DO IT! We’re not being cheeky; the number one reason for lack of appointments is lack of action taken, lack of effort. It’s something most reps don’t like to do, so they find any number of reasons not to do it. A sales manager at wireless company captured it very well when he said “there is always a battery that needs to be driven across town just when its time to prospect”. Sometime the greatest creativity shown by sales people is demonstrated in the way in which they avoid making the appointment setting calls.
But as with any professional endeavor, there will be necessary aspect of the drill that are not meant to be fun, yet those who excel understand that they have to incorporate it into their game. The best way to minimize the grief is to improve your skills, master it and thereby have to spend less time at it while still achieving the levels required to be consistently successful.
The accepted wisdom is that reps do not like to cold call for fear of rejection. Strange because most reps have a closing to initial meeting ratio that is very much in line with their contact to appointment ratio, that is leads to prospect conversion; generally around one in four or five. Yet you never hear reps say they are afraid to engage with prospects or submit proposals because they may get rejected. So why then when it comes to finding prospects. That’s a whole other posting. Simply, when it come to proposals, once all is said and done, just as they should with prospecting, they just do it!
Sell well,
Tibor Shanto, The Pipeline
We have a saying at my work place: Eat your vegetables first. When we were kids we needed to eat everything on our plates in order to get dessert. Normally, one would eat everything that one enjoyed first and leave the vegetables to last. But, eating the vegetables first would be the better move!
So, we try to do that which we love the least as early as possible in the sequence of necessary events at work. By eating our vegetables first we have taken care of the anxiety producing work at the beginning and can spend the rest of the time enjoying the process.
I was a little late in reading this one Tibor, but a fine post and thank you. I always (fondly) think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian – when provoked to action the Peoples Front of Judea response is “Right! lets have an immediate meeting”…. you can plan all you want but there is no substitute for action.
“Sometime the greatest creativity shown by sales people is demonstrated in the way in which they avoid making the appointment setting calls.”
Loool!
Yes, it is about discipline, 100%. Couldn’t agree more Tibor.
Thank you Roz, it is the small things that make the big difference.
Tibor