What is your call strategy? If you don’t have one, you might be killing your leads
It’s been a very long time since I was a fresh-faced, starry-eyed new sales rep. However, I do distinctly remember that my only strategy was to call a lot of people. At the same time, I was feverishly calling everyone and anyone, I was doing tons of reading on how to give a good sales pitch.
The funny disconnect in these two primary activities was the fact that one I wasn’t talking to a lot of folks and the ones I did make contact with were often pissed off. “Stop calling me!” was the most frequent abrupt interruption I got to my perfect opening pitch.
I continued to repeat this sales strategy for years and with several different companies. What never occur to me, until years later, was that my lack of call plan was killing my leads with my eagerness to succeed.
Ironically, the fastest way to a short career in sales it to merely haphazardly, indiscriminately, and tenaciously dial for dollars.
Let’s look at my older, wiser version of a call strategy.
Call as fast as possible
The strategy of quickly calling is critical if you’re using or generating real-time (probably online) customer inquiries. But, I think it has equal applicability in the context of cold calling.
Customers want immediate responses. If you’re purchasing leads or clients are coming to you online, you can add to this urgency the challenge of competing for their attention and business. So, if you’re not calling fast, you’re losing the opportunity.
If you’re making cold calls the strategy is similar, but for a different purpose. For cold calls, you likely pitch some “unconsidered need,” which should trigger a question or response. When this happens, you need to be Johnny-on-the-spot with your reply.
Sometimes this can be hard. You have meetings, or you might just be on another call. But, there are other ways to get that rapid “call” into that hot lead.
Here is a text message that I use all the time:
“I just got your online request for a rate quote. I’m on a call, but can I call you in 5 minutes? Or would you rather schedule a time later?”
And don’t forget the power of a quick, short, friendly email:
Don’t over call
Overcalling is a mistake that many salespeople make because it sounds a little counterintuitive. To explain the importance of this in your call strategy let's take a moment to look through the eyes of a customer.
I go online and fill out a brief web form to get a mortgage rate quote. Almost immediately — somewhat surprisingly — I get a call to my cell phone. Then another and another.
Holy crap! I’m at work. I can’t take these calls. My phone is vibrating all day long. I take a quick look, and see missed calls from four different numbers — one has like six calls and two voicemails. That guy is ridiculous (and obviously desperate).
On my way home, I get another call from the crazy dude (it has to be a dude — girls aren’t that needy). Guess what? I’m blocking your psycho-craziness.
There you go. You just killed a perfectly good lead.
Give your customers multiple contact options
It seems like everyone has a different preference for how they like to be contacted.
For me, contact me anytime by email (go ahead, it’s okay: bill.rice@velocitylending.com). I can sort it, manage it, forward it to a team member for action. However, a text message or phone call might get ignored a bit before I get to it — or even slip off my radar — because it’s not in my core workflow.
But, if you were to ask my wife, she would prefer a phone call any day. My teenagers, they would opt for a text message for sure.
The point is, you need to sort of survey your customer for their contact and time preferences in your initial contact strategy.
You can do this by making your initial contact strategy include attempts in each of three channels — phone, text message, and email. Then each of those contacts should include a strong call to action to either reply in that channel or schedule a more convenient time with you.
I have found that this option to schedule a convenient time is a very powerful option for your prospective customer. I just let them give me a time, and I make every effort to fit that into my existing schedule. However, I have also had a lot of success using something like Calendly that exposes my open availability and then seamlessly puts the appointment on my calendar and theirs.
More Contacts with Fewer Calls AND a better customer experience
The big ideas in implementing a call strategy with these three core component are that you are increasing contact rates while reducing the number of ‘missed calls’ you make the customer endure and the number of ’no answer’ and ‘vm’ notes you leave in your CRM.
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Originally published on BillRice.com
