I’m in the process of really ramping up our sales and marketing efforts at Everon, and I’m always on the lookout for great ideas on how to do so most effectively.
One of the things that I’ve found in all great sales organizations is that they have a sense of urgency to achieve their goals every day. I guess this could be said of any great organization period, but it seems more tangible in sales organizations due to the direct tie to revenue.
But how do you create that urgency?
There are numerous ways, but I heard one today that surprised me.
One of the new members of my sales team just came to Everon from AT&T’s new web services division. He left them, even though he was making a lot of money quickly, because they ran such a sweat shop that he never saw his family.
I’m not advocating taking such extreme measures to create urgency like AT&T has, but many of their techniques can be applied very effectively when toned-down a bit.
The specific technique I heard from my rep today is that they make every one of their sales reps cold-call all day on Mondays, with the directive of setting 13 in person appointments for the rest of the week. If they don’t set at least 13 appointments, they have to come back in to the office on Tuesday and continue cold-calling until they do, rearranging any of the appointments they just set on Monday to clear their calendar to make more calls!
That’s extreme - but I can tell you that they are getting results!
As I said before, I’m not advocating being this aggressive. However, one of the rules of effective selling is that you should have a defined purpose for every call. AT&T has very clearly defined that purpose, and so they get the result they are looking for.
I guarantee that if you sit down with your sales reps for a day and listen to their calls, very few will have a well-defined purpose for their calls, and therefore they will get less impressive results.
How can you put this lesson to work for you?
You should work with your sales team to define a specific list of possible objectives that will define each and every call. Then, make sure that every person on your sales team is calling with one of those objectives in mind, and with specific criteria that will determine if they met their objective.
Results will improve, and so will sales.
MRC
