Certainly not everyone is away and those that are away are not gone for 2 months. Generally, those in the workforce take one or two weeks.
So why do so many people stop cold calling in the summer? This has a detrimental, long-term effect on sales quotas and year-end results.
Instead, use this time to your advantage to keep your plan on target and get a leg-up on the competition.
Stay committed
Just because people are on vacation doesn’t mean that you should be making only a half-hearted commitment to qualifying leads. In a given week, you’ll reach some people and not others, but you can keep the process moving ahead.
You may reach a prospect before they leave for vacation and the process may drag out because of it. When they return, you can pick right back up where you left off. If you need to, adjust your daily and weekly activity goals.
Don’t assume
Just because it is the summer, don’t hesitate to pick up the phone. You don’t know if your prospect is away. Engage your usual call campaign, leaving brief messages, following up with emails and calling again.
Use time to your advantage
Because you may have a little more time on your hands, summertime is a good time to reconnect with in-process leads. Review your accounts, check in with them and find out what is new with them, personally and in business. A little interest goes a long way in your relationship.
Call on leads you might have overlooked at other times of the year, opportunities that, for whatever reason, didn’t materialize. As your competitors take a break from cold calling, this is your opportunity to get in front of these folks and build rapport.
Keep your pipeline full
When you take a hiatus from qualified lead generation your pipeline dries up and you have a huge fall-off in closed sales in a month or months following. There’s a ripple effect in your work flow that can have a substantial negative impact on sales for the year.
Let’s say you stop cold calling July 1st and resume September 1st. What will you or your team be working on at the end of July, in August or in September or October? You’ve created a gap in qualified leads that could last months. You’ve lost the momentum of the campaign.
A cold calling campaign is a process of initial calls, emails and building rapport. Interfering with this process will set you back, possibly months.
The pace may lighten up during the summer, but sales activities need to continue. Stay committed and don’t let your business stagnate.
If you cannot stay committed to your inside sales effort, contact One of a Kind Solutions. We can help.
As technology permeates every aspect of our lives, we can lose sight of the importance of staying in touch with prospects. Customer relationships are at the core of sales. When you nurture relationships, you endear your customers to your brand and your business. Without this, your leads will go nowhere and sales will fall far short of goals.
Building a relationship and converting a prospect into a sales-ready lead, raises awareness and establishes a 1:1 personal relationship with each prospect. A successful lead generation campaign engages on many levels.
Keeps their attention. Engage and get the buyer’s attention through a multi-touch approach, routinely throughout the year. Response rates rise with each subsequent outreach attempt. But most sales pros give up after less than two touch points. In fact, on average, salespeople don’t even get to a second touch point when reaching out to a decision maker. This is such a lost opportunity!
Cultivates the relationship. B2B customer acquisition isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes time to develop a relationship. Cold calling fails when call campaigns are not given enough time to mature. Continuous one-on-one communication using various channels helps cultivate the relationship.
Maintains awareness for when they are ready to convert. A prospect may not convert to an appointment by the end of one call cycle or even four, but that doesn’t mean that the prospect won’t be interested at a later date. Repeat the cycle to keep you and your company top of mind for when they do want to take the next step.
Engages on multiple levels. Being top of mind is one of the best ways to reinforce your relationship and turn leads into appointments. A multi-level effort using calls, voicemail, email and LinkedIn, with sales and marketing working together can be very effective in raising awareness, keeping you top of mind and getting the prospect ready to make the commitment for an appointment and subsequently a sale. The multiple touches and the continuity of the effort are crucial components of lead nurturing. Touch points are opportunities to prepare leads for the final stage in the buying journey, the point of decision-making. The better the experience and the more valuable each of these touch points are to leads, the more likely they’ll be ready to make a buying decision and convert to paying customers.
A successful cold calling campaign is more complex than you may be able to develop yourself. Contact One of Kind Solutions to see how we can help.
There are two basic approaches to selling: selling a product or selling a solution.
In my experience, selling a solution will generate more sales and cultivate more valuable, long-term relationships with your customers.
The key to successfully selling a solution is to clearly understand the prospect’s problem.
We do this by asking pointed questions and ‘actively listening‘ to the responses. And at One of a Kind Sales (OOAKS), we also train our salespeople to identify and match the prospect’s communication style so we can connect and respond more effectively.
We use a tool, called a DISC assessment, to help team members determine the buying styles of prospects so that they can then adapt their communication style to match that of the buyer.
The DISC Model
The DISC Model was first introduced in 1928 by William Moulton Marston, a physiological psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, in his book Emotions of Normal People. (1).
He identified 4 profile ‘types’:
D = Dominant I = Influencer S = Steadiness C = Conscientious
Dominant Type – They typically have fast-paced speech and a strong personality. They tend to think in terms of the bottom line and often have a quicker, more impulsive decision-making style.
To improve communication with “D” types:
Don’t dominate the conversation, listen more
Create a situation to give them a win
Ask specific, targeted questions and don’t waste their time
Keep a fast pace to match theirs
Give direct answers without a lot of “fluff”
Influencer Type – They are friendly and talkative. They typically enjoy interacting with people and like chit chat. Influencers respond well to testimonials and hearing about benefits in an upbeat, positive way. They tend to be less detail-oriented and focus more on the big picture.
