You’ve undoubtedly heard “Sales is a numbers game.”
There is no denying that the phrase is true. The more you put yourself out there, the more sales you will close. This is the underpinning strategy of conferences, billboards, display advertising and especially door-to-door sales and cold-calling. If you are not knocking down doors or blasting out calls you are simply not going to make the cut. While the pure volume metric of phone calls is a useful one it does not account for success well.
The sad truth is I can easily blast out 100 or 200 calls a day and no one answers the phone. It’s a good measure of will (or gamesmanship) but if no one answers the phone – what is the point? Now if I have quality conversations that ‘push the ball forward’ then my purely volume oriented metric may make me out to be a slacker. My 100 to 200 daily calls is going to drop significantly. For example, within a single 5 minute conversation it would have been possible to make 15 unanswered calls particularly if you are not leaving voicemails (or doing any research). Over an hour I could blast out 180 unanswered calls (worthless) or I could have 12 five minute quality conversations (highly valuable).
Now I am not professing that salespeople should make fewer calls. I am saying that the purely volume metric of calls is flawed and we should be looking at the number of ‘connections’ in addition to the measure of ‘will’. No one wants to make hundreds of unanswered calls. We want to be on the phone speaking with potential customers and closing deals. A typical salesperson should achieve a 10% connection rate while a hungry and talented salesperson can achieve a 15-20% connection rate.
Now we also all know that “You get what you measure” so let’s stop measuring the simple metric of calls or dials and let’s start measuring connections. Once you do, you should start to see your pipeline become a little bit more profitable.
