Is your account base the right size? If you work in selling, telemarketing or account management, I call it your call pot. You may call it your prospect list. Or possibly your database. Or whatever. It’s merely the list of names you’re going to be working through in order to win new business. This could be for you personally or maybe you’re office based and partner field based colleagues.
It is in one sense your raw material. It’s what you process in order to produce the result you want. In another article I refer to it as your fuel. I believe it is the single most important element of your armoury. In my book Using the phone to sell – how to sell more to more people more often I talk about it being the single most important determinant of your success on the phone. Yes more important than your sales skill. More important than your motivation. Certainly more important than your product knowledge. Consequently it’s worth developing and then refining to get it right. Polish your account list regularly. Keep it spick and span. Not sure what that phrase comes from but you know what I mean. Like Goldilock’s porridge it mustn’t be too much of one thing or the other.
The potential pitfalls of a small list
You don’t want too few names to contact. Too few names means that you’ll be calling people too often. This really isn’t great for many reasons.
Too frequent calling means the receptionist will recognise your voice and will respond accordingly. You’re more likely to get blocked. It’ll sound more like a sales call to them, and you can come across as desperate. Not what you want at all. Furthermore if they’ve not taken your call 4 times this week, chances are they won’t take this call either will they?
You’ll also feel demoralised. You look at your account base 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. I rarely try to contact someone more than once a day. And seldom more than twice in a week. It is likely to be counterproductive. There are many alternative things you could do instead. Such as try to talk to an alternative member of the team. Make sure you call them at different times too. They may work part-time so you want to cover these bases.
Too large a pot
However, also having too many names to call also isn’t great either. You simply can’t keep up with them. This means you’ll likely miss out on business. In this situation you need to spend time prioritising the ones you have. So, guard against this with some form of grading system. 1-5 works for me. Category 1s are the best ones you have. They may say they’re actively looking into the the type of product or service you provide. Or you may be following up a proposal with them. These are the best opportunity for business you have and so you don’t want to miss out. Category 2s are promising and looking favourable. They are perhaps looking at and or likely to make a decision on the types of products or services that you sell. Category 3 are those where business is neither likely or unlikely at this stage. They may need more work or perhaps more time. I have more category 4s than anything. Business seems unlikely with them at this stage. However there is potential at some point. A category 5 for me is an account where there is no business likely from this account for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless I think they are worth keeping in my pot for now. I will call them again. However, in YOUR cat 5, it probably wouldn’t take much before you remove them to the archive file if you feel that you 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.
Do you manage a team?
It is as important to keep an eye on this if you’re managing a team too. I worked with a client recently who had a team of 4 people calling their in-house database of 46,000 names. They acknowledged that much of the data was old, out of date. Worse much of it hadn’t been called for years. You can imagine how demotivating this was for the team. They frequently found that the companies had closed down and they learned not to trust the decision-maker names. It undermines your credibility on the phone if you’re repeatedly told that the person you’ve asked for left more than 10 years ago!
And if your data is really out of date and or poor quality there are better ways of cleaning it than demotivating your team by getting them to do it. Instead employ a student over a holiday and pay them to call the businesses and clean the data. There are also list brokers who can tidy up data by comparing it (appending) to up to date lists that they have. This will add or offer new data where their list is different to yours.
For advice on this and other related topics on running a successful telephone team, contact us here.
To Market works with clients around the East and West Midlands including Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, Hinckley, Lutterworth, Nuneaton, Rugby, Daventry, Coventry, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Cambridge as well as Warwick, Sutton Coldfield, Lichfield, Leamington Spa and Kenilworth.