Keep in mind that you are trying to reach a very busy businessperson, and you are interrupting them to try to get their attention. The likelihood of you getting in touch with them on the first shot is very slim. You need to follow a specific follow up strategy that gives you the best chance at success, and doesn’t make you look like a stalker. I would suggest something like this:

5 days after initial deliver/contact – Phone call
+2 business days – Email
+2 business days – Phone call
+3 business days – Email
+2 business days – Email
+3 business days – Final phone call

If you haven’t reached your prospect at this point, they probably aren’t interested right now and you should make a graceful retreat – for the time being. Leave them a message saying something along the lines of,

“It must be a very busy time for you right now, which I understand. Please take down my name and number and give me a call if you can free up some time. Otherwise, I’ll stop trying to reach you for now.”

Leaving messages

Whether or not to leave voicemail during your phone call attempts is the point of much debate in the sales industry. I’m not going to take a strong position on when or when not to in this guide, but I will tell you one thing for sure: If you are going to leave a message, make it a good one!

As the CEO of a company, I get a lot of sales calls. I also get a lot of voicemails from salespeople. Most of them are horrible!

When I say horrible, I am not suggesting that the salesperson needs to have a perfect script for leaving a voicemail. What I am suggesting is that if you are going to leave a voicemail, it should be:

• Professional sounding
• Clear
• Slow enough that I can actually hear what you are saying and write down notes
• Repetitive – give your name and phone number multiple times throughout the message; it is such a pain in the neck when somebody gives it once quickly at the beginning of the message and I have to replay the message three times to get their name and phone number written down!

And finally…whatever you do…don’t try to guilt the person into calling you back; I can’t believe how many people try this!

“Mike, I’ve got something really important to discuss – I don’t know why you won’t call me back…”

It makes me 100% sure that I DON’T want to call them back, and that they’ll never get my business.

If you are going to leave messages, be clear, professional, and courteous.

MRC

Drop offs are very similar to the lumpy mail concept we covered earlier, but instead of being mailed, they are delivered in person by the salesperson. Delivering them gives the salesperson the opportunity to do a little bit of discovery while at the client’s office, and sometimes meet with the prospect immediately.

I don’t know who originally created this strategy, but I learned it from a District Sales Manager at ADP.

If you aren’t familiar with ADP, they are a nationwide giant that provides a variety of services to small businesses – largely focused around payroll and HR administration outsourcing. My understanding is that they have somewhere in the neighborhood of 15000 sales reps out in the field! We all have something we can learn from them.

ADP uses drop offs very successfully to help their salespeople get in the door with new prospects. My contact at ADP says it’s by far the number one way they go about getting appointments with prospects; that’s enough for me to hear. Specifically, for every 25 drop offs he does, he gets in the door with about two-thirds of those! Any salesperson would kill for those kinds of number!

How do you use drop offs? It’s very simple:

1. Identify a target list of prospects – I would keep this to 30 prospects or less per salesperson per campaign
2. Identify a theme for your campaign messaging – examples could be “protection” or “security” if you are marketing a data protection service
3. Choose a product that:
   a. You can buy in bulk at an affordable price
   b. Is related to the theme you chose
   c. Will get the attention of the prospect
   d. And ideally is something they will want to keep around and us
4. Have it branded with your company logo if there is an affordable and appropriate way to do it – you can get this done with almost any product
5. Write a note or sales letter to go with the product
6. Deliver the product to the prospects office, addressed directly to the prospect you hope to meet with
7. Follow up the next week with phone calls and email, identifying yourself as the person that brought the gift and asking for an appointment

A very high number of people will accept your call or respond to your email, and a good number of those will agree to meet with you to discuss your services.

The more creative you are with these ideas, the better. Get a number of people in your company to brainstorm ideas and give a small reward for the best idea – you’ll come up with some very clever ones.

There are two very important things you should consider when using this strategy:

1. The number of drop offs a salesperson can reasonably do in a month is not a huge number perhaps 50 or so. However, the number doesn’t need to be huge, because this idea will get them in front of a very high percentage of their prospects.
2. You can afford to spend considerably more money on each of the drop offs (as compared to the “lumpy mail” concept or other similar marketing tactics due to the high success rate. Keep in mind the concept of Total Lifetime Value when you develop your campaigns and spend enough money per drop off to give them some real firepower.

