I have an addiction. Listmania.
Time and again this affliction has generated sales results for myself and my clients.
If you are looking to punch up your lead generation results, this is a disorder I suggest you catch. No other factor has greater impact on results. Not scripts, not call process, not your wonderful personality.
When companies need more appointments the dominant issue on their minds is usually scripts. Scripts, scripts, scripts. The common belief is that if scripts are improved, that prospecting results will improve.
Not usually.
Why? Because once you fix the script issue, other roadblocks to results are uncovered. Almost always, the list being called is a massive drag on results.
Many companies have the ability, with just a few hours’ worth of effort, to fairly tightly define the pool of prospects most likely to buy from them in amounts that will make the prospecting effort worthwhile.
Where will your great scripts get the best result?
A list of 100 which contains 5 buyers of 20 units each?
Or, a list of 100 which contains 1 buyer of 2 units?
If you could identify these pools of prospects would you invest time and effort calling the 1 buyer list before you called the 5 buyers list?
Most would agree that it is not wise to call the 1 buyer list before calling the 5 buyer list. Yet, unknowingly (maybe) that is exactly what many companies are doing.
Refocusing call time to a higher probability list is the single most important thing you can do to bump results quickly.
How bad can it get? Let me share what is typical. Notice I said typical.
Due to my listmania the first thing I focus on is the list when a company asks me to help. With just a few hours’ worth of effort we can have a fairly high degree of confidence about which suspects are most likely to buy.
Very typically, this high-probability group (HPG) is just 2-5% of the potential call universe.
After this highest probability group is identified, let’s call it the “A” group, there is usually a group of suspects just under the A’s that are better than average. Let’s call them the “B” group. Again, this “B” group is usually 2-5% of the call universe. After that the list value degrades to C’s, D’s and E’s that deliver far less results for the effort.
It is not at all unusual, in fact it is very common for me to find that 85 or 90% of prospecting resources are being directed to C’s, D’s and E’s, while the A’s and B’s are mostly untouched.
Just refocus your call time to better lists and voila, you have greatly increased your odds of prospecting success, without changing anything else.
But it is not quite that simple. When you have a team used to calling suspects that typically don’t buy often and when they do, don’t buy much, that team has usually developed scripts and habits that “work” in low-probability environments that will not translate to higher-probability higher-value sales environments.
Those behaviors are tough to break.
Calling lower-probability lower-value groups (LPG’s) is very different than calling HPG’s. The LPG’s are more amenable to less direct more folksy comfortable conversation and therefore companies get “meetings” that don’t convert. I call them “drive-by’s.” There was no real expectation that a substantive business conversation was going to take place that may lead to a transaction, it was more a short introduction drop-off literature type thing.
When your call team is now tasked to call HPG’s folksy light conversation good for drive-by’s won’t work when someone who can authorize a big check is deciding whether to give up an hour of time. The scripts have to communicate value, credibility and benefits sufficient to justify time from a top decision-maker within a HPG.
So, catch listmania. Make sure your call investment is purposely allocated to defined groups you know are more likely to contain buyers. Beware of list creep beyond these groups. It will kill your results.
Understand that often calling better groups means your call team has to learn new messaging behaviors.
If you have any questions, contact us.
