Showing Up

There are always questions coming my way about how many calls to make in a week, how many presentations to make in a day, how many new customers to see in a month.

There is no doubt that the more people you see and meet, the greater the likelihood that you are going to build your business. And it is extremely challenging to develop a positive business relationship with a customer you have never met and with whom you have no business rapport. People do not buy from people they have never met.

So what is the answer? How many calls should you be making?

That is all going to depend upon the definition of a sales call. Can you do six to eight presentation calls a day? Probably not. That would be between 30 and 40 sales calls a week. I am sure if I were to look at your sales call plans for the past year, I would be unable to find any representative with that many appointments (presentation calls) in any one week.

I think you would probably be successful if you did even three to four good calls a day. A good call is one where you have a scheduled appointment with a potential client, share information about your programs and services and spend some time getting to know your customer. It is all about advancing the relationship.

Should you avoid cold calls? Of course not. You need to play the law of averages and keep trying to see as many people as possible, and cold calling is often your only opportunity to get in the door. You will need to accept some rejection, but you will also find some acceptance as you make those calls throughout the week.

Here are some additional suggestions:

• Combine scheduled appointments with unplanned meetings or visits with clients to discuss your service. Try to determine if you are meeting customer expectations. Stop by to leave information on a new program or to deliver a follow-up report.
• Plan your appointments about 10 days in advance. You do not want to be getting into the office in the morning and then deciding what you are going to do for the day. Planning allows you to prepare what you are going to talk about and make sure you address the issues that are important to that account.
• Schedule several in-service programs a week. These programs will help you increase the number of people you can meet during a single sales meeting. Sales has much to do with reaching out to potential customers; through an in-service program, you will have the opportunity to meet many more people. Then you can set up individual appointments and begin to develop a more personal business relationship with the potential client.
• Decide which accounts you want to visit, with special consideration of those you have not seen in more than two months. If you are going to keep the business relationship alive and well, take time to visit these accounts. Never let them believe that you don’t think about them or forget how important they are to your business.
• Determine which accounts are no longer ordering as frequently as they once did, and place them on your sales call list for next week. Keep looking at those order sheets from the past several months to see if the names of your regular customers are on that list. If you notice a change in the frequency of their orders, it is time to visit those accounts to see what has happened. You could now be on your way to saving an important account.

Thinking back on the companies that came calling on my office in the hospital when I first started in this industry, I realized that nothing was more important than someone showing up. True, sometimes I would have preferred that they didn’t, but, often, those that kept coming, showing they cared about my business and my patients were most successful in getting business from my staff and colleagues.

What I conclude is that you need a week full of sales calls to advance new relationships mixed with other calls to those long-term customers who need to be reminded that they are important to your business.

Try a little of both and the rewards of your planning will be realized. Heck, I even gave business to people just to get them out of my office!

Louis Feuer is president of Dynamic Seminars & Consulting Inc. and the founder and director of the DSC Teleconference Series, a teleconference training program. He can be reached at www.DynamicSeminars.com or by phone at 954/435-8182.