To illustrate, if you were running a campaign about security or a managed back up service, you could have your salespeople deliver a nice padlock, or you could spend more money and have them deliver a personal fireproof mini-safe.

So, which warm-up tactic gets you the best return for your money? You’d have to test and measure the ROI to be sure, but my bet is that the personal safe would get your salespeople in front of a dramatically higher number of prospects.

MRC

Send an article or report

Sending an article or a report to a prospect is similar to sending a sales letter, but it adds a degree of perceived value and thoughtfulness to your approach.

Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. If you receive a letter from someone saying that they will be calling soon to introduce themselves, it has limited value – primarily just creating awareness – and is usually just a wasteful interruption of the prospect’s day. However, if you receive a report or article that’s of interest to you with a note attached that says “I thought you might enjoy reading this…” you now attach the value of the article or the report to the person that sent it to you.

As the salesperson, you are effectively “borrowing” the value of the article or report.

This is one of the easiest things in the world to do. You don’t have to be the genius that wrote the article or report – just find one, cut it out or photocopy it, and send it along to your prospect with a hand written note. Then follow up with a phone call to introduce yourself.

It’s best, but not necessary, if your handwritten note adds something of additional value to the article or report. If your note shows some thoughtfulness or expands on the ideas of the article or report, then you gain an extra degree of additional credibility with the client.

Invite them to an event

Inviting a prospect to an event can be one of the most enjoyable ways of warming up an initial contact. People love to leave the office to do something different every once in a while, and they particularly enjoy it if it’s on somebody else’s dime, makes them feel important, and is entertaining.

The number of things you can do here is unlimited, and really depends on the time and money you want to put into the event, as well as the one-on-one time you hope to achieve with each prospect at the event.  Totally different call versus calling in to speak to a cold prospect with nothing but your elevator pitch in hand!

For example, a popular use of the “invite someone to an event” strategy is taking someone to see a local professional sports team. Salespeople and business development people have been doing this for ages for one reason – it works! The downside is that this can be pretty expensive; the upside is that it takes virtually no effort to plan and it gives you great one-on-one time with your guests.

As an alternative, we have used events such as Small Business Roundtables in which we’ll invite a number of small business executives – say 10 or so – to a private event at a nice hotel conference room so we can ask them their thoughts about business trends, use of technology, etc.

We position these events in such a way that the business executives feel honored to be invited because we are acknowledging them as experts and influential in their local business community. During this type of event, we do very little in the way of selling our services, but we get a ton of good connections, build good relationships with influential people, and get good one-on-one time with prospects for the several people on our staff that we’ll have attend. The sales flow naturally as a result of the impression we made on our prospects.

Finally, we have put on many local seminars of our own about topics related to small business technology. We have been able to attract anywhere from 10 to 25 qualified prospects to these types of presentations.

Seminars such as this serve as an excellent way to position your company and your people as thought leaders and experts. They can cost a significant amount to host, and they don’t give you as much one-on-one time with the prospects, but they do serve as a great way to impress a significant number of prospects.

No matter what the event, it’s nice for a salesperson to have an invitation to extend to a prospect; it feels like you are giving them a gift. This makes for a totally different call versus calling in to speak to a cold prospect with nothing but your elevator pitch in hand!

For more information on marketing seminars, see our post from February 26.

MRC

What exactly does “warm up” a call me?

It means a number of things:

• The prospect has heard of you before the call
• The prospect was expecting your call
• You have a specific reason to call that is of interest to the prospect
• You’ve already done something of value for them that triggers a sense of reciprocation
• You have a relationship with them that is of interest

You get the point. It doesn’t have to be all of these things at once – any single factor will help – but the more you have, the better off you are.

When these factors exist, the call is less cold. The prospect is more receptive to hearing from you, and you are usually more comfortable with contacting them.

If you believe, like I do, that the far majority of managed services sales will happen in a face-to-face meeting with a prospect, then the point of all of these tactics is to help the salesperson get a meeting. If you are an owner or Sales Manager reading this, it is critically important to involve your salespeople in the decisions around these campaigns so they are confident that what is being sent represents them well and helps them get in the door.

Specific tactics for warming up the call

Send a sales letter with “lumpy mail”

A very common sales strategy for warming up a prospect is to send them a letter first, then place the follow up call referencing the letter.

There are many theories of what the letter should be about. One of the most famous books that discusses this technique is called “Selling to V.I.T.O.” by Anthony Parinello. It goes into great detail about what specifically should be in the letter and how it should be used.

I’m less concerned about the specif ics of the content of the letter. I am more concerned that it gets the prospects attention, gets opened, and is memorable.

For these reasons, I highly recommend using what’s called “lumpy mail”. Lumpy mail is just as its name describes – lumpy. An example would be an envelope that has something large stuffed inside of it.

Because of the odd shape the envelope takes because of what’s inside, the piece of mail is lumpy and really stands out from others in the stack of mail. This almost guarantees that it will be looked at.

If it gets looked at, it’s very likely that it will be opened. And if it gets opened, and you put something interesting inside, it is very likely to be memorable.

Let’s assume all of this has happened. How much easier is it for the salesperson to now call and say, “Did you like the X I sent you?” or “This is Mike, I’m the person that sent you X”?

It’s much easier! Your salesperson is more confident and having more fun because they had something specific to reference and the prospect is more likely to welcome your conversation out of a sense of reciprocation.

There are a million ideas on how to use lumpy mail. The best resource I’ve found for ideas is the website www.3Dmailresults.com. They will send you a free course on how to using lumpy mail, and they can serve as your source for “lumpy” products.

Get their free course and study the principles of how to use lumpy mail effectively, and then get creative with how you execute on the concept; there really is no limit to the number of things you could do.

This technique is one of the best ways to leverage your time. You can reach a huge number of people with direct mail, and by using “lump mail” techniques, you can make sure that what you are doing will stand out in the mind of your prospect. Once you’ve found a campaign that works, you simply repeat it over and over again.

I’ll cover other “warm up” tactics in my next posts – stay tuned!

MRC

You want to give the opposite impression.  You want the prospect to see you as someone with expertise and value to add to their lives.

To ensure that we are making the right impression and adding value in every managed services sales call, we try to follow the principle of V.I.P. selling. V.I.P. selling means that every conversation we have with a client should meet the V.I.P. criteria:

1. It should add VALUE
2. It should create INTEREST
3. It should POSITION your company and yourself as a thought leader and trusted resource

Perhaps not every call will accomplish all three, but you should always get 2 out of 3. This means that calling to “just check in” is not acceptable – it’s a waste of an opportunity to have a more engaging interaction with your prospect!

Instead, call with an introduction to somebody else they would want to know, or tell them about an interesting event, or a great article you read about their industry.  Something…anything…to make the call more relevant to the prospect.

MRC

There are all kinds of ideas on how to cold call. Some of it comes down to personal preference and what feels comfortable to you, but it should primarily be based on performance and results; after all, most people find any cold calling uncomfortable – you can’t let that stop you!

The following script works. I first heard it from my friend Andrew Morgan, but I had always practiced something similar to, if a little less refined than, this myself. I’ve broken it down below to illustrate the specific steps of the call. These steps are critical; the specific language you use at each step is less so. It goes like this:

1. Get their attention

Use an opening line that will get them to pay attention to you. Just using their name is enough:

“Jim – Mike Cooch with Everon here.”

2. Lower their defenses

Humor is often a great way to get them to lower their defenses and be more receptive to your conversation.

“This is a sales call; I’m sure you’re excited.”

Or you may have something local going on that you could reference:

“I’m glad I caught you at your desk; most people are at home mourning that Patriots’ loss last night!”

Just find something that fits your personal style and gets them relaxed a bit.

3. Set an up-front contract

An up- front contract is a way of laying down some ground rules/commitments that make your prospect more comfortable and will give you a better chance of success.

At this stage of the prospecting call, an example would be: “Look, I know I’ve caught you off guard and I know you are busy. If I promise not to take more than 3 minutes of your time, could I ask you a few quick questions to see if it makes sense for us to continue speaking with each other?”

4. Ask questions that demonstrate your knowledge of their world and challenges

An example at this stage in a prospecting call is to say something along the lines of:

“Typically when speaking with other (Their title)’s in your industry, I find that they face the following challenges:

Challenge 1

Challenge 2

Challenge 3

Do any of these challenges resonate with you?”

This type of question is an opportunity for you to establish credibility and demonstrate your knowledge, while giving the prospect the opportunity to “raise their hand” by acknowledging a challenge.

5. Respect the up-front contract you made!

When you’ve used up your initial time say “Mr. Prospect, I’ve used up my three minutes, but it seems like we have something to talk about. Do you have a little more time to continue now?”

