Appointment Setting Blog from the Caponi Performance Group
Setting More Appointments in Less Time
An article from the Harvard Business Review.
Sales training, when coupled with ongoing coaching works, period. According to the Sales Executive Council, sales professionals that receive fewer than two hours a month of coaching average 90% of their assigned quota. Those that get more than three hours of coaching per month average 107% of quota. Continue reading “Where is the biggest payback in coaching sales professionals?”
The value of knowing how many dials need to be made each day and how to figure it.
Do you know how many Dials you need to make today to have enough conversations that will be converted into enough appointments to hit your number at the end of the year? Continue reading “How many Dials Does It Take to Make a Sale?”
“Make more dials!” goes the typical sales manager mantra. But is that the best way to set more appointments?
Many clients we’ve worked with originally only had their sales teams reporting to management each week the number of dials they were making to set appointments. Most also track the number of appointments set. But, even in those situations that track them both, it’s not enough to effectively manage the process. Continue reading “Three Metrics required to manage the appointment setting process.”
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). Continue reading “How to significantly reduce the cost of a bad sales professional hire.”
Why our approach is different and why it has never failed to double the number of appointments a group of sales professionals set after going through our program.
When I make my own appointment making calls, prospects ask me all the time, why would investing in one of my Prospector’s Academies benefit them? They say that their team seems to be doing okay. And if my sales team knows how to close, they must also know how to set appointments, right? After all, selling is selling? “I just don’t think I’m interested.” Continue reading “The four reasons sales professionals fail at appointment-setting.”
Author’s note: This blog is about what causes Call Reluctance. I’ve written an in-depth article that is posted on LinkedIn that addresses both the causes and the four elements required to fix it. After reading it, you’ll understand why the manners you’ve tried to date have met with moderate success at best. Continue reading “You may be surprised by what causes Call Reluctance”
In an earlier blog, we talked about the value of recording ourselves to determine if we can improve our performance on the phone. In this blog, we’ll talk about what to look for when you listen to yourself. Continue reading “Three ideas to increase your appointment setting performance.”
If you are a manager of sales professionals, you are charged with not only driving a certain amount of revenue, but you’re also charged with developing the abilities of the sales team. It’s a given. Our incentive is our own survival and the belief in leverage. We know we’ll be asked to bring in more revenue next year than we were asked to do this year—and most likely without additional headcount. The only way to do that is to have a more efficient and effective team, which is another way of saying I will continuously need more leverage or better productivity out of each of my team members. Continue reading “A simple way to improve your appointment setting performance.”
You bet your sweet *** it does!
One of the most common objections I hear these days is that cold calling doesn’t work anymore. I’m here to tell you that it does work. We’ve trained over a thousand sales professionals to do it and they all report back that they set appointments.
Let’s face it, sales professionals come and go, but territories tend to be permanent.
If you think about it, even if we divide up a territory into smaller pieces, or recombine multiple territories in some fashion, the individual targets within them stay the same. Therefore, I would argue that territories are permanent even when the deck is re-shuffled. So, as I like to say, shame on me if my territories are not stronger, warmer and better defined a year from now than they are today.
There are two reasons why this is important: