Some of our clients justify the cost of our program based on identifying those that don’t have the aptitude or attitude to do the prospecting part of the job much earlier.
There are two benefits to putting a newly hired sales professional through one of our Prospector’s Academies™. On the positive side, those that will be successful will get off to a quicker start, filling their calendar with Initial Appointments as soon as they are licensed and know enough to go on sales calls. Even those that will need to take an experienced sales professional or manager with them begin to get face-to-face selling experience much more quickly. And more experience generally means more commissions and a lower failure rate of new hires (turnover rate, which is a discussion for another day).
A second benefit to our approach to solving the appointment-setting challenge is that we can identify those that won’t or can’t do the all-important appointment-setting task of their job within eight weeks of the beginning of an Academy.
Think about what that means. Most sales professionals fail, not because they can’t close, but because they don’t get enough chances to close. After all, sales management can go along on sales calls to help when a new struggling sales professional stumbles. However, they can’t get on the phone with them and help them set Initial Appointments. Ergo, if you want to reduce expensive turnover that occurs with new hires, help them learn how to get better at setting those Initial Appointments. As a side note, if you believe that the same skills, tools and processes that work in the pipeline, or face-to-face part of the selling process, are the same as what is needed in appointment-setting, you need to read this blog explaining why that is not true, or you can click here and watch a short video on the topic.
The benefit of finding out that a sales professional can’t cut it earlier can be substantial. For instance, on the intangible side, we all tend to invest more time with failing sales professionals (trying to save them) which takes time away from working with the rest of our teams that could be coached to higher levels of success or in helping close business. On the tangible side, it is actually very easy to measure the financial impact of waiting too long to make a decision which is what I want to cover here.
The great majority of our clients have buying cycles that are a minimum of 90 days. Using that as an example, let’s do the math with some basic assumptions. You can always plug in your own data.
- 90 day buying cycle
- 90 day onboarding process with at least 30 days of basic training before letting them loose on targets/prospects
- A salary plus commission compensation package (at least for some time period). As an example, let’s use a small $3,000 per month salary to keep the calculation conservative. That equates to $3,750 of salary and benefits at a 1.25 factor (direct costs). This does not take into account additional indirect overhead like office, phone, etc. Most organizations use a factor of 1.4 to calculate the entire amount, but let’s keep it just to direct costs for our example.
Assuming it takes the 90 days of onboarding, which includes some prospecting, to get prospects into the pipeline and another 90 days to see what kind of sales come out the other end. Most of our clients tell us they will wait the full six months to determine if the pipeline is too small to address a failing sales professional. Most then put them on ‘plan’ or ‘notice’, giving them another 90 days to improve. The result, in our example is $33, 750 in direct costs for an entire nine-month period of time.
Under our approach, we suggest that the new hire is brought on board with the expectations that although this is a heavy prospecting job, you will be investing in tools and their ability to tackle the hardest part of the job—appointment setting, right up front. In return, at the end of the eight-week Prospector’s Academy, they will be expected to have been filling their pipeline with opportunities. During the eight weeks, weekly coaching sessions are conducted using accurate quantitative results, so there are no surprises if they are not performing up to expectations at the end of that period.
Assuming that we conduct a new hire through a Prospector’s Academy beginning in the second month, at the end of the third month ($11,250 in direct costs) we would have quantitative evidence whether this individual has the aptitude and attitude to do the prospecting part of the job or not. If not, you can release them. But even if you have a culture of putting someone on a 90-day corrective plan at that point, you’ve considerably shortened the process.
Our Prospector’s Academies™ generally run anywhere from about $850 per participant to $1,500. Even at the high end, the ROI is significant. Is it no wonder that some companies completely justify the cost of our programs on savings they derive from identifying those that cannot or will not do the prospecting part of the job much sooner?
Of course, the majority of our clients like the fact that we’ve never failed to at least double the number of appointments that a group of their sales professionals were setting after going through a Prospector’s Academy (and that includes the ones that didn’t). The impact on their new business revenue generally parallels that increase as twice the number of Initial Appointments with new potential customers or clients generally means twice the sales.
If you’d like more information on how to build a plan or why no team of sales professionals has ever failed to at least double the number of Initial Appointments they were setting after going through one of our programs, give us a call or drop us a line. We love talking about the challenges of appointment making!
Caponi Performance Group and Contact Science jointly market the telephone prospecting and cold calling solution called Coldcalling101™. It is the only comprehensive solution to solving the biggest barrier to success in most selling organizations—the inability to secure enough Initial Appointments to begin the selling process. We accomplish that through simultaneously addressing both the efficiency and effectiveness of the process. We can be reached at 817 224-9900 or at bcaponi@caponipg.com. You can also find answers to many of your challenges in our books: Contrary to Popular Belief, Cold Calling DOES Work! Volume I: Effectiveness, The Art of Appointment Making and Volume II: Efficiency, the Science of Appointment Making.
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