Daily rate of cold calls. What to do: “Managers don’t call new clients”?! Example of a cold calling manager's plan

What to do: “Managers don’t call new clients”?!

The most common complaint addressed to the sales department by the manager is the lack of cold calls or an insufficient number of them.

How many cold calls should you make? good manager?

There is no clear answer to this question, and here's why:

1. A lot depends on the number of potential clients. If you sell helicopters, then it’s unlikely that you will have more than 100 potential clients, and setting a plan of 30 calls a day makes no sense.

2. The call plan cannot be the same for a new manager who does not yet have his own client base, and a more experienced one who spends a significant part of his time processing applications from existing clients.

3. It is very important to understand what goal you set for a cold call. The preparation time for a call to send a standard commercial proposal is several times less than if the goal is to present a product to the director of the company.

4. The competence of sales managers also plays a significant role; a seasoned salesperson needs three to four times less time to prepare for a call than a newbie.

This is not the entire list of factors that can influence the number of cold calls, but the conclusion is obvious; in each specific case the number is calculated individually.

Why don't managers call?

In sales training, I often ask, are cold calling important in your work? If you make more cold calls, will you earn more? The answer is almost always “YES”. The employees understand that this is an important part of their work, but they do everything exactly according to the residual principle; if there is time, I will call (read as if there is a desire). There are many reasons for this: fear, lack of self-confidence, fear of rejection or a crown on the head; it can take a long time to figure out what the reason is for each specific sales employee. In this article I want to tell you how you can change this situation.

Five steps to change!

The first and most important thing is to set a goal for the cold call. The goal should be a specific outcome of the call that can be measured.

Based on the purpose of the call and taking into account the factors influencing the number of calls described above, we set a plan for cold calls per day and per week for each manager. Based on my experience, a new manager should spend 80% of his time searching for new clients, while a manager with experience should spend at least 20%.

The next step is to develop a cold calling script; this is a mandatory tool for inexperienced managers and desirable for managers with little experience. There is a lot of information on the Internet on how to create a cold calling script yourself, or you can contact professionals, such as us.

Next, you need to organize control. This is the most difficult stage and it determines whether the situation in your company will change or not. In the first two months, monitoring should be daily. Be prepared to listen to dozens of reasons why the call plan was not fulfilled today, sometimes these will be objective reasons, more often they will simply be excuses. WITH modern technologies It has become much easier to exercise control; almost everyone has a CRM system and all calls are recorded.

The last step is to make changes to the motivation system for sales department specialists. It is necessary to display the fulfillment/non-fulfillment of the laid down plan for cold calls. From personal experience, I would not advise getting too attached to the plan for the day, since everyone has blockages, but the plan for the week must be completed.

Cold calling in most companies is the most effective way Attraction of new clients. Based on my practice, I can say with confidence that the work scheme described above is the most effective, but it requires a lot of effort, especially at the control stage.

In Russia, there is an ambivalent attitude towards telemarketing. On the one hand, this is a source of new clients, on the other hand, it is a primitive genus

activities. But the fact is that almost no company can do without it. This attitude often develops due to the fact that many companies themselves solve the issue of cold calling in a very primitive way. They allocate a room, 1-3 female students, give them a phone number and a pile of yellow press: “Call and sell!” The low performance of their work is guaranteed.

The girl looks for the phone number in the directory, enters it into a notebook/Excel (in the best case, into a program), dials the number on the phone, waits for an answer, then the conversation continues, after which the operator diligently enters the result of the conversation into the notebook/Excel. And then the same according to the scheme.

In principle, the process is logical, but have you ever wondered how many full-fledged calls an operator can make in a day?

Let me give you the following calculation:

The average conversation lasts 3 minutes, plus time for searching (2 minutes), dialing a number and waiting for beeps (1 minute), recording the result of the call (2 minutes), resulting in 8 minutes per contact. Thus, if you get through, it’s 8 minutes, if you don’t get through, it’s 2 minutes. This is 30 calls per hour (missing calls) and 7.5 calls (dialing), the average number of calls is 18 per hour. And then there are callbacks, which can take 30-70% of the time depending on the level of the person in the organization.

So: 9 hours work day - 1 hour lunch - 4 * 15 minutes break = 7 hours on the phone. This results in 126 calls, of which conversations 63 , and there were 19 (30%) callbacks. Totalnew 44 contacts.

Now let's see how many successful calls there will be. In Russia, cold calls result in sales in the range of approximately 1-5%. Moreover, this is not a direct sale, but more often an appointment. Average percentage - 3%,

63*3%= 2 effective calls per day.

