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?

First, let’s acknowledge that email marketing is really easy:

1. Buy a list of contacts from a vendor
2. Load them in an email marketing software package
3. Blast em, blast em, blast em,
4. Sort through the replies
5. Collect money from those who happend to need what you are selling at the time
6. Repeat.

Let’s also acknowledge that calling this  practice “email marketing” is misleading – it already has a name: it’s called SPAMMING.
Now, I’d like to make a few observations from having spammed in real life:

• It works. You blast 3,000 people with a sales pitch and 5 will turn up as a potential opportunity for your sales team.
  • Think about it, you didn’t have to really do any work. Just sit back, let the blasts happen and collect hot leads.
• It’s very obnoxious.
  • You just wasted the time of the other 2,995 people who did not appreciate getting your unsolicited email. Let’s assume that it took each of them (on average) 5 seconds to glanse at the email and recognize for what it is. 5 second multiplied by 2,995 people equals 14,975 seconds. That’s 4.1 hours. 4.1 hours of work that you took away from your potential customers. Let’s assume that you potential customers are Directors of IT (as it is in my case) who make $100,000/year or almost $50/hour. You know where I am going with this. 4 hours at $50/hour makes $200, that you just stole/wasted from your customers.
  • By this reasoning, blasting 3,000 people = wasting $200 of your potential customers money. But who sends out only 3,000 emails? What if you send out 100,000 emails? That’s almost $7,000 of damages that you inflicted on the people you should care about the most. And that’s not including the opportunity cost to them.
• Everyone does it
  • With the assumption that for every 3,000 blasted, 5 might buy, blasing 100,000 could result in almost 160 potentials deals. Which could result in significant revenue for your company.
• Most expect it.
  • This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of spamming. The majority of the people that I’ve spoken with, who are on the receiving end of business spam, expect it, and treat as a normal part of life. Just a part of doing business.

Given that it works, and that the reciepients expect it, I still can’t seem to come to terms with it. I like to tell my co-workers that I feel like a part of me dies everytime we do a blast.

What do you think? What’s your experience with marketing this way, and do you see anything wrong with it?

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.

The most obvious and unfortunately the most popular (I say unfortunately because it’s the least effective) way to look for a job is through job ads. Job ads easy to find, and easy to interact with – but especially on mega sites like Monster or CareerBuilder, you are up against hundreds of other resumes, no to mention the keyword search elimination robots. So the chances of landing an interview are really low (zero in my case).

Some job ad boards are better than others though, and I’ve had good luck with CU Career Services (because only CU students and alumni are allowed to see the jobs) and craigslist.

Of course, the best and most effective way to get a job is through a referral – through a network of friends and family. And I’m trying to network the best that I can, but it hasn’t been as helpful as I would have wished because I am looking for work in an industry (start-up/technology companies) here I don’t have a lot of contacts.

So, with the risk of running out of leads, I’ve decided to try what I call a “Top Down” approach to finding work. Rather than look for a job that needs to be filled, I will look for companies that I, at least on the first glance, would want to work in. The benefit of this approach is that it’s proactive, I don’t have to wait for jobs to be advertised, it gives me something that at least feels productive to do, and it’s an opportunity to learn about all the different companies in the industry.

I don’t know how much I should expect from the “Top Down” strategy – but it seems worth the effort.

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.

During the seventies, eighties and nineties, it was common for large corporations such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Compaq etc to put their new sales recruits through a twelve to eighteen-month training program.

Today, salespeople consider themselves extremely fortunate if they receive an initial two weeks of induction training or product familiarisation workshops.

So what has changed? Have companies discovered that training is not necessary?

On the contrary, training appears to be even more important today than it was thirty years ago and it is becoming more critical all the time.

One of the instructors at Three Value Logic is a product of the IBM sales training program, from back in the days of IBM sales training programs. He’s expressed a very similar sentiment.

You know that your car is more aerodynamic. You know that your insulation is more effective. You know that your insurance has a higher ROI.

You’ve thought about it a lot because it’s your job to think about it. It’s your job to make those charts and tables and graphs and brochures. So you know it.

The problem is that your prospect doesn’t care about any of those things. He cares about his boss or the story you’re telling or the risk or the hassle of making a change. He cares about who you know and what other people will think when he tells them what he’s done after he buys from you.

“It doesn’t really much matter where it’s going, he says, as long as the fare is right.”

I was surprised that he was able to engage so many people on an airplane without immediately turning them off. But then again, Mr. Topus flies first class, and I would imagine (I can only imagine, I’ve never been) that conversation is easier to come by there. Though I am a little skeptical by his claims of his abilities to be able to identify a qualified decision maker:

“In a hotel buffet line, it used to take me till the dessert section before I could figure out who near me was a qualified decision maker that I wanted to talk to. Then I got to where I could do it by the entrée line. Now that I’m at the top of my game, I can usually do it by the salad,” he said.

When I was looking for my way into the profession, I focused mostly on applying to entry-level positions at companies I thought I’d enjoy working in. I was looking for companies that had a product I could get excited about, and seemed to offer some prospect of professional growth.

But what I quickly discovered is that simply applying for a job is only half the battle. The other half is focusing on yourself – and really thinking about whether you have what it takes to succeed on the job.

After applying to only a couple of jobs, I found myself at an interview with the CEO and the Sales Manager of one of those companies, having to demonstrate what I knew about Sales. How would you carry yourself on the phone? What would you say? What insightful and thoughtful questions would you ask a prospect? How would you engage with them, and gain their trust? And these questions weren’t hypothetical, they actually made me participate in a role-playing exercise to see how I would do in real-time.

Needless to say I didn’t do too well on that interview, and after a few more embarrassing role-playing exercises, I was referred to a company called Three Value Logic Sales Institute in downtown Denver.

Three Value Logic (3VL) is an unusual company that provides free intensive sales training. They are also a sales outsourcing company, providing their clients with qualified appointments with potential prospects.

It’s my third week here, and so far I am learning a lot, and enjoying the experience. I am very impressed by management here, and will write about what’s like to go through their sales training in future posts.