Oops! We have moved to our new site

Same info, more features and capabilities.  Please join us at http://www.fillthefunnel.com

Cold Call/Prospecting Best Times

What day of the week is best day for prospecting calls?  What time of the day is best?  My recent post titled Pounce, Pause, Nurture or Wait? was focused on the preferred response strategy for followup on a lead generated via the web.  Terrific comments are captured on Smashmouth Marketing blog and I recommend you read and catch up with the comments left behind.

Plenty of personal experience and anecdotal data over the years have planted the ideas I have as answers to those questions.  Gut feeling only, no empirical data to back that feeling up.  When you are preparing and planning my prospecting or cold-calling / FirstCalling activities, wouldn’t it be great to have some hard data to guide you in your efforts?  Thanks to a post by John Whattam, Regional Account Executive at Paradigm Learning, I came across a valuable report titled Lead Response Management Study from the Kellogg School of Management and presented by David Elkington, CEO of Insidesales.com and James Oldroyd, PHD Professor at M.I.T.

Here is the summary that John provided:

Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call in order to contact (by 49.7% over the worst day) and qualify (by 24.9% over the worst day) leads. Thursday is the best day to contact a lead in order to qualify that lead (by 19.1% better than the worst day).

4 to 6pm is the best time to call to make contact with a lead (by 114% over the worst time block). 8-9am and 4-5pm are the best times to call to qualify a lead (by 164% better 1-2pm, the worst time of the day). 4-5pm is the best time to contact a lead to qualify over 11-12am by 109%).

The odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the 1st hour. The odds of calling to qualify a lead decrease by over 6 times in the 1st hour. After 20 hours every additional dial your salespeople make actually hurts your ability to make contact to qualify a lead.

The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.

If you have an interest and/or responsibility to mazimize the results from leads, you will benefit greatly from this report.

Directly from the report here is an overview of their effort:

“Generally Speaking, the study was focused on identifying WHEN the best time was to efficiently contact web-generated leads, and HOW to generate web leads that qualify and close at optimal rates.”

If you are in sales or marketing, that has got to grab your attention.  Here is the link to read/download this report:  http://budurl.com/umd7

So, read the report and then come back and tell us if you have changed your strategy or approach to following up on leads.  Let us know if your experience matches the findings in the report.

Craig Rosenberg’s response is sounding better all the time (frequent occurrence)!

Pounce, Pause, Nurture or Wait?

No, this is not a sales personality test.  It is though an interesting question posed by Mike Damphousse on his Smashmouth Marketing Blog recently.  His question was:

“Within a day or two of sending an initial email to someone, leaving a phonemail or posting an interesting blog article or tweet, I see they (or someone from their company) have clicked into and visited our site.

Now, how aggressively do I go after them? Do I pounce immediately? Do I pause and call shortly thereafter? Do I just nurture them? Do I wait a couple days then call?”

Does your answer change because it is via the Web?  Would your strategy change if it was a phone call?   From the sales experts that initially responded to Mike’s question, only Craig (Funnelholic.com) said Pounce!  Should I be concerned when reading his blog (which I do everytime he has a new post)?   Haven’t had a sales call yet.  Of course, Nigel Edelshain (Sales 2.0) being the diplomat that he is, selected all the answers except for Pounce.

What do you think?  Why would you utilize one response over another?  Share your comments here if you like, but I encourage you to visit Mike’s Smashmouth Marketing Blog and share your thoughts there for all to see.  I’ll be watching for your comments myself.

Now I’m off to find a lead to Pounce on!

LinkedIn Subgroup Followup Q&A

It appears that there is quite a bit of interest around the recent LinkedIn Subgroup announcement. As a webtool, it seems to provide an answer to many needs you have been asking for.   Two key questions have been coming up and the answers are here:

1)  How many subgroups can I join?
You may join up to 50 subgroups across all parent groups.  This total does not count against your parent group total of 50.

2)  How many subgroups can I create for my parent group?
Up to 20 subgroups can be created within a parent group, but any individual can only create up to 10 Subgroups across all groups.  This limit does not count against your parent-group limit of 10.

If you have additional questons, leave them below as a comment and I will get you the answers as soon as they are available.  The link to the original announcement and analyis of the impact is here.

LinkedIn Groups Adds New Subgroups Feature

Last evening everyone that manages and/or owns a Group on LinkedIn received (or should have) the following announcement.

“There are now over 300,000 groups on LinkedIn where professionals are discussing, sharing news and collaborating with each other. We sincerely appreciate your dedication to the LinkedIn group you manage. Your efforts are essential to the continued success of groups.

We’re happy to announce that later this week we are launching a long-requested feature for group managers: the ability to create subgroups. Subgroups are like a break-out session at a conference. They enable you to create more focused areas than in the main group.

Also, by creating and inviting members into subgroups, you can now send additional weekly Announcement emails to focused audiences.