To improve communication with “I” types:
Be friendly and animated with your conversation
Ask for their ideas and opinions
Applaud and compliment
Don’t dwell on the details
Provide personal stories on how other people have benefited from your solution
Steadiness Type – They are patient and easy-going. You can identify these individuals by their reserved, indirect, but people-oriented approach to others. They typically have a deliberate and methodical decision-making style and may resist change or anything they perceive as a risk.
To improve communication with “S” types:
Don’t pressure them to make a decision quickly
Listen patiently and take time to explain
Speak with a sincere tone of voice
Discuss the process
Conscientious Type – They are methodical and deliberate. They tend to focus on the details and are primarily concerned about doing things the “right” or “correct way.” This buying behavior style can be skeptical and is often concerned with analytics and the effects of change.
To improve communication with “C” types:
Present data to back up claims about your solution
Avoid asking too many personal questions
Slow down and answer questions precisely
Involve them in planning
Be conservative in assertions
Use a DISC assessment to identify your prospect’s ‘DISC type’ and adjust your approach to achieve better sales outcomes.
Tools to help
There are many DISC based assessment and insight tools available. I use the Crystalintegration for LinkedIn. I find it helpful, providing me with personality insights before I meet with prospects or clients. There are others out there as well – find one that works for you.
Control What You Can
As salespeople, we cannot change or control the prospect. They decide if they want to purchase or not. But we CAN control our communication style. It’s our job to adjust our style appropriately. If we can help make the prospect’s decision-making more comfortable or easier then we can gain their trust, establish credibility, and keep the sales process moving forward. A win for everyone!
Want to learn more about how to use assessments like this to get better results with YOUR prospects? Give me a call at 908.879.2911 – we can show YOU how to effectively and successfully connect with YOUR prospects!
Your leads have been properly qualified as a good fit for what you are selling. But the leads aren’t getting closed.
When qualified leads don’t turn into sales, cold calling campaigns can be erroneously considered to be root of the problem. The failure to close sales cannot be attributed to the cold calling campaign when other conditions may be in play.
Proper training, preparation and having the right tools on hand will ensure that qualified leads result in closed sales.
Training and role-playing. Often reps are not properly trained to take the call/meeting to closure. The goal of the salesperson isn’t to just make a one-time sale but to position themselves as someone that understands the customer’s needs, someone to be trusted, and someone that the customer can turn to for solutions to their problems. Role-playing techniques help salespeople to become comfortable using this consultative selling approach.
Preparing and planning. When it comes to sales calls, don’t wing it. Prepare by becoming knowledgeable about the company and the prospect you will be speaking to. Have on hand all paperwork, forms, etc. that the customer will need to move forward. Plan by anticipating any objections that might arise and knowing how to respond to them.
Tools. Scripts are a useful tool to guide how the call or visit should go. Base scripts on the ultimate goal for the meeting but be as specific as possible when goal setting and writing scripts. Be sure to include thoughtful questions that will open the prospect to discussion. Leverage rather than read your script to make sure progress is made through the call to reach your goal.
Hiring. There is no training or preparation in the world that will make a rep successful if that person does not possess the need for achievement, an underlying competitiveness and overall optimism. If a rep is still not successful after the proper training, planning and preparation, it’s time to re-examine your hiring process because you are not attracting the right people.
Select people who are suited for the job, and train and prepare them properly to sell and close. Then you are ready to launch a cold calling campaign and turn qualified leads into sales.
Some people say that cold calling is dead. However, thousands of salespeople use the phone to successfully qualify prospects, set appointments and open sales conversations. When you don’t use cold calling for lead generation, here’s the impact on your effort.
Lower response rate. Regardless of industry, engagement rates using the phone are higher than response rates using email and social selling. One study shows that 57% of people who receive prospecting emails believe them to be spam without even opening the email*. The majority of people that you send emails to likely won’t even end up opening them.
Lost competitive advantage. When you rely on email and social media to reach out to your prospects, you are lost in the sea of emails and social media posts. So much sales communication has shifted to email and social that phones are not ringing nearly as much as they did in the past. Cold calling lets you stand out. Even if you gather all the social intelligence available on a prospect, that information isn’t going to give you much of an advantage over your competitors, who have access to the same tools and information.
Loss of relationship intelligence. A personal phone call allows you to learn through conversation the prospect’s pain points and goals. Conversations allow you to uncover nuances about their business and their challenges. Not only does email not enable you to do that, but the tone of emails can result in complete miscues.
Less meaningful connections. Emails don’t build relationships. Calling can give the prospect a sense of importance and a sense of immediacy. Phone calls allow you to customize your points based on what the prospect says. Prospects are more likely to do business with people that they know, like and trust.
Opportunities left on the table. Believe it or not, the success rate of cold calling has actually proven to be higher than many people would think. One study has found that cold calling outperforms emails by a significant margin (8.2% vs 0.03%)**.
Social-selling tools are great for research, identifying trigger events, and finding mutual connections. Emails help keep you and your business top of mind, but no lead generation method builds relationships like, or is as effective as, cold calling.
As technology permeates every aspect of our lives, we can lose sight of the importance of staying in touch with prospects. Customer relationships are at the core of sales. When you nurture relationships, you endear your customers to your brand and your business. Without this, your leads will go nowhere and sales will fall far short of goals.
Your leads have been properly qualified as a good fit for what you are selling. But the leads aren’t getting closed.
