As a sales person the line between professional persistence and harassing peskiness is always on your mind, and it should be! The minute you become irritating in the eyes of your prospect you can kiss your chances of a sale goodbye. But that line is harder to cross than most sales people think.
In a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, the data showed that 90% of all sales appointments are set after six attempts with the same prospect, and only 4% of sales people make that many attempts.
Why? Time. As a sales person, you have a long list of other things to do rather than sit at your desk and make call after call to try to secure a commitment from prospects. But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense that so many approaches are necessary. Think about your own day. You don’t even have time to make the ideal number of approaches to each prospect, let alone take calls from outside vendors. That’s the case with most of your prospects’ daily schedules as well.
With that in mind, repeated contact attempts are not the complete solution. If you simply call six times and then give up, you’re still not using the ideal strategy to get your foot in that door. What you need is a non-invasive, professional, straight-forward approach that compels your prospects to request a contact if they’re ready to talk now, or to request a follow-up at a time when they will be.
That’s where having a great lead generation partner comes in. A great lead generation partner will take care of the first few steps in the sales process, and by the time the prospects reach you, the first few contacts have already been taken care of. You’ll spend more time talking to people who have raised their hand and requested to speak with you and less time on dead end phone calls trying to sift through all the cold prospects that have no interest in speaking with you, or following up with prospects you’ve already spoken to who are still just not ready to buy.
We want to become your trusted prospecting partner. Let’s talk about how we can take the first, tedious steps of the sales process off your plate.