Arthur “Red” Motley was known for his conciseness and, true to form, each section of his famous definition of the sales process says a great deal in only a few words:
“Know your customer, know your product; call a lot of people, ask all to buy.”
In a recent post we shared some thoughts on the first three words of his definition, and today’s focus is on the third component of the quote, “call a lot of people,” which refers to the total number of sales contacts – i.e., telephone calls, personal visits or appointments, and emails – that we make each day; and which brings-about an important question: when involved in professional selling, does call volume matter?
We believe the answer is a most definite, “Yes!”
Making a sufficient number of sales calls is important because without an adequate call volume we are likely to miss opportunities and leave ourselves vulnerable to the competition, which might well be making a stronger impact on our marketplace.
But “call a lot of people” does not mean we should call, email or visit lots of people on a haphazard basis, and it doesn’t mean we should contact a lot of different people once or twice.
In fact, too much focus on top-of-the-funnel call volume can be costly, and it’s important to recognize that “call a lot of people” encompasses “all” sales and follow-up calls – those made to unknown prospects, known prospects, and customers!
To optimize results there are four additional factors to consider.
The first of these factors is targeting, as we must contact those who are likely users of our products and services, and who are in a position to evaluate and buy them.
Then, in addition to call volume, we must also pay close attention to call frequency.
If we make only one or two attempts to reach unknown prospects and then move on, we will be missing-out on most (research shows as much as 80%) of the opportunities! Further, once a prospect is identified, it most often requires multiple contacts to make a sale. So, we must contact “known prospects” multiple times after they are entered into the top of our sales funnel in order to advance these opportunities through our sales process.
But calling the same people over-and-over-again or with too much frequency is not effective either, as we can quickly alienate these prospects or customers.
Thus we must also make every call value-added. Simply making calls or just “showing-up” or “checking in” is never enough; the quality of our sales calls is critically-important, and we must have a value-added message and a value-added agenda for each contact.
This will require a degree of pre-call planning.
Finally, we must keep score! As sales professionals we should establish a goal for exactly how many sales contacts we would like to make, on average, each day – and we should maintain an awareness of where we stand with respect to this goal throughout each business day. In addition, it is wise to maintain data on the various types of calls we’re making, such as prospecting calls, assessment calls, presentations or demos, etc. These metrics are the true measures of our productivity.
Yet surprisingly, a multi-year survey indicates that a high percentage of sales people cannot definitively answer the simple question, “On average, how many sales calls do you make in a day?”
In some cases this lack of awareness is due to over-reliance on CRM systems, which are very effective at managing call frequency, but do little to keep a sales person aware of the actual number of calls they are making as each day unfolds. Similarly, in many inside-sales environments the telephone system keeps track of inbound and outbound calls, but this data tends to be shared with the sales people after-the-fact, thus resulting in the same lack of real-time awareness.
In other cases, an absence of proactive front-line sales management is the problem.
Regardless, the best course of action a sales professional can take is to set a personal standard for call or contact volume, and to also maintain personal accountability for maintaining that “successful” average as well as a successful standard of quality and frequency.
As author and founder of makingthenumbers.com Jack Falvey often says, “This is how the best get better at sales!”