This shows that you do respect their time and keep your word.

6. Lower their guard even more and demonstrate proof of your capabilities at the same time

At some point, the prospect will most likely ask something along the lines of “How are you suggesting that you’ll help me solve my problems?”, to which you should reply with something along the lines of:

“Well, Mr. Prospect, I’m not sure that I can. But here is what we did for a similar company in your situation.”

By doing so, you keep yourself from going into a pitch about how you can make their world perfect without even knowing the details of their problems – a common salesperson affliction!

7. Set another up front contract

“Mr. Prospect, I think the best way for us to proceed is to meet and spend some time discussing your specific business needs. If I promise to keep it to 45 minutes, can I come to your office next week to meet with you?”

8. Set the appointment, if that is your objective.

Again, it’s the process behind this cold call that is most important, not the specific language you use. The entire call structure is designed to get a conversation and establish credibility with the prospect.

There are many other cold call script structures, and many of them will work for you. Experiment with several and use what works best for you. Just stay away from anything that is overly gimmicky, and keep in mind that the cold call is just the first step in an often long managed services sales cycle, so do everything you can to leave a good impression and establish yourself as a trusted resource.

Good luck!

MRC

We built our managed services business for three years doing essentially nothing but cold calling. We had no money, we had no marketing people, and we didn’t have any of the ideas I’m about to share with you – all we had was time and a desire to get off the ground. So we picked up the phone and started dialing.

It’s not sexy.

It’s not easy.

But it works.

To this day, our salespeople make 50+ sales calls each and every day. I think this will always be the case.

You’ve got to learn to love the phone!

Have realistic cold calling expectations.

The reason most people dislike cold calling is because they have the wrong expectations. If you think that every call you make is going to result in someone being glad to hear from you, then you will of course be sadly disappointed.

However, if you understand that for every 50 calls or so you are likely to get one good appointment that may lead to business, then you will be able to find success.

50 calls for every appointment may not sound like a great ratio to you, but considering you can make 50 calls in one day, it’s not that bad. The way to improve that ratio is to “warm up” the calls you make, and every one of the additional techniques we cover will help you do so.

In my next several posts, I’ll share our lessons about how to make cold calling work for you.

MRC

Sell the prospect on the opportunity, the company, and your culture.

Sell the prospects? Aren’t they looking for a job from me?  I am the managed service provider after all.

Two good questions and a huge reason companies often fail to attract top talent. The interview is just as much about you selling your company, culture, and team as it is about vetting candidates.

I am not talking about a long sales pitch.  What I am suggesting is that you have a process by which to introduce the opportunity you are hiring for.

You should be able to go through the following with prospects:

• Company history
• Why it is an exciting rewarding place to work
• What the prospect will be part of in the bigger picture
• What your company’s values are
• What your hiring criteria is

Doing this serves two purposes. One it gets the prospects excited to win the chance to work for a company that can articulate things at this level. Two it gives them insight into what you are looking for and you will quickly be able to tell who doesn’t get it as the process continues.

We use a group interview process to make this pitch to candidates and I highly recommend it.

I am able to put 8 prospects in a room and within two hours send half to two thirds home. Getting the process down takes some getting used to but once you have a process for the group interview it is an invaluable time saver. Think about how many times you have had a candidate get through a phone screen and within 10 minutes of meeting them in person you know they will never work at your company? The problem is that you feel obligated to go through the motions of interviewing them and even if you speed through everything it is still a waste of an hour of your time. Get comfortable with group interviews and use them to your advantage.

The group interview process has many other benefits as well:

• See how candidates interact in a team setting – your team works as a team after all
• See how candidates work to get their thought heard by the group
• Give group activates for them to work on – who leads, who doesn’t contribute
• Ask the group who the best candidate in the room is based on their understanding of the job – you will be surprised how much wisdom there can be in group mentality.

D0 a deeper dive into the candidates’ fit.

Once you have sent the unlikely prospects home it is time to conduct an abbreviated individual interview to really assess the candidate’s potential.

In this process you should have a shared language by which to rate people with the members of your team. An example of this is as follows:

Rate each candidate A, B, or C in each of the following categories:

• Cultural Fit
• People Skills
• Critical Thinking
• Tech Skills

In order for this to work your team has to have a shared understanding of each of these categories (they should look familiar at this point) and what they mean to the company.

