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August 18 - October 11, 2019
Basic marketing 101 says that the people most likely to buy from you look like the people who have already bought from you. Genius.
The key point here is that you are making purposeful conscious, informed decisions based on facts, research, and basic marketing and sales principles. This profiling and research effort gives you control over how you allocate your limited lead generation resources.
Mistake #1: Casting the net too wide.
Remember, every call made, or email sent to a low-probability or low-value account is one less call or email sent to a high-probability or high-value account.
Mistake #2 Buying too many records.
Always work a fresh list. Stay flexible.
Mistake #3 Letting the crap creep in
Mistake #4 Getting locked into major expenses prematurely.
Don’t Prematurely Limit Your Ability to Bob and Weave, Test And Make Changes
Create Your Profile With The Same Data Source From Which You Will Download Your Leads
Greater efficiency means more opportunities for time invested.
It's All A Giant Sorting Process. You need to be in control of where you allocate your time and money.
You do not do things like follow up, send info or call back just because a voice asks you to.
The worst and most useless place to record this info is in the notes. You simply cannot search and sort properly if various forms of data is mindlessly put into notes.
If you can’t book a meeting, use the call to gather recon information that will make it more likely that you book a meeting in the future.
With no extra investment, they are making the calls anyway; they ask questions to get all the information they can. They use that info to sort and prioritize their calling. To launch more calls or use other marketing tools within sub-segments where it makes economic sense to do so.
When there is a service failure with a competing vendor, or it is time to review vendor options, they are there.
Why not do better? Well, they do what most do. They call too many targets. They don’t identify the high-probability from the low-probability. They think short-term immediate results only. They have not set themselves up for maximum call efficiency. They don’t gather recon info as they go. They are not able to properly allocate their time or resources as they chose not to make the one-time investment of a few hours in basic list research, setup, and organization, so they are now doomed to spending hundreds if not thousands of hours calling inefficiently to lower-probability or no-probability
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Whether they may buy now or 2 years from now, their potential worth is the same. Do not mix the concepts of how much and when they might buy into one field.
If you code it a certain way that could trigger them getting a direct mail touch from you every week for 6 weeks, without you having to think about it, because you have thought ahead and coded it appropriately.
Add people to auto drip
Your “great scripts” do you no good if you are not talking to the right people.
Complete the process that provides you with your best chance to set a meeting before you drop down to a less effective option.
There is no message you can leave with a gatekeeper that can sell a meeting, so don’t bother trying.
Studies have shown that it takes 9-12 dials to get a decision-maker in a large organization to pick up the phone.
Very simply people need to be “touched” by you multiple times with a consistent message. It is the combination of frequency and consistency that enables people to grasp what you are communicating.
Reach out to your target with 3 cycles of 3 dials 3 business days apart. At the end of every cycle leave your “touches.” Your touches most commonly would be voicemail and email.
Once you identify or confirm a decision-maker within a targeted company you wish to meet with that is the official launch of your call process to that target. That is day 1, action 1.
You would then make 3 dials to that decision-maker within a very short period of time, a day or 2, not a week or 2. On the first 2 dials of the cycle, if you do not speak to your decision-maker, you do not leave a voicemail or send an email.
On the 3rd dial, if you have not reached your decision-maker, you leave your “touches.” A voicemail and an email. You schedule the next cycle of calls for 3 business days later.
Three business days later, when you open your CRM that follow- up call you scheduled pops up. You again make 3 dials over a day or 2. Just as in the first cycle, on the first 2 dials, if you don’t speak to your decision-maker, you do not engage or try to get through the gatekeeper. On the 3rd dial, if you do not speak to your target, you leave your t...
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Three business days later, that follow-up call will pop up on your contact manager/CRM activity list. You follow the same procedure. Three dials. No gatekeeper engagement. Leave your touches ...
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When in doubt, when you are bored, when you want to convince yourself that making this call at this time is a waste of time or not worth it, work your process. Don’t think. Work your process.
Work the process
Once you have decided to call someone you have committed to complete your call process. Work your process.
On the flip side, if you uncover objective information that tells you that your targeted company has an above average worth, then you might decide to add a 4th or 5th cycle to your calling. That prospect is worth more of your time.
When you do let go, you must schedule the next action. Without exception, every time you complete a call, you must schedule the next action.
By default, a good rule of thumb is that for a suspect company with an average size potential worth, relaunching the cycle of calling in 6 months seems to work. For those records that you know have an above average potential value, you might try again in 4 months. For those you determine have less than average value potential, but still acceptable, you might choose to relaunch the cycle of calling in 9 or 12 months.
Appreciate that gatekeepers can only help you with 2 things. They can provide you worth info so that you can properly sort and allocate your time. They can also provide you information that increases the odds of you interacting with your target, direct dial, extension numbers, or email address. That is about it.
But, if you try to engage the gatekeeper, answer their questions, “Who’s calling and what is this regarding?” That is a guaranteed dead end.
Only you can sell your meeting. So you want to put something in the gatekeeper’s hands that, if it were shared with your targeted decision-maker, would have a chance of selling your meeting.
So rather than “leave a message” you might offer to send a gatekeeper a one-page pdf or email that explains what you do, the companies that have chosen you, the problems you solve with representative results. You offer to send that (they don’t have to pretend they are taking a message) and then call the gatekeeper back in a few days to see if Mr. or Ms. Big wishes to meet. That way you don’t have to keep calling back.
If you are going to have any serious chance of success at appointment setting, you will have to call a very carefully selected group of targets.
I need to do this with my region
As to that group of records, you should know their needs and wants, problems, challenges, triggers, and more. You interact with that group prepared to relate issues and offer solutions to problems common to the group and to speak their language.
Which specific companies you book with is of less significance. They wouldn’t be in the group you are calling unless there was a high probability that they would be worthwhile.
If you interact with a very carefully selected group of targets using a consistent process at some point, you will realize that on average you book X number of meetings per week. That is your baseline. X. Then you think, well if I researched each company before I called them, so I knew something about them, that would improve my results. So you spend half of your time researching (at least) and half your time calling. For that “researching” to be worthwhile, you would have to double call productivity just to break even. That never happens.
Those reasons, the buying motivations, the problems you could solve that are blowing their hair back were not to be found on their website, Linkedin, or in a press release.
You are asking a top-level person to give you 30-60 minutes of their time. The fact that you pulled something off the web or read a newspaper article or press release is not going to impress someone of that level to give you that time.
Common sense tells us that in any situation there are words, facts, phrases, statistics, and quotes that when used tend to achieve the result sought more than other words. If you are aware of that verbiage and use it, the odds of success go way up.
People buy from peers. People buy from those they think are prepared. People spend time with those they feel are authorities and knowledgeable.
The one limited to saying what pops into their head at any moment, what they are comfortable with or the 5 or 6 things they can remember? Or the one who has brainstormed and written down all the most powerful impactful words and phrases they could use in a script in an organized manner?
Think of your prospecting pitch in terms of parts. There is your name, your company name, what you do, why you are credible, benefits clients/accounts get from working with you, what they will get or learn at a first meeting/discovery call, how you ask for the meeting, then you have proofs and ear candy. These are the parts. Make each component part as strong and clear as you can.
