The Approach Path
Improve your Dial:Connect ratios, and convert more opportunities into meaningful business conversations.
The Sales Management Challenge
OK, so you’ve finally managed to convince your sales team to do more cold calling (although getting your teeth pulled without anesthetic would have been less painful). And perhaps you’ve even taken it a step further and got them to refine the message so that they’re leaving a strong benefit statement. But 95% of your reps’ calls are going to hit voice mail. So then what? Well, if you’re like us, you leave a carefully crafted message that gives the prospect a reason to want to speak with us. However, no matter how strong the reason, rarely does this alone initiate a call back from the prospect. So while you’ve successful increased the number of dials, you’ve probably done little to improve the Dial:Connect ratio.
The SalesForce Solution
It’s a phenomenal contact program called The Approach Path. The Approach Path is a planned set of contacts to prospects with defined ‘hit’ dates, varying from voice mail to a specialized contact tool that allows us to track our prospect’s interest, as well as post cards and letters.
The SalesForce Approach Path is designed to accomplish one objective, improve your Dial:Connect ratios and convert more opportunities into meaningful business conversations.
How It Works
The Approach Path accomplishes this by improving three fundamental elements of your cold call process, namely;
- Send a more powerful, compelling and consistent message to your prospects;
- Improve your efficiency – track who’s engaged and who’s not so we spend less time finding and chasing prospects to speak with, and more time communicating with those who are interested in our offer; and
- Differentiate your offering. The aim is to stop asking your prospects to do things for you, like “Please call me back”, and to start to provide your prospects with items of value that can help their businesses run more efficiently.
With the SalesForce Approach Path, you can track your prospect’s interest and then zero in on those prospects that look like they need your help, eventually discarding those that don’t respond at all. To date, SalesForce clients that have leveraged this best practice have reported phenomenal results. The process has allowed their reps to contact more decision makers, book more meetings, and edge out their competitors from the process, and have found that they were achieving positive results in as little as two weeks.
Do You Need It?
If cold calling is an essential element of how your sales team finds new business, then ask yourself the following:
- Do all of my reps leave the same compelling message with a new prospect when they are reaching out for the first time?
- Do all of my reps follow up the first message with a consistent second attempt on a specified date and time?
- Do we have a blended contact strategy utilizing more than just voice mails and
e-mails? - Do we offer to provide something of value to prospects even before we connect with them?
- Can my reps accurately tell me their Yes:No ratios?
- Do I hire relatively inexperienced cold callers and expect that they’ll figure out how to do it right?
- Have I sat in and listened to their call attempts and provided coaching?
Chances are strong that your honest response to more than one of these queries is a “No”. And our guess is that if you have ten reps, they’ll be trying ten different approaches. And why? Shouldn’t all of your reps follow a defined, standardized and identified best practice?
Our Offer
Please complete the following information and one of our sales representatives will contact you and arrange a free evaluation for yourself, or your team’s cold call approach, and start the process to improving your Dial:Connect ratio.
