keep making calls. Don’t stop to analyse what just happened on a previous call, don’t sit out in your car or at your phone thinking “I should have said XYZ to that prospect,” and don’t stop to refine your pitch between calls. That is an activity for the day’s end or on the trip home.
All of the above behaviors draw you back into the privacy of your own mind, which makes it harder to switch gears and to be “present” when making sales calls. But making calls helps you to stay out of your own head and keeps you sharp and alert during your calls, your pitches and your closes.
So instead of trying to switch gears between that and making your calls, work your entire day to completion without stopping between calls. Then, spend some of your evening, your weekend hours, or your commute, analysing your approach, refining your pitch and coming up with new ways to answer client objections and concerns.
Rule Recap and Action Challenge
These three rules should give you plenty to focus on for the next month, and applying them consistently will significantly contribute to your sales success. Here’s a recap and challenge for applying these rules right away…
Rule #1: Use Call Quantity to Your Advantage
- Instead of giving yourself a sales quota, work on a call quota. Make a commitment to achieve this quota every day, no matter how many sales you’ve made.
- Every morning, put importance before urgency. Leave the office admin until the afternoon and seize the day by making customer calls first thing. Most buyers prefer to buy in the first half of the day, especially over the phone.
- When you make a sale, don’t take a break to celebrate yet, keep moving until lunchtime and use that positive momentum to your advantage.
- Just before you would normally finish for the day, make one more sales call and give it everything you’ve got.
Rule #2: Set Yourself a “No Quota”
Instead of setting a goal to hear yes so many times a day, set yourself a goal to hear no more than your quota for no’s. Then monitor how many no’s you do face before getting to yes. Get curious and adjust your approach accordingly.
This way, you won’t stop and smell the roses once you hit your “yes quota.” Instead, you’ll keep making your sales calls simply to not overshoot your “no quota.”
Rule #3: Separate Work from Learning
By following rules one and two, you should have plenty to do during your working day. Now, set aside a time away from territory to practice and refine your pitch and to assess your progress in achieving your sales goals.
Make it happen!
BIG Blog
Modern account managers have a slightly different focus than field sales people when it comes to building sales and increasing earnings. A sales person is all about immediate results: more prospects, more sales, more money earned per sale.
However, an effective account manager is focused on the longer-term repeat business, referrals and increased customer loyalty. This requires a different set of skills than the skills required to drive sales through traditional prospecting and selling.
In this article, we’ll share with you four rules which modern account managers use to increase repeat business, get more referrals and increase customer loyalty…
Rule #1: Add More Value First, Earn More Money Second
A common error made by inexperienced account managers is focusing too much on driving sales to existing customers through higher priced lines or new product developments.
While these strategies can grow sales, they should not be achieved at the expense of the client relationship.
When a customer is sold lines, which are not in their strategic best interest, the sale comes at the expense of the relationship. The same thing happens when a customer is sold services that the account manager is unable to build value in to the client relationship by over delivering on service fulfillment.
The effective account manager however will focus first on over delivering value for the products and services already purchased by the customer, thus raising the customer’s perception of value. Once the customer is 100% confident that they’ve made a wise purchase in first instance, they’ll usually close themselves on future sales.
Rule #2: Don’t Just Follow Up, Follow Through
Another common error made by inexperienced account managers is focusing too much on follow up and not enough on follow through. Follow up is simply having a well-organized contact plan with existing customers in order to assess their needs and to collect orders.
However, follow through is being committed to creating an compelling customer service experience on the products and services already purchased by the customer. A customer is more likely to re-order or upgrade if they feel that they’ve received MORE than their money’s worth on the products and services previously purchased.
If you want to know whether you’re focused on follow up or follow through, just ask yourself these four questions:
- Do I contact customers only when it’s time to re-order, upgrade or to ask for a referral or a review?
- Do I make the same amount of calls JUST to check on a customer’s satisfaction as I do to solicit a referral, a review, an upgrade or a re-order?
- Do I reach out to my customers to wish them well on their birthdays or special events?
- Do I follow through my verbal commitments to my customers with timely actions?
If you didn’t answer yes to all these questions, you can gain MORE sales opportunities by engaging your customers in a few more “non-sales oriented” actions.
A successful account manager knows that they’re always selling, whether they’re wishing a client happy birthday or just checking in to make sure the client is getting the most value out of their recent purchases. Try it and monitor the results.
Rule #3: Education Beats Persuasion
Robert G. Allen, the author of “Multiple Streams of Income” once said:
“No matter what your product is, you are ultimately in the education business. Your customers need to be constantly educated about the many advantages of doing business with you, taught to use your products more effectively, and taught how to make never-ending improvement in their lives.”
Mediocre account managers rely primarily on persuasion when it comes to making repeat sales; every attempt to get a customer to renew or to upgrade or to re-reorder is almost like closing a brand new sales relationship.
But great account managers know that through consistent customer education, they can increase the customers value awareness and get the client to persuade themselves to renew, to upgrade or to re-order.
A well-educated customer has full understanding of the value of your product or service, and that’s why they need little or no persuasion when it comes to making repeat orders, renewals or upgrades.
Rule #4: Magnify Your Referral Power with Social Media
Every experienced sales person today knows that referral business is the secret to higher profit margins and growth. However, modern account managers understand how the age of Social Media has completely changed the referral process.