To create and invite other professionals into a subgroup, visit your Groups and go to the group’s “Manage” tab today. Once you’ve created the subgroup, here are four easy ways to get it going quickly:

• Set the aims for the subgroup by posting a featured discussion in the subgroup
• Kindle the conversation by posting a news article with a brief comment every day for the first month of the group
• Provide an ongoing focus for members’ attention by adding 10 RSS feeds related to the focus of the subgroup
• Drive attention to the subgroup through your comments in the main group and in other groups where you participate”

Within the Groups that you manage or belong to, Subgroups has the potential to increase the value of the discussion and at the same time provides another reason to become even more active on LinkedIn.  Up until now, the Discussion tab had the tendency to be extremely cluttered with topics ranging over a tremendous number of topics.  The larger the group has become, the more unwieldy the value of the Discussion and News Tabs are.  In only the most actively managed groups has the owner/manager been able to keep the topics and posts in some type of order. It has grown into a task that has taken several hours a day to manage for the active groups.  One of the best managed groups that I have experienced is SalesBlogcast.com Group owned/managed by Doyle Slayton.  Doyle says that he has spent up to several hours a day to keep his Discussion tab in a readable and topic-worthy form.  He has strict rules and enforces them diligently.  Due to his efforts, his site now enjoys over 16,000 members.  If you are interested in Sales in any way, I recommend his group and his blog.

If you are a member of a group that is not taking advantage of Subgroups yet, be proactive and send a note to the Group owner with suggestions for Subgroups and how you would benefit from them.  If you are really interested in driving the success of the Subgroup, ask the owner if they would be willing to let you be an additional Manager for the group and focus specifically on the subgroup.  Some groups have grown extremely large, Linked-HR is currently the largest group with almost 147,000 members as of today.  Olivier Taupin is the Group Owner of Linked-HR Group and you can imagine the management activities that he and his team must invest to keep things focused.   Subgroups should create more focused discussions as well as save time for the Group owner/manager by allowing their members to place their comments and posts in an appropriate subgroup.

One of the new features within Subgroups is the Access methods for the Subgroup.  You have options that include:

• Open Access: Any member of the group may join this subgroup without requiring approval by a manager. The subgroup will appear in the Subgroups directory of the group.
• Request to Join: Users must request to join the subgroup and be approved by a manager. The subgroup will appear in the Subgroups directory of the group.
• Invite Only: Only members who receive an invitation from the group manager may join the group.

This opens up an entire new use for LinkedIn.  Think about how you might be able to benefit from this new feature.

As I wrote in an earlier post, Groups are where the action is on LinkedIn.  What are some creative and useful ways that you want to implement as a Group owner or member?

Salespeople Don’t Know?

I have been reading a book titled How To Sell When Nobody’s Buying by Dave Lakhani.  Dave has some very good points throughout the book.  In an interview with Dan Schwabel on his blog, Dave asks the following question:

“How has selling changed in the last two years?“

The following is an excerpt from the interview regarding this question (emphasis is mine):

“Selling changed dramatically and no one told the salespeople. Most salespeople are still slogging along using the same old ideologies and techniques from the 80’s and 90’s that are based on ideas from the 60’s and 70’s. The result is a bunch of very frustrated salespeople and managers who are not making their numbers. Then, along comes an economic downturn and wholesale destruction of many industries and salespeople don’t know what to do or where to turn. What really changed was buyer mentality and buyer psychology. Consumers and prospects are overwhelmed with choices, markets commoditize faster than ever now and virtually all of them are over-communicated.”

Come on Dave.  No one told the salespeople?  I am not sure which salespeople you are referencing but I don’t buy it.  Salespeople already know this.  They knew it before all the smart people started writing about it.  The sensed it five years ago or more.

If your income depends on successfully selling a product or service, you know when changes are occurring.  Communication with our customers changes.  Decisions are being made by different people within the customer’s organization and the time frames begin to shift.  Expectations in frequency, responsiveness and attention are all in flux.  If you are in sales, you either know about these changes early on, or you are not selling much longer.

Successful SalesMakers don’t need to be told that selling has changed!  They are the first ones to know it .

What do you think?  Do you need to have someone tell you that selling has changed?

CLAIM YOUR NAME UPDATE

At midnight on June 12th, 2009 Facebook made it possible to have a customized URL for your account.  It works exactly like the LinkedIn personalized URL.

So…my new Facebook address is http://www.facebook.com/milesaustin

I have only a meager presence on Facebook at this time but as I wrote in an earlier post, claim your name or someone else will.

Let me know if you got the name you wanted.

Turn Contacts into Opportunity

Every successful SalesMaker I have ever known has built a substantial contact database.  It is protected and kept away from the eyes  of peers, bosses and company executives with a passion.  What used to be found in a Rolodex is now housed in LinkedIn, Jigsaw, Outlook and/or your favored sales CRM tool.  Wherever it is housed, those contacts are usually the most prized asset of a SalesMaker.  People are recruited and hired because of them, legal battles over non-compete agreements are fought over them, and they always hold promise for future business.  These contacts are most  often customers, but also contain business partners, manufacturers, fellow employees and even competitors.

