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!

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?

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.

LinkedIn Reading List Feature

Are you using the Reading List feature of LinkedIn?  It is always helpful to get to know as much as you can about the people that you are selling to, or attempting to sell to.  Here at Fill the Funnel, we are dedicated to share tools and techniques that help you accelerate your success.

At lunch with a customer earlier this week, she asked me my thoughts about Crowdsourcing? I smiled and asked what she knew about it, and she said that she was just learning about it, and that she had noticed I was reading the book Crowdsourcing while reviewing my LinkedIn Profile under my Readingt List. That took me by surprise, first because a customer is looking at my profile for preparation, and second that anyone would look at the Reading List in the profile.

Several  key learning points from this experience were:

1. You never know who is reading your profile, so put some effort into it.
2. The Reading List is a terrific window into the interests and thoughts of your prospects.  

WebTools Tip:  You can elect to follow someone’s Reading List.  Track the lists not only for those that you might have as a prospect, but also those that you respect.  Might be a good idea to connect to the reading list of your executive team.  Tremendous window into the interests of those that matter to you.  

Give it at try and let me know what you discover in comments below.

LinkedIn Groups-Where The Action Is

The real action on LinkedIn can be found within Groups.  If you want to increase the benefits and rewards of being a LinkedIn user, consider joining one of over 212,000  groups on LinkedIn.  These groups  typically are open to everyone, and are comprised of professionals that have a specific area of interest, experience, affiliation or goals.  There are Groups for Alumni associations, Community organizations, Industries, Professional Certifications, software programs and even geography.   These Groups are an effective way to develop connections with others in your profession or area of interest.  They will always help you fill the funnel.

To find a group that interests you, the Groups Directory  allows you to easily find the right group. Click on the “Category” drop-down to sort by different group types (Alumni, Corporate, Non-Profit, Corporate, etc). Once you have found a group you are interested in joining, click on the “Join Group” link to request to join the group. Clicking the Share button lets you invite your connections to join the group as well.

If you do not find a Group for the topic of your interest, LinkedIn makes it easy for you to start one yourself.  I have started several groups and have established numerous new connections that are of great value to me professionally and personally.  

WebToolsTip:  Belonging to a group is one of the easiest and most comfortable ways to invite someone to connect that you do not otherwise know.  When you click on the link to Add to Your Network, you are asked how you know the person.  One of the choices is Groups & Associations.  After selecting that option, you are presented a list of Groups that you share.  By selecting a group that you both share, and refering to that group in the text of your invitation, the likelihood of an invitation acceptance goes way up.  

In my opinion, LinkedIn should be required for anyone participating in our Web 2.0 world .  If you want to break through to the real power of this, or any tool, you need to go deeper into its capabilities.  Utilizing the power of Groups in LinkedIn will enhance your experience. 

For SalesMakers, here is a short list of some of the Sales Groups that I belong to and recommend exploring and joining if you are so inclined:

1. Sales Blogcast.com
2. The Sales 2.0 Network
3. Jigsaw User Group
4. Selling to Big Companies
5. Inside Sales Experts
6. Friends of the Funnel

Join one of more of these groups, start one of your own, and most importantly jump in and contribute ideas, answer questions and share experiences.  You will get out of this what you put into it.

Free Contacts For Cold Calls

In both webinars and workshops with SalesMakers, the #1 question I am being asked is how to get the phone number and email address for the prospects on your list?  In other words,  how can you Fill the Funnel?  I am going to make this real simple.  In a special arrangement with Jigsaw, I am able to provide you with twenty free contacts (as compared to the two contacts that I have offered in the past).  Follow the step by step instructions below and you will receive your twenty free contacts.  Here is what you do:

Click here to go to the special link for your 20 contacts (otherwise you receive only 2 contacts)

Complete the registration form.  Once you have completed your registration, Jigsaw will provide the ability to obtain 20 contacts  for free with your account.  Upon completion of your account setup form, you will receive an email that will activate your account.  Once you have clicked the Activate button, you are ready to search for and obtain your contacts.

For this example, I will be looking for Materials Managers in Healthcare in California and Arizona.

Follow the steps below to obtain the desired contacts:

1. Browse to http://www.jigsaw.com
2. Upper right hand corner, click on Sign In.
3. Enter your email address and password that you provided when registering.
4. Click on Advanced Search in the blue header toward the top of the screen, then select Find Contacts from the pull-down menu.
5. In the Title area enter the title of the contacts you desire (Material Manager in this example).
6. I recommend you leave the Company, Last Name and First Name fields for this type of broad search.
7. In the Levels area, select the level that your prospect would most likely hold (in this example I would select VP-Level and Director Level).
8. In Departments, you select the department that this position would typically reside in (for this example I would select Finance &Administration, Operations and IT).
9. For Country, I will select USA. 
10. For State, select the appropriate state(s).  Hint=hold the CTRL key down and you can select multiple states at once. (for this example, I will select CA and AZ).
11. Enter appropriate info in Metro Area, Area Code and Zip Code if you would like (for this example they are left blank).
12. With Industry I will select Health-care, which then populates the Sub-Industry area, where I will select Hospitals.
13. Employees area I will select ALL categories and then de-select the 0-25, 25-100 and 100-250 boxes ( I am looking for hospitals with at least 250 employees or more).
14. For this example I am leaving Revenue, Ownership, Website and Fortune Rank all untouched.  For your searches, select those that are appropriate.
15. I typically leave Actions as Added or Updated.
16. I most always leave By blank.
17. Now click Search button in the bottom right of the screen.  If you followed the example search for Materials Manager above, your search will return over 22 contacts that meet your criteria.  WebToolsTip: Once you have reached this point, the column headers for your search are all underlined.  One of my best practices is to click on the Updated column, which results in the list being re-sorted from the most recent information to the least recent information.  The odds are that the most recent information is the best information.  However, don’t shy away from the older leads, but just don’t go there first, especially if your search yielded more contacts than you are looking for or have points for.  One of the many great features of Jigsaw is that if you “buy” a contact and discover that the information is invalid, you can report it as such with a few mouse clicks, and get your points back for another contact.  At the same time you are cleaning the database that will benefit you and other Jigsaw users in the future.  There are many Jigsaw users that have accumulated large point totals by doing nothing other than correcting and cleaning the existing Jigsaw database.
18. The next step is to click the Boxes of those contacts that you would like to purchase with your points, and select Get Contacts button, then Get Selected Now.
19. You will then see a screen that shows the Number of Paid Contacts you have selected, Points Required and Your Points (total points you have in your account).
20. Select the Get Contacts button.  You will then see a list of your selections from earlier, and those that you have “bought” with points now have a green money symbol to the left of the title.  You will notice that there is also now a name showing in the Name column.
21. Click on the Name and you will be taken to the business card for your new contact.  
22. By selecting the arrow to the right of the blue Export button, you will be given three options:  vCard, Export as Lead to CRM or Export as Contact to CRM. If you use one of the CRM tools supported by Jigsaw (Salesforce.com or Oracle on Demand) you can import it right into the tool.  If not, you should select vCard and you will be able to use it with Outlook.

