Want To Sell More? Have More Conversations

If I could say nothing more about sales to the thousands of entrepreneurs I counsel, it would be simply this: At the end of it all, sales is still a numbers game. The one immediate way to increase sales results is to increase the number of sales conversations you have.

To bring this point home, here’s a story from our own company’s history. We sold our power dialing technology into a major telecommunications company you would recognize. But the company wanted to do their own training and run the system their own way. So we delivered the system, assisted with initial set up, and got out of their way.

What ensued was a lesson for both them and us.

We recorded their efforts and results before our technology as a baseline snapshot and in 90 days went back and measured again. In the baseline, we could see the company was averaging 22 calls per day, per rep. Ninety days later, however, despite our technology, they were doing the very same thing. Twenty-two calls per rep, every day.

So what had gone wrong? We’d handed them technology that typically boosts conversations and conversions by at least 30 percent (often more than 100 percent) and they were getting nothing. Worst of all, they believed the stall was our fault. Then some additional factors came out. Management confessed they weren’t much concerned with productivity; they just wanted transparency. We had given this company the equivalent of a Gatling gun to increase the cadence of their sales conversations, but they were using the technology as a single shot rifle. They hadn’t changed their culture or practices to make use of it. And yes, it had been our fault for not pushing back. At the end of the day, sales is a numbers game. To make more sales, you need to have more conversations.

When we went back in, our customer asked an honest and powerful question, “Why should we have more conversations? Can’t we just have better conversations instead?”

We shared our research with them that shows there are two ways to have “better” conversations. The first is to increase your skill (through sales training, product training and industry knowledge). The second is to have the conversations with decision makers who have buying authority. In another post, I’ll focus on the ways to converse with qualified decision makers in new ways. The average sales training systems we’ve seen increase results by slightly over 20%, on average, by focusing on skill. But they take many weeks and months of study and practice. But having more conversations per day can start in an instant with just a decision! So the meaningful question, then, is this: Why not do both? Get immediate results by having more conversations, and get even better results in the long term by having better conversations.

But for now—at this moment— having more conversations is the single most powerful thing you can do to increase your sales, your results, and your income.  The good news is that there are now more ways to start conversations than ever before, via email, social messaging, text messages, landlines, mobile phones, Skype, web conferencing, or high-impact direct mailers. However you do it, having more conversations is the single biggest key to more sales. So what is stopping you?

What Stops Reps from Having More Conversations? When we ask reps what’s stopping them, we always get the same answer - Research. A common phrase we hear today is “whitespacing,” which refers to the filling in of the fields in the database that determines which companies to call (that have a need) and who to speak to (who has authority).

The reps in the telecom company making only 22 calls a day were dutifully conducting this research before every call. So let’s assume it takes 10 minutes to do the research that proceeds each call. That’s 220 minutes—nearly four hours—for 50% of the day. At this rate, with breaks and holidays, each sales rep will make roughly 5,000 calls in a year, at a huge cost (see table below.) Labor is a company’s most costly investment. Based on the income of the salesperson, it can be one of the most expensive things they do. Furthermore, it wears the salespeople out.

What if you could automate most of the research for your sales reps? In 10 years of our own research, we’ve found that sales reps research roughly the same things on every call. They research information on where to find companies to call and where to find the decision makers within them.

They pull together the areas of authority, need, urgency, and money (qualifying). They look for things their intuition has told them worked in the past. Some of it is good, some aren't (the art and the science). This isn’t bad, because it is best to start with art, especially when it comes from your best sales reps, your veterans. They know what works and what doesn’t. The problem for them is that they often know what worked in the past, and are slow to adjust to what’s working best now. These individuals are your most expensive and talented assets. Research by these individuals is costly and rarely their superpower. The automated research will be an especially good proposition for them.

However you do it, you will quickly discover that the only time you are increasing results, revenue, and income is when you are having more sales conversations.