I have been exploring an intriguing new Web Tool that combines the many advantages of social networking and the contacts that you have accumulated.  MyWay Interactive has announced the availability of Reach, a social network for sales professionals and small business owners.  Reach provides live secure connections between salespeople for the trading of qualified leads.  Reach provides a secure platform to “trade” leads  with other sales professionals that are in a non-competitive or complimentary role.

Using Reach, salespeople and small business owners are able to immediately generate greater sales revenues and expand their number of qualified leads while building collaboration networks with other sales and business professionals.  Sales people can now conduct business at new levels of productivity using the collective account knowledge of thousands of sales peers.

Here is a brief overview of how MyWayInteractive’s Reach works:

1. You have contacts within companies.
2. You would like to obtain new contacts within your target prospects and current customers.
3. There are many other non-competitive or complimentary SalesMakers engaged within the same account from other companies.
4. There are manufacturer reps engaged within the same accounts.
5. You can search the database for a contact within a specific company.
6. The name and contact information is NOT provided at this point
7. You initiate a trade of contact information with the owner of that contact for a contact that you have that they would like.

Examples:  If you are selling copiers into Company X, others are selling Computers, office supplies, recruiting services, and numerous other advisory services to them at the same time.  There are manufacturer reps from most of the major companies calling on the same company.  Would it be beneficial for all to share contacts with each other?  You are not competing with each other.  In many scenarios you are not even crossing paths.  How about the ability to create a private “network” of these same people to collaborate?

Another scenario that holds great promise is for a very large, multi-divisional sales organization.  The company will have various sales teams for printers, computers, servers, infrastructure, storage, software, services, leasing and even recycling.  How useful would it be to share information and contacts effortlessly with each other?

Reach is a hosted,  free service that includes:

• Personal web based contact manager
• Sales trading partner locator
• Exchange engine for anonymous trading
• Secure network for information exchange
• Easy integration of your LinkedIn contacts
• Fast, responsive customer support if you have a question

You can create an account easily by visiting MyWay Interactive and signing up for the free Beta account.

Create your account, load some of your contacts, search for some of your desired contacts and trade contacts with others.  Let me know what you think of the experience.

Don’t Cold Call

“Through observing what works, and what doesn’t, we’ve come up with six factors that determine whether a prospect will meet with you.  

These six factors are:

1. Your product
2. Your message
3. Repetition of your message
4. Talking to the right people
5. Using changes in your buyer’s environment
6. Establishing relationships

I will cover eash of these factors briefly in this ebook but will focus on the last three most heavily as they are the most important ones and also the ones we can change the most in our favor using Sales 2.0 tools and techniques.”

The quote above is an excerpt from a new ebook just released from one of the thought leaders in the Sales 2.0 field that I follow closely. Nigel Edelshain is CEO of Sales 2.0 LLC.  The company is dedicated to taking the sales profession to another level. Sales 2.0 provides companies with a range of services and products to enable them to make their sales forces wildly more effective.  It is one of my “must-read” blogs and sites for Sales 2.0.

Nigel has just released his newest eBook entitled Don’t Cold Call. Social Call.  Packed into it’s 24 pages is information that you will be able to reference over and over.  I found myself printing this out because I kept reaching for my highlighter when I was reading it on the screen. Nigel is currently providing this at no cost – FREE.  Click here to download this book.  While on his site at www.sales2.com, dig around a bit.  If you are a sales professional you will find a wealth of information that will help you earn your living and grow professionally.

What do you think of Nigel’s ideas and his six factors?  Did he miss any?  Share your comments below and let us in on what your experience is teaching you.

Claim Your Name

Claim your name from as many of the Web Tools and sites as you can.  Consider claiming both your personal name and your company name if appropriate.  Twitter would be an example of a Web Tool that you should create an account with your name and also your company name.

Don’t wait on this, add it to your to-do list now.  Claim your Name on every social media and web tool service you can think of.  In my last two corporate training workshops, “Web Tools for Business” and “LinkedIn Professional Profiles” the same topic has come up consistently.  Your name has already been taken. Even if you do not anticipate using the specific tools, claim your name anyway.  When you learn of a new Web Tool, go claim your space early.    I went so far as to buy .com domain names with my kids names many years ago.  At least they will have the control of their name in the future.

Using LinkedIn as the example, one of the first actions I recommend and one with immediate and practical benefit is to customize the URL for your profile.  Changing the default URL from http://www.linkedin.com/pub/7/234/3×7 to http://www.linkedIn/in/milesaustin will yield an address that is easy to understand, remember and provides the enhancement of additional search benefits and branding of your name.

Here is a list of the sites that should be high on your list:

1. .Com domain name
2. LinkedIn
3. Twitter
4. FaceBook
5. WordPress.com
6. Gmail
7. Yahoo
8. YouTube
9. Flicker

I am sure you can think of many more that should be claimed.  Add your recommendations on additional sites and services in the comment section for the rest of us to benefit from.