I, like most sales people, avoid talking about cold calling.

It is the ugly, nasty, important core of our business. We hate it (Or should we? More in a minute) and our prospects hate it (Can we fix that?). And I spend a ton of time writing about a million ways to make every call less of a cold call, like using Facebook and FriendFeed for sales leads.

Loving Cold Calling

But, I ran across this great little article from Sales Machine on BNET–Top Sales Pros Really Love Cold Calling. Guess what? He’s right!

I remember back in the day at Quicken Loans one of the highlights of motivating our sales teams was what we called Live Sales Events. These were simple…Sales Managers hoping on the phone with their teams listening in. Of course, the motivation was the competition to see whose manager performed the best on those cold calls.

One last point before we leave the example. Not only did the teams love it, so did the managers–that’s how they got there!

Why is Cold Calling Important?

Why does everyone avoid the topic of cold calling or act like it is something to be avoided? Because it is hard!

(Secret: And telling people things are hard doesn’t sell books or “Get Rich Quick” eBooks)

The number one failure I see in sales performance is phone anxiety. People are afraid of failure and cold calling (sales in general) is full of it.

Legend has it (I don’t know for sure) that one of Chris Gardner’s (The Pursuit of Happyness) tricks for success was to never cradle the phone. By never putting down the phone he was forced to dial one number after the other–never time for doubt to creep in. He learned to love cold calling. He learned how to pursue “happyness.”

How Do You Learn to Love Cold Calling?

I’m not sure you do. But, it is the key to success.

You can get better at attracting an audience. You can find better ways to target your message towards the right people. You can figure out more efficient ways to hit those right people with that message.

However, until you learn to love picking up the phone and making a connection with someone you will never be great in sales.

Do you love cold calling? Do you love helping people? Can you make people interested in hearing your voice?

Practice it.

Tell me how you do it…leave me a comment.

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Don’t leave your cold calling success to chance. Sales Machine on BNET provides a must take quiz on “What’s the Best Time to Cold Call?”.

Based on scientific research on thousands of cold call sales logs, it will walk you through important questions about when and how to make cold calls. Once you answer the question it will show you how thousands of others voted and then reveal the research supported “correct” answer.

What amazed me was not only how often my intuition was wrong, but also how often the “wisdom of crowds” was wrong too.

Give it a try and then come back and tell me what you thought. What surprised you the most?

Efficiency. Reporting. Standardization.

Any one who has ever headed up or been involved in a campaign fundraiser knows that getting people to effectively volunteer, get into place, on the phones, and actively calling is like herding cats.

First, you need to get volunteers to show up at the local HQ. Why? because that’s where the borrowed phones are and the printed out lists. (P.S.–can you spot two problems in that sentence?) Then you need to individually train each volunteer as to how to fill out the tally sheet, make the right comments, and not to skip around, leaving gaps in numbers called.

Now you have to spend 9pm- 11:30pm going through 32 coffee stained, crumpled, tally sheets to get some sort of usable report about activity of your phone volunteers and your district before the candidate calls in the morning. Sound familiar?

Here are the problems that can be solved for–

• Why does any volunteer have to show up at the campaign headquarters? They have phones and computers at home. Use those resources to your advantage.
• Training? This should be done electronically. You should not have to do this for every new batch of volunteers, or, worse yet, every single volunteer. Whatever tool you use should have video instructions, written instructions, and even inserted scripts. Maximize your time by standardizing repetitive activities.
• Let technology determine who your staff contacts. Want them to only call one zip code, but need everyone in that zip code contacted? technology should drive that process. A tally sheet NEVER will.
• Incomplete comments? Not sure if that says contacted or committed? It makes a difference which one, though, so how do you correct it? Standardize the response codes and make comments optional.
• Don’t want to hand 50 names to a volunteer if they are only going to get through 15? your campaign management system should only be serving up one name and number at a time, so there is no excess of voters to cull from 40 different call sheets.

A campaign management system should give you the capability to allow volunteers access to the voter information from their home computer. It should allow them to use their own phone resource-thus reducing campaign costs. It should be self explanatory and fully contained–simplicity in its design and functional in its use.
It should ensure that the only voter names given to a volunteer are ones they are going to work. How is that solved? Through a pull method of distribution that gives the volunteer one voter at a time and ensures the activity and status are clearly marked online.
The system should give you up to the minute reports that don’t have to be analyzed with a microsope or interpeted into English. No more late nights. In fact, the reports hsould be accessed by your entire leadership team wherever they are located-down the street, at home, or 3 time zones away.
Your candidate is running for change and adapting to the 21st century. Your campaign management of phone banks should be doing the same.