By doing this you can assure that each member of the team is evaluating the candidates on the criteria that will make them successful in their roll.

Get started.

If you start to use this process in your hiring you will bring a new level of clarity to what you are looking for and it will cut time and money out of the process of hiring.

This is going to take some getting used to and you will have to create and document some new hiring processes but they will be worth their weight in gold once you start to use them.

Josh

Hiring is a process.

I think the most important thing to understand is that it is a process, not an event. You need to know that hiring takes time and plan ahead. If you wait until there is a burning need to hire before you start the process you will surely fall back into the old ways of just taking the best of what you can find.  Engineers are usually looking to get a job right away so it can be hard to keep a pipeline full of candidates.

On the flip side of this is when you lose an engineer because you are not quite ready and they get another offer, they will often come back to you when the time is right if you sell the opportunity well.

The most important part of the managed services hiring process to realize is that if you will need an engineer to start working for you the first of a particular month, you must start this process with enough lead time for success.

Cast a net for candidates

There is an unlimited number of places to post your employment ads. The key to success is testing a few of them out and measuring your success. We have some of our greatest success in these areas:

• Craig’s list – sounds too easy but we have great success here
• Internal referrals – A players like to work with other A players, they tend to stick together
• Career Changers – colleges, certification programs, people looking to get their foot in the door and bring a wealth of other experience to the table (possibly service related)
• Competition – there are a lot of big companies putting reps through extensive service and technology training that you can take advantage by luring them away

Go through what you have caught and determine what to keep.
If you have cast your net properly you will have a lot of resumes to go through, even if you have written your job post to try and weed out the people that do not fit.

You should have someone (HR if you have them) review each resume for characteristics you are looking for. Have the list of what you are looking for in a candidate and check off as many of them that can be identified from the resume and cover letter.

Do not screen resumes for tech skills only and I would even argue on the first screen you should not rule out anyone due to a lack of tech skills as long as they have some tech background or training.

Once the resume screens are done a phone screen should be completed.

The HR person can do this phone screen for you again as long as you have clearly outlined what to look for:

• Phone Personality – we work on the phones in this business so you cannot be a dud
• People Skills – were they able to keep the conversation going, did they have good questions, were they articulate
• Salary Range – why do you want to talk to someone that wants twice what you can afford to pay for the position? I worked with a hiring manager that would talk to everyone and tried to create positions for good people that didn’t fit the particular role he was hiring for. Sure he hired some great people but his budget was way out of whack and the roles that needed to be filled suffered.

Once you have these screens completed you are ready to move on to the next phase.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the interview process and how to “sell” your company to strong candidates.

Josh

5.  They love to learn

In the managed services business, it is impossible for anyone to know everything about everything, even though there are people you will run into that think they know everything. Great service reps do not need to know everything about technology or about how to provide great customer service.

Great service people are able to instill confidence in people that their problems are in good hands and will be resolved even if they have no clue how to fix the problem at that very moment. Even my most senior techs see problems each week that they have never dealt with before.

Using their critical thinking ability and their people skills they are able to provide a great experience to the customer while learning what it takes to address the situation.

I am not saying that they can spend all day tinkering with technology or reading articles to formulate a plan. They are adept at using the team and the resources available to them in order to learn in the most efficient way possible how to resolve the issue.

They must also be able to lean the technology need to do their job while being great service people.

Great service engineers love to learn!

6. They are enjoyable for you and your team to work with

I am not suggesting you ever hire someone because you like them. In fact, if you hire someone based on the fact that you like them they will almost always disappoint you because you have not factored in the other critical components of making the decision.

I am saying that after you know someone has all the characteristics and values you are looking for you should stop and think about how they will mesh with the team. In fact when hiring service engineers weather you like them or not is less important to how the team will enjoy working with them.

One of the biggest determinants of an employee’s longevity at your company is the perception that they have friends amongst their coworkers. If they are not enjoyable for you and your team to work with, they don’t belong on the team no matter how good they are at what they do.

Make sure you find people with all six of these characteristics

Hiring can be time consuming and it is often tempting to settle for the best of what we have seen. Just get someone into the role because we are buried is the mentality I often seen take over when decisions are being made.

You do not have to pick the candidate who is the lesser of the evils. You can run your process again and again until you find the right fit. Even though it will take more time and possible feel like more pain it will save you aggravation and money in the long run.

Josh