The figure looks very unprofitable. That's without even calculating telemarketing costs.

How to increase the effectiveness of telemarketing? There are the following options:

1. Create your own contact center with automation of all operator processes. According to third-party calculations, this can cost at least 200,000 rubles for 5 operators, and monthly maintenance will cost about 30% of this amount. This option is often chosen by large companies.

2. Turn to an outsourcing contact center, but this will again cost a substantial amount and it will be difficult to monitor the quality of the operators’ work, because they do not know your product/service.

3. There is a profitable and effective option - your own remote contact center. Like this? Very simple. You register in a program that works through a browser. Load your contact database, choose the dialing option that is most convenient for you, and pay subscription fee(200-300 rubles per operator per month) and everything is ready. One of such remote contact centers is the Skorozvon service -

REDUCE THE DISTANCE BETWEEN POINTS "A" AND "B" 05.11.2011 06:51

Imagine that your contacts with the client, and more precisely the time between contacts is the distance between points “A” and “B”, as in the school problem. Unfortunately, few sellers consciously pay attention to the distance between these points, and this sometimes plays a cruel joke on the manager. Let's look at why you need to monitor the time between contacts and how this can help a manager?

So, today you called a client, a regular cold call, heard from the client the usual phrase like: “we don’t need advertising,” “it’s expensive for us,” or something like that. You, of course, tried to get him to talk, identify his needs, you even managed to make a mini presentation of your radio station, talking about the audience and new special offers, but everything is even, the client asks you to call later. And here you need to be especially careful. Now you are talking with a client - and this is “point “A”, he asks you to call back later - this is “point “B”. What should be the distance between them?

Here is an exaggerated example of a dialogue (manager-client, cold call):

This is an example of a “micro-dialogue”, such are often found among beginners, and “old-timers” are also guilty of brevity, now we will not discuss the dialogue itself (I repeat this is an exaggerated version). What is interesting to us is that the manager easily agreed to call the client back in a month. A MONTH LATER!!!

IMPORTANT! WE REDUCE THE DISTANCE BETWEENCONTACT US AS POSSIBLE!

Why do this?

1. The smaller the “distance”, the less chance there is for other sellers to “interfere” and “hijack” your client.

2. Each contact is a warming process; the more often you contact a client, the faster you will turn him from “cold” to “hot”.

3. Frequent contacts will allow the manager to be aware of current changes in the client’s business processes, his marketing strategies and, most importantly, the client promptly receives information about new profitable offers from the radio station.

1. We won’t let other managers get involved in our insulation process!

Indeed, while you wait months for the next contact, more agile and perhaps even more professional managers of other media outlets will definitely communicate with your client. And there is a high probability that they will arrive at the right time, or will find the necessary arguments, thanks to which the client will agree to cooperate, well, while you wait: a month has not passed yet.

A little math. Let's calculate what a month is - it's 22 working days. How many cold calls are you required to make per day? The number differs in different companies, from 10 to 100, let’s take at least 30 calls, multiply by 22 days, a total of 660 calls should be made by one manager! AHow manysuch, how are you, managersworks in the advertising services market?
Well, here's an example: average city population 500 thousand people, 20 radio stations with an average of 5 managers each, a total of 100 managers - this is just radio! Now add to this number managers of television, outdoor, printing and online advertising- you will actually have an army of at least 500 sellers per month, which makes more than 300,000 calls to customers.
Let's count further, how many commercial companies are there in your city? In cities with a population of 500 thousand people this figure is approximately 10 - 15 thousand legal entities. Half of which are not advertising active. In total we have 5,000 companies. That is, according to statistics, on average, each company receives 6 calls every month!

CONCLUSION: YOU CALLED A CLIENT, YOU WERE ASKED TO CALL BACK IN A MONTH AND DURING THIS MONTH THE SAME CLIENT WILL BE CALLED AT LEAST 5 MORE TIMES. AND IT WILL NOT BE YOUR CALLS!

A LONG DISTANCE BETWEEN CONTACTS IS YOUR VOLUNTARY DECISION TO GIVE THE CLIENT TO SOME OF THE REMAINING 499 ADVERTISING SERVICES SELLERS IN YOUR CITY.

2. Each contact is a process of insulation.

Indeed, the more we contact the client, the easier it becomes for us to understand him, and we learn constantly Additional information, which allows you to create offers that meet his needs. And what can I say, if you often communicate with a client, it means that you at least have something to say, and if the client communicates with you, then he has questions to which you probably know the answers. If everything is so perfect, it turns out that you really become useful to the client, and this is the main thing that any seller should strive for - to be useful to the client!