Increasing your sales contact rate and sales conversion should not be a mystery. It takes discipline and diligence. Is your contact management system designed to maximize sales performance? If you are operating off an Excel spreadsheet or flipping through contacts in Outlook or ACT!–you are static. These are not contact strategies–they are contact miracles.

Here are 10 contact management strategies that will get you more sales:

1. Centralize Your Contacts: Stop the madness with sticky notes, address books, rolodex, business cards, and Outlook. Find one place for sales leads and get them all in there. This is about to become your most valuable asset as a sales professional–so, I suggest you have a sturdy, backed-up, easy to maintain contact database-based system.

2. Script Your Process, Not Your Conversation: Sales scripts kill more sales than they bring. However, knowing exactly how you want to target and the process you want to take a lead through to become a happy customer is valuable. Map the process, and the potential deviations, of your ideal sales process. This mapping process will help you measure your performance and process better as well as making you sharp in front of the prospective client.

3. Put Your Contacts Database in Motion: Static databases cause sales prospects to rot on the vine. Put your contact management system in motion. Unfortunately, most lead management software does not have an automated mechanism to constantly optimize and suggest the next best lead. So, you may have to do a little work here. Segment and build a call list based on last contact–daily. Do not randomly meander through your address book–that is another sale miracle strategy.

4. Don’t Think, Call: I’ll make this real simple. Dial–Hang-Up–Dial. Repeat until exhausted. This is the MOST IMPORTANT SALES TIP you will ever get!

5. Let Email Help You: Email is a great tool to remove barriers and anxieties between you and a new prospect. Make it work for you. Automate email campaigns based on various statuses within your sales process. The primary objective it to create response while you are calling–increasing your overall sales velocity.

6. Schedule a Time, Even If They Don’t Answer: People are busy and increasingly hate to be interrupted–especially by sales calls. Prevent this initial objection by always scheduling a time. This works for an initial conversation, follow-up to the current call, or even a voicemail. Voicemail appointments is a powerful tactic that is rarely used, and it is a dandy. When you leave a voicemail tell the prospect when to expect your next call. This simple psychological trick sets expectations and reduces the perceived interruption on your call back. You will be amazed by the contact rate lift.

7. Try ALL Contact Information: I can’t tell you the times I have seen smart sales people kill sales leads over one bad phone number or incorrect email. Try all of the contact information available data errors and contact information migration is rampant. There is also a wide range of personal contact preferences too. Do loss a sale because of laziness.

8. Never Kill a Lead–Nurture It: Leads should never be killed in your contact management software. People don’t say no because they don’t buy things–they are simply waiting for the right time and value. Treat them as such. Place withdrawn or less promising leads into a lead nurturing campaign that keeps you in a light touch and education mode.

9. Work in 30 Minute Bursts: Calling and sales is an intense emotional business. Like an athlete driven by adrenline and achievement you need to run your race, recover, and then run again. Approach any sales activities in burst of energy and use recovery periods to tidy up lose ends for the next burst.

10. Set A Daily Contact Goal, Not a Daily Sales Goal: Here is another powerful technique that is often overlooked. Don’t base your day on sales quotas. Measure and manage you sales day on activity and contact rates. If you apply the effort and hit your activity rates the sales will come. Continue to tweak and reset your activity goals based on known conversions to consistently hit your monthly quota.

Reread 4!

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Bill Rice is the founder of Kaleidico, a leader in contact management sales software. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable sale management strategies.

Sales is hard. It runs on emotion–full of ups and downs. That is why having a daily plan is so important. It certainly won’t be everything you do, but it will be a foundation for sales growth. Make it simple. Work it.

1. Build Daily Contact List: Query, by last contact date, your daily contact list. Some contact managers, like Kaleidico’s icoSales , allows you to automate call back periods for calls and emails allowing you to skip this step–making sales even lazier.
2. Segment Contact List: Logically split your list into email contacts and phone contacts based on your preferred process, but certainly use a combination throughout your prospect phase. Then slice again by prospect, proposal, customer.
   
3. Personal Brand Building: Post to your blog. I suggest posts about what you do and how you do it. Someone may want you to do it for them.
   
4. Learning and Sharing: Cruise your RSS reader (make sure you have your Twitter listener too) for opportunities to learn more about potential customers. Comment and add value to the conversation.
   
5. Follow-ups: Dive into your email. Certainly follow-up on any inquiries, but also send out status updates to any proposal phase customers and teasers updates to customers. This is a great way to activate a static sales pipeline.
   
6. New Outreach: Using the same daily email list concept, blast out sales letters or emails to new contacts and prospects.
   
