The very most basic things your company needs to know about sales (part 4 of 4)
May 6th, 2011 by Dan Ostlund
This is part four of a four part series, click here for part one, here for part two, and here for part three.
Your day in some more detail
I’m going to assume that you spend most or all of your day doing sales—adjust as necessary if that’s not the case.
Salespeople all have a pipeline—this is the set of prospects or leads that might convert to users or sales. Keeping that pipeline healthy is important. Doing that is often a function of smales (see part 1) which feeds you new leads, it’s also a function of the quality of things that come out of your mouth, but crucially, it’s a function of your personal organization and follow-up.
People that are good at the process aspect of sales have a very high tolerance for making lots of calls and sending out lots of email replies, and all other things being equal, they create an advantage for themselves.
The phone
Many places set really draconian call targets that salespeople must meet each day. Seventy calls, eighty calls, sometimes more. We don’t do that at Fog Creek because these sorts of targets are so easily gamed and don’t often serve your larger business goals.
But the purpose behind them is sound, even if the execution is not. What these goals attempt to capture is the importance of getting on the phone. If you convert the prospects you talk to at a 3% rate, and you talk to one hundred prospects, wallah, you have three new customers. Obviously, if you talk to two hundred prospects, you have six new customers. That’s what these call number requirements are after (by the way, the whole quality section of this series is about improving that conversion percentage).
I much prefer to have that impulse come naturally from the sales people. I certainly monitor the number of calls that are happening, and I’ll have a conversation if they get too low, but an internally motivated person is a million times preferable to the people you have to berate. I hate it, they hate it, and then they are working from fear, and not the personal desire for accomplishment, praise, self-satisfaction, or what have you.
So here is the point: block out a significant section of each day for sustained and uninterrupted calls. Paul Kenny told me the story of the most successful salesperson he ever saw—a guy whose business had failed, and who was doing sales to build up his stock of capital so he could start a new business—in other words, a highly motivated and focused person. This guy, pay attention, there is an important lesson coming here, this guy would block out around four hours each day and make calls non-stop. He made it a personal rule that the phone would not touch the cradle for that whole time, so he kept it draped over his shoulder as he dialed the next call, or made his notes from the previous call.
Similarly, one of the best salespeople we ever had at FogCreek would open up twenty-five or thirty tabs in her browser, each of them a prospect she wanted to call. She worked from right to left through the list and closed each tab when she was done with it.
When you plan your calling day, do your most valuable calls first. Then if you need to slip calls to the next day, you’re shifting the less important ones. Just be cautious that you’re not forever slipping calls that then never get made.
This discipline matters and it makes an enormous difference. It’s not easy, but if you do it, you will be light years ahead of your peers. In fact, you might have to stop calling them peers.
How many calls?
There is no set number since there are so many variables that can affect what makes sense. But keep in mind that many sales people estimate the number of calls they can make based on getting through to people, and so they think they can make eight or twelve calls. This is a mistake. The vast majority of your calls will result in no talking at all.
What you want is a fairly heavy rotation for people you’re trying to get a hold of. Try to reach them often. At one point I discovered that some of the salespeople at Fog Creek would make an initial call to someone with a new trial and if the salesperson didn’t get through, the prospect was put in for another call in two weeks.
Wrong.
Call them the next day. Hell, maybe later the same day. Initially you just won’t leave any voicemail messages. It’s just a call with no result. Note it and move on. Remember this is about keeping your pipeline healthy and having productive conversations. It’s just like the 3% close example above. If 10% of your calls result in a conversation and you have ten calls per day, you get one conversation ….ok, you get it. Make your calls.
A call without a conversation costs you maybe two minutes at the outside. If you’re well organized it’s not unreasonable to think you could do thirty calls in an hour, possibly more. If you have a conversation, fantastic! That’s what we’re after, not some arbitrary number.
Now, I strongly suggest that you reserve an hour or two a day for this level of sustained calling. I don’t think most people can keep that high pace going all day long, but if you do an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, you can certainly keep that up. Do more if you can. And just abandon and forget the notion that you’ll “get to the calls in between other things.” This is a fallacy a fraud and a fantasy.
You must reserve time exclusively for calls. Anything else is sub-optimal and is often just avoidance. Anything else is like hunting for gnats when you can order a porterhouse.
