(Newswire.net — September 13, 2013) Dallas, TX — Having spent many years as a top sales pro, and after nine years of analyzing thousands of top salespeople as a sales coach & consultant, one glaring truth stands out above all the rest to best-selling sales author Frank Rumbauskas:
The people making the MOST sales are going on the LEAST number of sales appointments!
This is an astounding statement, especially since it flies in the face of the more activity & more appointments, “more more more” culture of today’s sales management.
But why does it happen?
When a sales cycle happens very quickly, the closing rate tends to be very high because the prospect sees the immediate value and the salesperson is able to close the sale with minimal objections, if any at all.
On the other hand, when an appointment is set several days in advance, the prospect naturally builds sales resistance in anticipation, and has plenty of time to come up with logical reasons not to buy.
Salespeople who abide by the “numbers game” theory of sales tend to spend massive amounts of time cold calling and setting appointments up to several weeks in advance. This causes the above to happen — the prospect’s sales resistance builds to insurmountable levels as the appointment date approaches.
In his own words, here’s how Rumbauskas solved that problem in his own sales career:
“Well, I didn’t really solve the problem — a brilliant sales manager solved it for me! I started a new job that I’d been after for quite a while, a two-year waiting list in fact. After three weeks of sales training, I showed up for my first day at work, and not knowing what else to do, I picked up the phone and started cold calling.
“My manager — the first one I’ve ever had who thought outside the box — pulled me aside and told me that cold calling was off-limits at that company. They had a respectable image to maintain and didn’t want to tarnish that image and create the perception that they were too broke to run a marketing department by having their reps cold call.
“But what really got me was when he explained that I was too talented to do the job of an unskilled telemarketer and that the company had just that on staff to make the cold calls and set appointments. That’s when I realized that cold calling is a waste of time and that I needed to create what I call my own ‘self-marketing’ systems and procedures to generate leads on my own, without cold calling”
By following this same process, he explains that any salesperson can break the “make more calls, do more activity” cycle and immediately begin selling more while spending less time working at it.
Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the New York Times best-seller Never Cold Call Again and runs a sales training firm based in Dallas, Texas. To learn more about Frank’s lead-generation and self-marketing processes and strategies, please see http://www.nevercoldcall.com