7. Daily Call List: Now that you have email working for you in the background–make your calls and leave voicemails for call backs. Don’t forget to set expectations and schedule the next call back on every messages you leave.
   
8. Take Calls: Always take the call! If at all possible, live and directly answer every call. It is such a shocker these days to immediately connect to a real person–that alone will get you sales.
   

This sales plan is simple. Consisting really of only three concepts: list building, brand building, and making contact. By spending only a few minutes a day preparing a contact list, leaving a few comments, and leveraging email you will be building a steady flow of inbound inquiries.

Enjoy making your sales day lazier.

If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

photo credit: kirainet
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Bill Rice is the founder of Kaleidico, a leader in contact management sales software. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable sale management strategies.

Getting Things Done (GTD), the powerful efficiency concept from David Allen, is often applied to our task list and our email inbox, but rarely to more complex processes like our sales pipeline. However, the principles are the same and the effects could be staggering.

Sales is an Art, Not Really

Sales as an art form is the lead myth and barrier to consistent sales performance. Sales is a process that is performed. Granted some better than other. Just like an Olympic athlete–the technique is consistent, some just get better at it.

Unfortunately, for our sales organizations somewhere along the way we got the impression that there were a variety of better ways to swim the 100M freestyle. Rubbish!

Sales is about making efficiently making contact, delivering value, and collecting money. Most of those you can’t control. I have said it before, but it boils down to this: If the product sucks–you don’t need sales. If the market sucks–you don’t need sales. So, lets figure that out as fast as possible by contacting more people more efficiently with GTD.

Collection

Get all of you stuff in one place. That means all of your contacts, leads, people. Whatever you want to call them–you need them together. When you start calling you don’t want to be hunting for names, phone numbers, or who they are. Dial–Hang-up–Dial.

This means you need a database, spreadsheet, or contact management software that lets you efficiently move from one contact to the next. I suggest contact management software with a robust lead management database. This is going to allow you to scale and make a lot of notes. Hopefully you are building a rolodex for the ages.

Processing

You need a system. Calling fast and frequently is great, but you need to know what to do with each contact based on the results of the call. GTD has a nice 5 choice process. Make your sales lead management process just as simple:

1. Trash it
2. Close it
3. Transfer it (hand it up or down)
4. Schedule it
5. Nurture it

There is nothing else.

Organizing

When you organize your sales pipeline manage it in the same way as GTD. Set-up the right buckets and make sure your processing system gets the right contacts into the right buckets.

Here are the buckets I use:

1. Attempted
2. Contacted
3. Proposal
4. Closed
5. Withdrawn
6. Scheduled
7. Bogus

The nice thing about creating buckets in your contact management software is you can use it to automate your contact flow, lead prioritization, and any lead nurturing campaigns you have. Manual or automated–organizing into predefined buckets makes sales happen faster.

Reviewing

No system is perfect. Review it. See what is working and what is not.

This is again where a good lead management database comes in handy. Look at your reports and do some quick analysis. Don’t get overwhelmed by the minutae–eyeball your reports for oddities.

I like to look for what I call–”slowing and heaping” in my reports.

What processes seem to be happening slower or less frequently than expected? Try something new to speed them up.

Where are leads piling up? Try something to process them out of the log jam.

Doing

Want to know the number one cause of most poor sales performance? Ssssssh, come close for the secret…NOT DOING ANYTHING!

That’s right. Just doing something even without a contact database, or a system, or a process, or organization will yield more than standing around organizing sheets of paper, counting your pencils, or labeling your folders.

As Nike says, “Just Do It!”

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Bill Rice is the founder of Kaleidico, a leader in contact management sales software. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable sale management strategies.

Sales contact management should discipline YOU. It should look at your contacts and understand what stage of the process they are in, when they need to be called next, when they should be sent a specific communication by email.

Sales contact management is not about you looking into a dead database and trying to decide what to work on–it is about serving you the lead most likely to close at that point in time.

If Amazon wanted to be like big box retailers, they could present goods on shelves in groups for you to browse. This is the same as a dead contact database–it simply groups names together for you with no action attached.

But Amazon goes one step further–every time you enter Amazon.com, the first thing you see is your personal recommendations from Amazon. You shop, you click, you buy, you trust technology to make the decision.

Why wouldn’t you expect the same from your contact manager? Managing leads is a job for technology, not for you. You are a sales person. Just like Amazon–you’re not a librarian, you want the book, not the map of how to get to the book. Expect the same from your contact manager.

If not, then what is the technology application good for? Holding your leads? (Psst–Excel can do that) Find a better solution that makes your technology work FOR you. Need another hint? It’s icoSales by Kaleidico.

contact me: keith burwell

my company: Kaleidico