Over the past several years, I have spent a lot of my time studying different selling techniques, from Sandler to the SPIN selling model. Personally, I think the best method to use is a combination of all the selling methods out there – but most importantly, making sure to add a personal touch to your communication with a prospect, especially during your introduction. In thinking about this, I was reminded of a constant debate that goes on here at AG, but also for many sales organizations out there: Is there a proper way to engage a prospect when contacting them and how personal can you get?
The “How are you?” Debate. I have worked in places where I was told never to say “how are you” when introducing myself when a prospect answers the phone. Many say because you are cold calling someone, it is absolutely inappropriate to ask them how they are, as you have never spoken with them to establish that rapport. However, if you look at some of the most successful reps here at AG, you will notice that most of them add a personal touch by asking how the prospect is because it comes natural to them. That being said, it is important to always read your prospect – if they seem perturbed when you ask them how they are, make sure to mirror them moving forward in the conversation, and make your tone more direct if they don’t react well initially.
The “Do you have a moment”/ “Is this a good time?” Debate. I feel that by asking this question, you are setting yourself up for failure. Think about it – you are cold calling an individual out of the blue in the middle of their work day, so odds are they are in the middle of their latest proposal, IT catastrophe, etc . Instead, introduce yourself and state (very directly) the purpose for your call and pause, then ask a follow up question about their current programs in place to manage XYZ. If it’s truly a bad time for them, they will certainly let you know. This opens the door for you to quickly ask if they are even the appropriate person to be speaking with – even better, they might be the right person, and you can ask for 5 minutes on their calendar later that week when they do have the time.
The “Product Dumping” Debate. As I stated above, you want to be as direct as possible when introducing yourself. Along with that, make sure you keep your intro to a minimum, and avoid product dumping – From my experience, if you start your introduction with a one minute “what we do summary” you will be cut off pretty quickly. Remember to be respectful of their time and state the purpose of your call immediately as they might not even be the right person you are looking to speak with.
These are some of my philosophies on the introduction debates out there – what are yours??
On a recent client phone call, one of our clients asked, “How do you actually get responses from these people?” There are many ways to accomplish this – some companies believe making 200 dials a day until someone picks up is effective, while others target a third of that number and use different methods to catch their attention. I’m sure both ways are effective, but at AG, we prefer the latter and have found it to be the most effective method based on our experience cold calling.
So what can you do to gain better results from your outbound activities to get responses from your prospects? We are constantly testing new methods to increase the amount of conversations our inside sales reps have, as more conversations = more opportunities converted. Reaching the prospect takes some leg work and below I have shared a few of our favorite tips and tricks on how to do it!
Leave a voicemail. How many times do you get up from your desk per day for a meeting, lunch, coffee, and so on? We believe that when we call our prospects, they aren’t purposely ignoring our call but maybe they are away from their desk. For this reason, we find voicemails to be extremely effective. If you are no contacting, they will never know you are calling, and you might miss the opportunity if they do in fact have an active initiative.
Talk to as many people as you can. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t call someone in Marketing if I needed to talk to someone about IT security. At the same time, you need to make the most out of every dial and talk to as many people as possible. 0# is a great trick to use for this – sometimes the most effective conversations are with assistants who can point you in the right direction of who to speak with. Also, if you only have one contact at a company, use 0# to find more and also call into the operator to get directed to the appropriate department. Use contact databases to find more contacts, and don’t forget to utilize your own CRM. If you aren’t contacting more than one person at an organization, you definitely aren’t making any progress especially if you aren’t leaving voicemails.
Make the most out of your emails. Email templates are great – just make sure to tailor them to who ever you are sending them to. Spend a lot of time tweaking your emails and email subject lines to find out which ones are most effective for you. Send them shortly after you leave your voicemails otherwise the prospect is sure to forget who you are and won’t make the connection if you don’t. It is no joke that we often receive emails such as this “I am not interested because I don’t have budget right now, but for what it’s worth, your email was great and I am going to have my team adopt a similar one.” Even though we didn’t get a person that was interested, we now have ammo for when we want to reach them live closer to the calendar year when they do have budget again.
There are many other ways to get a response from your prospects - What have you found is the most effective way for your inside sales team to accomplish this?
Some will argue that certain people have the intrinsic ability to manage their time well. Though some might be "better" at balancing their day, I think time management techniques are trainable, and we teach best practices here at AG as a result. Effective time management techniques can be taught immediately after a new hire begins, and also after a inside sales rep has been at the company for months - years even. We like to hold periodic training workshops and effective time management is a perfect example of a one hour training workshops that we would hold for all inside sales reps, new and old.
So what are the top three techniques we find most effective?
1. Planning your day and prioritizing. Determine the amount of teleprospecting activities you need to achieve in one day and divide that number by the hours in the day. For instance, if you are responsible for 60 calls in one day, you are going to need 7.5 calls/emails/conversations/etc per hour in order to reach your goal. If you hold yourself to the 7.5 number, you will reach your goal without a problem.
2. Motivating yourself with rewards. This technique is directly related to number one - in order to hit your daily teleprospecting goal, you have to reward yourself for your hard work through out the day. You will wear yourself out if you slam the phone all day without allowing a few minutes of downtime. I like to tell myself "if you make it to call number 30 in the next 5 minutes, you can get up to grab a coffee." Some of the reps at AG work together to motivate themselves. For example, I just watched two gentlemen walk outside with a football. This is a typical routine for them - they just hit the phones hard for an hour, and now are taking a 5 minute break to toss the football around outside and enjoy some fresh air. Some may say this takes away from their productivity but we believe this makes them even more productive.
3. Taking advantage of CRM. Inside sales reps can easily have access to the number of activities and conversations they are having throughout the day through our CRM's reporting function. If they know they need 10 conversations, and the report says they only have 3 conversations at lunch time, they know they need to turn it up a notch after lunch to hit their goals. We create dashboards on their homepage to make this easier for them - all they have to do is hit the "refresh" button and they can instantly view where they are for the day - this eliminates the number of times they must click through the CRM to find these reports, which means more time for them to make phone calls!
What techniques do you and your inside sales teams use for effective time management?