It’s important to get the size of your call pot just right. I refer to the list I work as my call pot. For you or your team it is probably some form of list within a CRM (Contact Relationship Management) system that you’re working. If you’re really old school it may well be an Excel spreadsheet. Regardless of what you refer to it as and what format it is in, it is important to have the size of it about right. It may seem like an incidental thing. You may think initially that surely the more names you have to call the better. But no, almost certainly not!
Optimum list size – what it looks like
The list of names that you’re going to call is intended to sustain you for however long and so it needs some pruning and nurturing – just like your garden. This is the fuel for your sales engine. You want to be successful, hit targets and earn commission. All of these things will come from the list of names you have.
For these reasons I believe your call pot is the single most important element of an outbound phoner’s armoury. It’s worth refining to get it right. And like Goldilock’s fabled porridge it mustn’t be too much of one thing. Or the other.
If you have too few names in your lead generation list you’ll end up calling people too often. You will simply be filling time. This isn’t great for many reasons.
Calling too frequently means that there is an increased chance that the receptionist will recognise your voice and respond accordingly. You’re more likely to get blocked. It’ll sound more like a sales call to them, and if you’re calling every day for instance, you can come across as desperate. Not what you want at all. Other than in exceptional circumstances, never call someone more than once a day. Or 3 times in a week.
You’ll also feel demoralised if you’re calling too frequently. You look at your list or call pot and recognise that it’s gone stale. You pick up the phone with a sense of trepidation.
8 day call cycles
I use 8 day call cycles for people I can’t get hold of repeatedly. You may have tried them 3 or 4 times in a week or so. Or perhaps you feel you’re being blocked. Or they’re rejecting your call.
If that is happening, I’ll want to try them again, but it’s no point keep calling them every day is there? Instead put them off for a call back in 8 days. Not 7 as it might be that you can never get them on a Monday morning because they’re in a management meeting. Every Monday morning. 8 day cycles help get around this.
Too large a pot
Conversely, having too many names to call isn’t great either. You simply can’t keep up with them. This increases the chances that you’ll miss out on business. So if you’re in this situation where you have more names and numbers than you can keep up with, you will need to spend time prioritising the ones you have. My suggestion is to have some form of grading system. For me I have a simple, narrow column where I grade each account from 1-5. 1 being the best, 5 the weakest. My definitions are loosely as follows;
- Best short-term opportunities. Have quoted and they are actively looking at training
- Good opportunity. Have expressed interest within defined time frame
- Business neither likely or unlikely at this stage
- Business unlikely at this time
- Business unlikely for the foreseeable future
Incidentally I don’t bother coding any where I haven’t spoken to the decision-maker. I’d be guessing so there is no point. Having a grading system allows you to filter your best prospects when necessary. Obviously you don’t want to miss any of these.
I have more category 4s than anything else. A category 5 is just about worth keeping. I will call them again. However, it probably wouldn’t take much before I would remove them to the archive file if I feel that I will never get business from this account. These are all judgement calls of course. Your subjective opinion. It’s still valuable to code the accounts this way as if you have limited time for phoning one day – understandably you want to focus on those with the best potential for you.
The other element of having too large a pot is that you will be forced to make tough decisions. Try to filter as many out as you can where they don’t meet your criteria. They’re too small. They don’t buy what you sell etc. Volumes are low etc. I generally suggest putting them in an archive file rather than deleting them completely. That way if the company name comes up again, you can check why you’ve archived it, can’t you?
So work on your call pot. Love it. Nurture it. Polish it. Look after it, and it will look after you.