Time is money, spend it wisely

I’ll bet you’ve heard something like this before. Probably when you were a young, a sprog, knee-high to a grasshopper, etc. I saw this in action during one of my first ever sales jobs, where they split the sales process down into two chunks:

1. One team who did the qualified appointment setting
2. Then a separate team who attended the appointment to quote and close the sale

It didn’t strike me much until years later about the importance of this. Because fundamentally they are two very important roles but have very distinct skills. ‘360 sales roles’ (those roles where you basically have to find sales by opening a phone book and making your own pipeline), sales are a lot less efficient in generating sales. Why? Two things: Who people are speaking to vs cost of a salary.

The more interested people you speak to, the more sales you’ll make

You probably think about processes for most parts of your business. Do you have a similar, written down process for sales? If you want to oversimplify it, you can think of a sales process as moving prospects through a series of stages until they are satisfied enough to buy.

Salespeople are a charming bunch, but only as useful as the data you’re speaking to. Why? Put simply, if you’re having to sift through contacts where someone’s not there, someone’s on hold, someone’s giving you the run around, that has a huge time suck on your day. Before you know it, it’s 3pm and you haven’t even spoken to anyone, let alone someone who’s interested!

If you’re partial an analogy or two, here’s one for you to enjoy. It’s like giving a carpenter a mixture of nails of differing quality, shapes and sizes instead of nails of a specific size. What this means is that the carpenter’s time now has to be spent sorting through the nails to check which ones she can actually use, instead of the valuable task of building furniture.

If you’re not convinced by my above analogy, think of it like this. Salesperson salaries are typically higher than appointment setter salaries. So essentially by asking your salesperson to do their own qualified appointment setting, you’re paying more money for a much less efficient process.

Ask yourself one question, what’s the bit you make money on?

You hire a salesperson. You pay them a salary to make you a certain amount of money. When do you make that money? It’s when they close sales. Why wouldn’t you want them quoting and closing sales as much as possible?

When sales coaching clients ask me about how to increase their sales, the first thing I ask is;

“How much time is your sales team spending quoting and closing sales? How much time does your sales team spend on finding potentially interested prospects to quote?”

By making sure that your sales team do more of the former over the latter, it stands to reason you’ll increase sales without much extra effort.

We’re a pay on results lead generation agency, right? So we’re in a similar situation to our clients. We hire appointment setters but we only get paid when they book appointments. We take this same principle of time management and do this for the qualified appointment setting itself. You might not know how much effort we go into cleansing the data and marketing to prospects, prior to any of our reps picking up the phone.

These links will help you more on qualified appointment setting

Long story short, get as much of the qualified appointment setting done by someone other than your salesperson. Because the best use of their time is spent on the late stages of the sales process, quoting & closing sales. To help you, here are links to blogs we’ve done on this exact topic;

How to 5x your sales

Name says it all really. We talk about the role that marketing plays in making hitting sales target all but a certainty.

Free qualified appointment setting app by Hubspot

To help you fit the appointments neatly into your sales team’s diary, why not try this tool from Hubspot? Or alternatively, Calendly is pretty good and it’s also free

Designing a killer sales process

We do love Hubspot. With all our heart. You can find out more about designing a great sales process here in addition to a link to a really useful bit of stuff from Hubspot

Which sources of leads are the best?

How you provide your sales team with a steady stream of leads? Here we give you a framework for answering that exact question. (Hint: You’ll be surprised at what you already know. Just write it down.)