Now that I’ve been with the company for almost 7 months, I thought I’d share the activity dataset. In the graph below, you’ll see the following stats for each day (outbound and inbound activity):

• Email: how many email I wrote,
• Call – No Message: how many calls I made in which no one picked up and I didn’t leave a message,
• Call – Left Message: how messages I left,
• Call – With: how many meaningful conversations I’ve had about whether it’s an opp or not
• Call: All other types of calls (getting to the right person).

You’ll also see that during the course of the last 7 months, I’ve switched strategies in how I approach my job, twice. The first few months, my strategy was to get a hold of someone, no matter how many calls it took. I also didn’t leave any messages, because I thought it would be a waste of time (people almost never call back).

After about two months of relentless calling (and following the advice of my manager), I switched tactics, and started leaving voice messages every time I called someone for the first time. I also tightened my “abandon” criteria – meaning I stopped hounding people until they answered the phone – I would call, leave a message, follow up by email and be done with it.

Tracking daily activity in Sales

By tightening the abandon criteria, I can reach out to a lot more people, and by leaving a message, hope for a better chance that they will notice my outreach.

And the most recent change in strategy (after I got back from vacation) was prompted on my own, with the realization that my goal should be to maximize the number of people I reach out to everyday. With the help of a lot of email templates, I can now send out a lot more email per day, and call to leave a message only to the most promising prospects.

Notice that there is a crucial piece of data missing above. I left out the outcomes data on purpose. The data above is real, and I don’t want to in anyway compromise my current employer’s competitive status by revealing too much information.

What do you think? Have you been able to extract useful strategic information by analyzing daily sales tasks data?

I find it a professional, and a polite thing to do.

But it’s a surprising easy question to mess up.

Word Choice

For one thing, the words you use matter. For example, if you say “Did I reach you at a good time?”, it immediately begs the question – when is a good time? There is never a good time.

Conversely, you can’t ask if it’s a bad time (even worse “Are you busy?”). It’s always a bad time.

So what I say is “Did I reach you at an OK time?” and most people, being reasonable, submit to me that yes, it is an OK time.

Tone

Another important aspect of the question is tone. If I sound at all scripted, I can almost hear the person on the other line shut down: here we go, another annoying sales call. To avoid this, the question must come out naturally – not too fast, and not too confidently. It has to sound genuine.

Sentence Structure

How you position the question also matters. For example, if you say “Hi, this is Joe Shmoe calling from such and such, did I reach you at an OK time?” it sounds almost too pushy. I find that it turns people off because they can’t honestly answer that question. OK time for what? If I don’t give them an idea of why I am calling before asking that question, I am implicitly suggesting to them that they are about to be sold to. In fact if you use this form, the most common response that you’ll get is “OK time for what?” which puts you in the defensive position.

Instead, I try to give a hint as to why I am calling “Hi, this is Joe Shmoe calling from such and such. I am following up with you from such and such a conference. Did I reach you at an OK time?” or “Hi —. I was referred to you by John Doe. Did I reach you at an OK time?”

Of course, this forces you to have a reason to call. What if you are cold calling? What if there is no conference to mention, and you are not callilng on a referral? Just a straight cold call? I still try to condense the purpose of the call “I am calling regarding [insert topic]” or “I am calling to follow up on my emails”. I find that almost anything is better than not giving them a heads up as to why you are calling.

At least these are the things that’ve worked for me. What do you guys think?

The point is that you need to get into your customer’s heads and figure out what differentiates you (your company/products/services) from the competition and why your customers buy from you. Then in your cold call opening, lead with that differentiator and/or that reason. Once you are able to stop making your offering into a commodity and instead focus on the value, your prospects will respond.

While at Three Value Logic, I learned that the first 10 – 20 seconds of a call are the most important, and really determine the ultimate outcome of the call. I’ll have more to say on this point later.

Imagine this, which seems to happen most of the time:

Greg: “Hello, this is Greg…”

Sales guy Bob: “Hello, Greg, this is Bob WannaSellYa. How are you doing today?”

11 words, and this already puts me in a bad spot, and instantly annoys me. First, I have no idea who Bob WannaSellYa is or what company he’s with. So I’m either annoyed that he wants to know how I’m doing even though I don’t know him, or I’m horrified that I might have met him yesterday and forgot his name. Could go either way. If you have some connection to me – if say someone I know gave you my contact info – then say so right away, and I’ll pay much more attention. Otherwise, my usual response to this:

Greg: “Fine.”

And I’m sorry to admit, it’s not a polite “fine” – it’s more of an annoyed, who-the-f%@!-are-you “fine”.

He even offers some tips to the would-be-callers:

• Get to the point quickly; small talk is awkward when we don’t know each other.
• If we have some mutual acquaintance or connection, say so quickly, and I won’t blow you off. Better yet, ask them to introduce you to me via email.
• If I don’t answer your voice mail, you don’t need to leave 8 more messages – I got the first one. I probably just don’t need what you’re selling at the moment. It’s no offense.