Complex Selling Made Effective

The premise for a disciplined call prospecting system

By Dale Wolf, Editor, The Perfect Customer Experience

For the past ten years, Barrett & Simmons, a relatively small sales management consultancy near Washington DC, knew first-hand that the odds were stacked against their clients. They knew that 85% of sales calls die in voicemail hell. They lived this fact every day for nearly a decade.

The firm’s typical client was faced with a complex sales environment and a need to drive very high percentage contact rates within a finite or limited number of targeted accounts per sales representative. Working with hundreds of sales people, pursuing thousands of new accounts, and tens of thousands of new prospects – they achieved a success ratio that was high above the norms.

They figured out the key to success – they had to “out-prospect” the competition.

• It takes 10 to 15 call attempts over 4 to 6 months to achieve 70% contact rates with the right prospects
• Live connections are driven by outbound calls 75% of the time with only 25% of the connections coming from inbound calls from the prospects

Eureka! Barrett & Simmons methodology was pretty simple.

Call the right people.

• Keep calling.
• Be prepared with the right message if the prospect happens to answer the phone.
• Leave well-conceived voice mail messages that in the duration of 10 to 15 calls tell a compelling story.
• Stay disciplined.
• Use the phone every day.
• Do the hard work. Do the digging.

From their experience, if you do these simple things, you will connect with 70% of your targeted prospects. Most other sales people going after the same accounts will have given up, looking for fresh targets, while your success ratio surges upward.

By Dale Wolf, Editor, The Perfect Customer Experience

For the past ten years, Barrett & Simmons, a relatively small sales management consultancy near Washington DC, knew first-hand that the odds were stacked against their clients. They knew that 85% of sales calls die in voicemail hell. They lived this fact every day for nearly a decade.

The firm’s typical client was faced with a complex sales environment and a need to drive very high percentage contact rates within a finite or limited number of targeted accounts per sales representative. Working with hundreds of sales people, pursuing thousands of new accounts, and tens of thousands of new prospects – they achieved a success ratio that was high above the norms.

They figured out the key to success – they had to “out-prospect” the competition.

• It takes 10 to 15 call attempts over 4 to 6 months to achieve 70% contact rates with the right prospects
• Live connections are driven by outbound calls 75% of the time with only 25% of the connections coming from inbound calls from the prospects

Eureka! Barrett & Simmons methodology was pretty simple.

Call the right people.

• Keep calling.
• Be prepared with the right message if the prospect happens to answer the phone.
• Leave well-conceived voice mail messages that in the duration of 10 to 15 calls tell a compelling story.
• Stay disciplined.
• Use the phone every day.
• Do the hard work. Do the digging.

From their experience, if you do these simple things, you will connect with 70% of your targeted prospects. Most other sales people going after the same accounts will have given up, looking for fresh targets, while your success ratio surges upward.

Urgency Addiction is not Job Insurance

Louis Columbus

Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions

People are battling against the uncertainty of their jobs, the economy and their company’s futures by taking on more work than ever. Overcomitting and being hyper-responsive is the new job insurance mirage.

I’ve seen my good friends increasingly see urgency addiction as job insurance this year like none before. The more battered the industry the higher the urgency addiction. One friend is in the mortgage industry and he has always been ultra-responsive, yet now he is in alert-mode constantly.

Now don’t take this as a blog post about getting off the grid; I am all for being passionately consumed about what you do and getting immersed in it. That is the only way to live.

My point is that when urgency addiction is seen as some form of flimsy job insurance – a mirage if you will – people sell themselves short of what they could accomplish.

Killing distractions or at least controlling those gives people the freedom to do their best work – those projects and tasks that make their passion of what they do abundantly clear. Urgency addiction and the anxiety it’s based on short-changes some of the best people I know from doing excellent work.

On Sunday June 22 Marci Alboher wrote an excellent column for the New York Times titled Fighting the War Against Distraction. It’s an interview with Maggie Jackson, author of the book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Here are some insights Maggie Johnson shared in the New York Times column:

• An astounding 28% of a worker’s day is consumed in interruptions (Basex) and recovery time. Ms. Johnson states in her book that it takes up to 30 minutes to recover from an interruption, citing Gloria Mark who leads research in the area of interruption science.

• "Under deadline pressure, workers produce creative work on days when they are focused, not when they are scattered and interrupted, a study published in the Harvard Business Review found" as cited from the New York Times article.

• "In meetings where everyone is checking e-mail, opportunities for collective creative energy and critical thinking are lost, argues Nathan Zeldes, a senior engineer at Intel and a leader of the nonprofit Information Overload Research Group" as cited from the New York Times article as well.

My favorite quote of all from the series of blog entries and articles all emanating from the New York Times article mentioned below is "Knowledge work can’t be done in sound bites."

Julie Morgenstern of BusinessWeek.com, one of my favorite writers on time management, wrote a blog entry on this topic on June 24 titled Concentration Conundrum, which is worth checking out. The graphic in this blog entry is from her post. I’ve read her book Time Management from the Inside Out and it’s excellent; it was a gift when our daughter was born and Julie Morgenstern’s tips were really helpful for us as new parents.

Resolving to tackle the larger, more complex projects and ignore the immediate gratification of firing back quick e-mails or voice mails may paradoxically be the best job insurance of all.