End of Q2..Time to Utter the Words Inside Sales Dread! CALL BLITZ
There is no better time during the year then right now to utter the phrase "call blitz" to your teleprospecting\inside sales teams. It is a phrase that causes groans across any team. Despite the general hatred of the "call blitz", I am a fan, and a firm believer that it is still a viable way to build pipeline quickly. While you'd be hard pressed (at AG anyways) to find a rep that "LOVES" a good old fashioned call blitz, none of them will argue that they aren't a healthy exercise to make your team go through. Here are my guidelines for running a one day teleprospecting blitz...
1. Set a high, but realistic activity expectation. Take your average daily outbound activity requirement and add 30% to it. That is more than reasonable unless you run a true sweat shop already. Don't go too high on your required number or you'll just end up with a bunch of meaningless activity from people just trying to hit an astronomical goal.
2. Break it down by hour. As you introduce your call blitz parameters, make sure you break it down hourly for your reps. Do the math for them so that they know what they have to do per hour as opposed to focusing on a large goal that may seem too overwhelming at the very start of the day.
3. Buy some lunch. Control the lunch hour by being a stand up guy\gal and buying the crew food. Pizza is my meal of choice, but I'm pretty unhealthy. Salads, tofu, whatever, just buy them lunch. This is a great way to say thanks for the extra effort and it also allows you to keep folks in the building so as to not lose any dialing time.
4. Send updates. Make sure you or a member of your staff is sending periodic updates on activity to the entire team throughout the day so people know where they stand and aren't wasting time checking the system for themselves.
5. Reward the "winners". Take the rep with the most calls and give him\her a small, but useful prize. Then do the same for the rep that had the most quality conversations over the course of the day.
Those are the basic parameters that we operate our call blitzes under.
The best time to run blitzes is the last two weeks of June. You are nearing the halfway point of your calendar year as well as entering what we have found to be the slowest two weeks of the year (July 1st - July 15th). Running one or several call blitzes during the last half of June accomplishes some very strategic objectives for your organization.
1. Increased activity in June makes up for the drop in activity that July will bring. July is one of the most popular vacations months of the year. The July 4th holiday when we celebrate this great nations independence can be a real bloodbath for business that rely on outbound teleprospecting to drive their pipeline development. Blitzing before and after those two weeks helps keep the overall activity at a level that offsets both the internal vacation that you probably will have as well as the external vacation time taken by your prospects. Your reps maintain an overall acceptable 30 day (June 15th - July 15th) call volume number thanks to the blitzes. They also focus more of their activity during times when prospects are more likely to be in the office.
2. Running several call blitzes at the end of June helps to clean out the pipeline and give some healthy cleansing to your database. You've spent half a year working your lists and have probably started spinning your wheels a little bit on many accounts. The extra activity means more conversations and more conversations lead to faster dispositioning of accounts. When you disposition an account it makes room for the new lists that you are inevitably going to be entering into the system in July for the second half of the year. A couple of well timed blitzes will accelerate some much needed purging of bad data and not interested accounts.
3. It's a good thing for your team. Whether or not people choose to admit it, competition and a challenge brings out the best in sales minded professionals. The call blitz is a great way to bring out the best competitive juices from your employees and helps to build even better moral through some healthy competition.
So, get your lists in order AG team...we are having a blitz tomorrow!