The age of Social Media has made it possible to get more “mileage” out of your customer recommendations by getting those recommendations posted online where the whole world can see them.
Just think about where you go to do your research about a company before making a purchase decision. Do you go to the company’s website to find out how great they think they are, or would you rather know what their current customers are saying about them?
By making a commitment to get your customer recommendations to happen out in cyberspace, you create a virtual billboard that will outsell even your most effective advertisements. Are you currently active on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter? What is stopping you embracing the greatest revolution in how customers choose to buy? If you are not there, you can be sure your competition is. Do it today!
Power Recap! What Will You Do Next?
Now you have four solid rules for building stronger customer relationships, selling more products and services and turning a single customer recommendation into dozens or even hundreds of recommendations.
What will you do now to put this to work and increase YOUR sales outcomes and personal rewards?
You can start by adding value first and letting the money come second, following through just as much as you follow up, building a system for educating your customers on the value of your products and services and by getting your customer recommendations posted where the world can see them.
Get started now!
BIG Blog
Anyone who’s led a sales team knows that only one thing matters when it comes to sales and that’s results. When the numbers are added up and it’s time to get paid, the three most important metrics are:
1. More qualified leads
2. More conversions
3. More value per sale
In this article we’ll discuss three simple strategies modern sales managers use to help their team get more qualified leads, more conversions and more value per sale.
#1: Good Priorities: Hiring First, Motivating Second The most common challenge for sales manager is how they can keep their sales team motivated. If a sales manager’s primary concern is keeping their sales people motivated, they should probably look at their hiring strategy first. There’s a saying in the sales world that goes: “You can’t train out a bad hiring decision.” The same is true for motivation. You can’t use motivation to glaze over a bad hiring decision. Motivation and training are vital to sales management success, but only if they’re invested into thirsty sales people. Thirsty sales people are sales people who are self-motivated because of their own internal desire to succeed. When you invest your energy into training, coaching and motivating them, you get a much higher return than you would from those sales people who have no internal sense of motivation. It’s like the saying goes… “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.” Ever tried leading a dozen horses to water every day AND having to force their heads down and make them drink? After a few weeks of that, you’ll be the one in need of motivation! (Or a drink!) So how do you hire and work only with thirsty sales people? We’ll talk about that in just a moment. Let’s look at the second strategy modern sales managers use to get results from their team…
#2: Consistent One on One Coaching This seems almost too simple to mention, but it’s also really easy to neglect the habit of consistent coaching, and regular training. A popular financial coach named Dave Ramsey once said: “A little bit consistent makes a lot, a lot inconsistent doesn’t make much.” The same is true in developing sales people. Consistent sales training and coaching creates momentum and helps sales teams to stay focused, in both the good times and the tough times. Ask any sales person how they hit a slump and most of them will say they’ve lost their momentum. Consistent training and coaching is the key to helping your team keep up this momentum. It provides new strategies, reminds them of what they already know and helps them to keep their skills sharp. Consistency also sends a powerful message about how dependable a sales manager is thus increasing trust and accountability with their sales team. So if consistent sales training and coaching is so important, why is it so easy to let it fall away? Most of the time it’s because it’s working! When a sales manager starts seeing results, they get comfortable and start thinking that the development activity is no longer needed. Big mistake! There’s a saying that goes: “The best time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining!’” Unfortunately, it’s also the easiest time to crawl into the shade and take a nap. But effective sales managers know that a sales person is most receptive to training then they’re feeling positive because of a recent success. That’s why good sales managers use this positive energy to create more success through consistent development activity and accountability.
#3: Good Energy Management On most sales teams, 80% of the results are being created by less than half of the sales people. However, one slight shift in the sales manager’s response to this statistic will make a night and day difference in the overall effectiveness of the team AND the manager’s ability to stay motivated and positive. That difference is this…
- Ineffective sales managers invest 80% or more of their energy into coaching, training and managing the less effective sales reps
- Effective sales managers invest the majority of their energy into coaching and training their top performers
Investing your energy into coaching and training the top performers has a “trickle down” effect on other team members. It also gives you the opportunity to duplicate yourself by turning your top performers into team leaders who can coach and train other team members. Most important, when your best performers are at the top of their game, it raises the bar and challenges the less adept sales people to either press in or to make their exit. This is how you go from being a sales manager who has to constantly “carrot and stick” more than half of your team to one who builds a winning team starting from the top down. This is why it’s so important to know how to hire thirsty and self-motivated sales people. How do you hire and work only with thirsty sales people? Here are four characteristics to look for:
- They’ll tolerate short term discomfort for the sake of creating long term results.
- They’ll delay pleasure for the sake of creating future success.
- They’ll handle both a “Yes” and a “No” without losing their cool
- They’ll bring their own specific goals to the table instead of relying on a quota to set their performance standard
Warning: Action Required! Now you’ve got three strategies that are simple and effective enough to put into practice starting right now.What can you expect from taking action on these?
- More qualified leads
- More sales
- More money per sale
If YOU are thirsty for results, it’s time to get busy! Make hiring a priority over motivating, get that consistent training going and invest your energy into turning your top performers into leaders. Keep selling!