Jesse, Ashley and Dan started to set sales appointments quickly.
Their stories and the key strategies that made the difference.
Jesse – Set appointment with an elusive monster account.
Ashley – New job 2 months ago setting appointments with $500+ million companies. Immediately starts setting 4+ a week.
One has already converted to a $1.2 million project.
Dan – 3 “highly qualified” appointments first week. 4 responses to voicemail.
There were 3 common core strategies that led to these results.
Jesse’s sole goal was to meet with one high potential account that had proven elusive. In his case, it was the script, particularly the phrasing of the credibility and value statements that made the difference.
He wrote…” Your advice coupled with my experience in sales allowed me to put together a script that landed us a meeting with a major independent television studio. I will let you know how it goes.”
Jesse Cuddeback.
Ashley has an interesting story. Works virtually for a niche consulting company setting appointments with top people at companies with more than $500 million in revenue. Base pay is $70K and the requirement is to set 5 appointments a week or you are gone. Turnover is very high in this position. Her challenge was made more significant as her fellow reps had claimed most of the suspects as their own, leaving few to call. She had sales experience but no appointment setting experience. If she didn’t produce quickly, her $70K virtual gig was gone.
She didn’t do what the company suggested. 1) The scripts were not good and contained many of the common self-sabotaging mistakes. The responses to resistance were not calculated to separate the legitimate prospects from the tire-kickers and get the meeting now. She rewrote them.
2) There was no recommended call process. She started calling in a systematic manner and let them go at the point of diminishing returns. The company line was to never stop calling. Not good.
3) She didn’t just call, she called in a way that increased the odds of having a conversation. To increase the odds of conversing with your target, you must interact in a certain way with gatekeepers and voicemail systems, call at certain times and utilize what I call “power calling” techniques to get your identified decision-makers to pick up the phone. Her company did not teach any of these techniques.
Ashley called me Friday to say that although her average number of appointments set was averaging 4 a week, not the 5 required to maintain employment, that one of her meetings had just converted to a $1.2 million project and her manager had commented that her meetings seemed to be of a higher quality and asked her to do a presentation at the next sales meeting. She is no longer worried about losing her job.
Ashley worked with me on a coaching basis.
And Dan…. He is a salesperson in a high-tech industry. In week one he set 3 “highly qualified” appointments and got 4 replies to voicemail. Things unheard of previously.
He told me the following helped him the most…
1. New response to “send me some info.” Dan said that stating an immediate refusal to send general info coupled with an offer to send any specific information that would genuinely help them, enabled him to know who really had an interest and who was just blowing him off.
2. His biggest objection to overcome was “we have that already.” He said he learned how to get them to open up, rather than the call just ending.
3. The biggest thing… he thought his pleasant personality and obvious industry knowledge would be enough. It wasn’t. He said that he lacked a real strategy. That writing down the words to use really helped him. In particular it forced him to think really hard about the benefits he was mentioning and pushing them up to the beginning of the conversation made a big difference. He said it seemed to cut down on the knee jerk blow-offs he would get and identified some very qualified opportunities.
Dan used the Seminar-in-a-box to get these results.
Three different situations but some common threads led to appointment setting results.
A. Careful selection of who to call. Before they picked up the phone they profiled their high probability targets and called only them. They didn’t call the phone book, some local chamber of commerce list or other low probability source. Most people spend the majority of their time calling companies that never should have been called in the first place and wonder why they can’t get results.
B. Solid scripting and responses to resistance. Worthless words and the common self-sabotaging mistakes were ripped out. Their scripts reeked of value, credibility and benefits. Their responses to objections were calculated to retain control, separate the legitimate prospects from the tire-kickers and get the meeting now, rather than later. Those scripts and responses must be structured a certain way to get that result.
C. Working a total system. They did not make calls randomly. They called in a calculated sequence and then stopped at the point of diminishing returns.
Setting appointments is not easy, but if you break a successful process into components you will find that each component is relatively simple. The challenge is knowing what the components are and coordinating them to get your result.
If you need help spending more time with qualified high probability prospects or improving conversion, contact meat 978-296-2700 to discuss your situation and some options.