There is much more to Jigsaw than what I have presented here.  I will be hosting a series of web events and workshops on Jigsaw for SalesMakers in the coming months. Click on the RSS feed button on the top right of the blog and you will receive information on how to sign up for these events.  If you are a member of  LinkedIn, there is a Jigsaw User Group that you can join to learn from some of the Jigsaw users as well as many of the Jigsaw staff.  Click here to join the Jigsaw User Group.

If you would like to learn more about Jigsaw and several other companies that I use on a regular basis, read about them in some of my earlier posts here.

LinkedIn Clamps Down on Super-Connected Users

If you use LinkedIn to any extent, you should be aware of the recent restrictions on the number of connections any one person can have.  LinkedIn’s official policy for connecting to other members states that “LinkedIn members should only connect with people they know”. 

CIO Magazine just published a terrific piece on LinkedIn’s Super-Connected Users that I recommend you read here.

LinkedIn has quietly been putting limits into practice for some time now, as their membership is now over 34 million members in over 200 countries.  Three key limitations that you should be aware of are:

1. Maximum of 3,000 invitations to connect can be sent out from your account.  This is why you sometimes receive an email that asks you to invite them, they are out.
2. 30,000 connection limit
3. You can belong to no more than 50 LinkedIn Groups.

There are groups like Toplinked.com and GroupLinked.com that exist primarily to expand your connections. They provide weekly lists, rankings of the members with the highest connections and require that you accept any invitation from anyone that invites you.  You are required to identify that you are a member somewhere in the header of your profile.

For many LinkedIn participants, the perception of status is tied to the number of followers. The more connections, the more influential, successful and powerful you must be.

I have found the same thing on other social sites like Facebook and Twitter.  As I have become a more active participant of Twitter with a growing list of those that I follow, I have been amazed at the amount of time Twitter users spend talking about the number of followers and the number of re-tweets they get obtain. There is consistent requests to ” help push me over 3,000 followers” pr please te-tweet my tweets.  There are sites that rate you based a magic algorithm of followers, followings and updates.

I believe strongly in the capabilities of these services.  They can be powerful web tools that can foster dramatic new connections and relationships in your life, both professional and personal.  My recommendation is to keep your purpose for participating in clear view.  I am using this tool to____________(answer here).  Without a clear focus on your reason to participate in these social activities, it is very easy to allow them to become a major time-drain.  Know your purpose, and incorporate tools like LinkedIn and Twitter into your daily routine, and follow that routine.  If you really start to enjoy the social part of these tools, create personal accounts and keep your activities in the proper area.

How do you manage your LinkedIn connections?  Does the number of connections influence your view of the person in the profile?

Are Your Leads Being Followed Up?

The respected Aberdeen Group released the results of an informative survey of 226 B2B organizations in November of 2008 entitled Lead Nurturing: The Secret to Successful Lead Generation that included this disappointing statistic:

“… upwards of 60 percent to 70 percent of leads are never followed up by sales.”

Are you spending a significant amount of money to generate your leads only to have them be ignored by salesmakers?   In the opinion of Ian Michiels, Practice Leader-Customer Management Technology Group at Aberdeen Group,  The most effective way to combat this fact is to focus on and implement a Lead Nurturing program.

Here is how Michiels defines Lead Nurturing:

“Lead nurturing is a relationship-building approach utilizing multiple media (e-mail, whitepapers, telecommunication, seminars, webinars, blogs, collateral, speaking engagements, third-party articles) to support the prospects buying cycle with relevant information and engage in an ongoing dialog until qualified prospects are deemed “sales-ready”  A “sales-ready” lead is ultimately defined by the unique definition of a qualified lead within the organization.  Sales-ready prospects are educated, informed and prepared to make a decision; thus they need to be actively engaged with sales or engaged by call to action marketing messages.  The goal of a lead nurturing program is to support and nurture long-term opportunities with the hope that these prospects may represent future sales.  Ultimately, this requires marketing to take ownership and accountability for nurturing prospects that are not ready to purchase, but may have a defined need, authority, budget or a long-term timeline.”

I have found very few organizations where marketing is accountable for the nurturing of prospects, while only the “sales-ready” leads are fed to the salesmakers.  It is typically, “here are 100 prospect names, go sell them something.”

Do you segment your Leads into “sales-ready” and prospects?  Do you have different processes built for each?  Have do you handle this in your company?