Sales Management Tip: Help Your Reps Cut Through the Noise
Unless your entire business is based on a “1-click” transactional sales model, the old rule of “You don’t have a sale until you have a conversation” remains pretty well entrenched. Sure, there’s lots of companies doing great things with inbound marketing, demand generation, lead nurturing, and “pre-qualifying” of prospects–but even then, unless you’ve got a relatively simple product with few set-up requirements, at some point a prospect is going to need a sales rep to step in and “bridge the gap.”
And as we’ve been preaching for years, the trick is giving yourself every possible opportunity to actually have that conversation.
With that end in mind, B2B lead generation outsourcers Green Leads has a “standing policy” for reps to work harder on “off peak” holidays (e.g., President’s Day, Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day).
Why?
Because a lot of companies, even if they don’t take the day off, they “take the day off.” There’s less noise, less static floating around the prospecto-sphere. It’s about better opportunities for getting a decision-maker’s undivided attention. And Green Leads has had a lot of success doing it.
Spend any time on this blog and you’ll know that one of XANT’s mantras is that “Speed kills”–our research in conjunction with MIT, and our later collaboration with the Harvard Business Review has pretty well proven that if you’re not getting to your leads fast, you’re losing sales (to say nothing of the fact that 26% of companies don’t even bother to follow-up on their leads at all). It’s why we built our ResponsePop inbound dialer suite that responds in seconds to new leads that arrive from your CRM or Web site, to give reps the competitive edge of getting to new contacts.
But one of the other pieces of data our research uncovered was that the day of the week and time of day can also have an effect (check out the actual data charts here).
And like Green Leads has discovered working off-holidays, there are definite times of day when you have a better chance–in some cases a MUCH better chance–of cutting through noise and actually getting a decision-maker on the line.
For both contacting and qualifying leads, you have a 114% to 164% greater chance of success by calling during the optimal hours of 8-9 AM and 4-5 PM, than during the worst times (11 AM – 2 PM).
Some have mistakenly taken this data to mean that they shouldn’t be calling at all in the middle of the day, which is definitely not the case. What it does mean, however, is that sales management teams should seriously consider how they’ve designed their current prospecting strategies. If you’re not currently having your reps pound the phones for the first and last hours of their days (at the very least), you may be unnecessarily stunting sales opportunities and growth.
Give your reps a better chance to cut through the noise.
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