At some point after they’ve been in the rotation for a bit you may shift over to email, leave a voicemail, send a snail mail, put them on a much less frequent rotation, or abandon them. You’ll have to figure out where those lines are, but they are probably not as tight as your first impulse suggests.
Save voicemails for when you’ve tried to reach the prospect five or ten times. Most people just never return voicemails from a salesperson, so this tends to be a waste of time. Opinions differ on this topic, but that’s mine. It really depends on what you have to offer, though. If your voicemail said, “If you call me today I can get you 75% off your purchase,” well, OK, then they’ll call you back.
Follow-up
The purpose of the calls is to help people decide to use your product if it’s a good fit for them. In addition to calling new prospects, you should make follow-up calls so you can keep tabs on how the evaluation is going. It lets you intervene if there are bumps in the road. If a problem has developed and you have not been in contact with them, you will not know it until you’ve lost the sale.
Let me tell you another story.
I recently moved to a new apartment and needed to get blinds for the windows. I had a guy come out and take measurements, show me samples, and give me the whole spiel. Really nice guy. Did a great job. Explained everything clearly and set expectations really well. And then? Nothing. Total silence.
Actually I was on the fence about buying. It was a little more than I wanted to spend, so I sat on the decision for a while. Even so, there is a high chance that if he had called to follow up with me once or twice he could have convinced me to take the plunge.
He just lost a sale because he doesn’t have a good (or perhaps any) system for following up. All I had was a price objection, and he probably has several ways to overcome that. For the investment of maybe two phone calls, he had perhaps a 75% chance to make the sale. In the end I bought from blinds.com and did it myself. Oh well.
The price objection won because that was the only debater at the debate. No one else showed up. When you follow-up you’re getting yourself a seat at the conversation. You might still lose, but you can’t win if you don’t show.
And please remember the cardinal rule—do what you say you will. Part of sales is establishing credibility and trust, and these things can rise and fall on small moments like sending the article you promised to send, so always do that. Get it into your to do list, make a slot for it like it was a call, whatever it takes, but don’t forget.
Don’t chase inside straights
Develop, preferably through data or a formal process, a sense of what constitutes a good lead. Too many times I’ve heard this from a salesperson, “Had a great conversation with Company X and I think they’ll purchase next week.”
Awesome, sounds good.
Me: How many users?
Salesperson: I don’t know.
Me: Did you talk to the person who is going to make the decision?
Salesperson: I think so.
Me: When are they going to make a final decision?
Salesperson: Mmmm, not sure.
Me: What other tools are they looking at?
Salesperson: I didn’t ask.
OK, if you’re that salesperson you don’t get a cookie. You don’t know anything. That’s not a qualified lead, that’s a pipedream.
In order to know which leads are your most important, you need to get some of these very basic facts. If you don’t have those facts you’ll spend your time chasing chimeras while the real prospects go unattended.
We use a checklist to determine where in the buying process any given prospect we’ve spoken to happens to be right now. At a minimum you should be able to answer these questions about any lead you’re spending time on: 1) Who is making the final decision? 2) When are they going to make the decision? 3) How much will they need to buy? 4) What are they using now? 5) What other solutions are they considering?
You’re a lot further ahead if you know these things. If asking about any of this stuff makes you uncomfortable, go back to the questions section. You are trying to gather information so you can save everyone’s time and give them more precise answers to their needs.
Last Thoughts
Anyone can learn to do sales, you just need to have the right mindset. Yes, it can seem very scary, but you’re just talking to other people, who have jobs, and desires, and concerns just like you. Try to be yourself, and remember you are simply having conversations about how to solve a problem.
Like any skill you can get better at it with practice, but find time to practice when you’re not talking to a prospect. No one got any good at the violin by practicing only during concerts.
If you have an obnoxious and pushy sales culture you’re doing it wrong. You can become exceptionally good at sales without making people hate you. In fact, people will really appreciate the help you give them.
Lastly, I’ve got a secret for you. Even though this was directed mainly at people who spend a chunk of time directly in sales conversations, the fact is everyone in your company is in sales. Everyone. Self-identification has nothing to do with it. You have a product or a service, and you want people to buy it or use it (or join or donate). That’s the fundamental purpose of your organization no matter what other noble and laudable goals you adorn it with. Every programmer, receptionist, support tech, accountant, and CEO is a salesperson in your organization, and they would all do well to think about how the above advice might apply to them.
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