3. Frequent contacts will allow you to be aware of “how the client lives”, and the main thing is to promptly inform the client himself about your advantageous offers.

In a good radio station sales department, ideas for new offers, promotions, special packages appear almost every day, well, even if not every day, then something definitely appears every week, and why don’t you tell your client about it. It’s natural not to “spam” everything you create, but to choose exactly those special offers that meet its needs, audience, and estimated budget. Also, if you have already called the client, do not miss the opportunity to identify his additional needs, find out the latest news and plans of the company. All this information will make it possible to more clearly formulate an offer that he ultimately will not be able to refuse - because the offer will be created practically from the client’s words, and it is very difficult to refuse your own words!

REPEAT: THE LONGER THE “DISTANCE” (LONGER TIME) BETWEEN CONTACTS,

OUR TASK: TO REDUCE THE DISTANCE BETWEEN CONTACTS!

CONSTANTLY REDUCE THE DISTANCE BETWEEN CONTACTS!

Specific examples of how to do this:

1. The simplest and most obvious thing is that you should propose the date of the next call, meeting, etc.

Often managers are like “ordinary” - the “general” said in a month, that means in a month. But you understand that a month is a long time and is not acceptable for you, find a good reason to shift the date of your next contact to an earlier date.

Option: “Ivan Ivanovich, well, I will contact you in a month, but I want to say that next week we will have a very interesting and PROFITABLE offer, exactly corresponding to the requests that you told me about (it is advisable to list them), can I call you and tell me about this proposal?"

In most cases, the answer at the other end of the line will be “call.” Of course, you shouldn’t naively expect that the client will now sit in front of the phone for a week and wait for your call, fascinated by the intrigue about a lucrative offer; most likely, his mood will not change, but “the ice has broken” - we will make the next contact with you on 3 weeks earlier - the first goal has been achieved. Well, now all that remains is to come up with an interesting and profitable offer that you just mentioned to the client.

2. Limited time period for your GREAT OFFER, and you really should have it profitable.

If a client “sends” you months in advance, and judging by the dialogue, you understand that the main thing for him is good discounts (minimum budgets), and he also places advertising everywhere except your company. In this case, you can say that of course you will call back in a month or two, but now there is a special autumn (winter, summer, spring) promotion, and you (by contacting the client) can profitably invest part of your advertising budget by receiving excellent discounts, bonuses and a good amount of advertising! But our promotion is valid until the end of this week (month), so we need to make a decision now (soon).

3. We agree on the date of the next contact, but ask permission for additional contacts.

An example of such a dialogue:

Client: Call back in a month.
Manager: Do I understand correctly that in a month you will have a need for advertising?
Client: I can’t say for sure, but it’s possible. We will be discussing the budget at the end of the month; I admit that we will need additional advertising media.
Manager: Great, Ivan Ivanovich, if you allow me, I’ll ask a few more questions in order to prepare a special offer for our next communication that will meet your needs. Client: Okay, ask.

The manager asks questions: about the audience, budgets, experience in advertising placement, finds out which type of advertising is more interesting - “direct” or “sponsorship”, etc. The task is to obtain maximum information, and most importantly: at the end of this conversation, the manager must warn the client and obtain approval to carry out additional contacts with clarifying questions that may arise (and will arise) in the process of preparing a special offer for the client.

As a result, we agreed to call back in a month, but during this period the manager received permission to call, ask questions, inform the client, which is exactly what we need!

Download the article: REDUCE_DISTANCE_BETWEEN_POINTS_A_AND_B

‹a href="http://radioprodaji.reformal.ru" mce_href="http://radioprodaji.reformal.ru"›Leave your review feedback‹/a› ‹a href="http://reformal.ru" mce_href="http://reformal.ru"›on the platform ‹img src="http://widget.reformal.ru/i/reformal_ru.png" mce_src="http://widget.reformal.ru/i/ formal_ru.png" /›‹/a›

How to organize control over managers to understand that they are really working.

The most obvious indicator that sales managers are actually working and not just slacking off while waiting for the next paycheck is the number of deals closed and profit margins. However, it happens that a manager has no deals for more than two weeks, or his personal sales have stopped growing, or he has not fulfilled the plan this month, although he always did before. In these cases, before parting with the seller, it is worth understanding the reason for the failure. In this article I will describe how to organize control of managers by sales.

6 tips on how to organize control over the work of sales managers

1. Check the manager’s correspondence with clients. Ask how many emails the seller sent in a week. If he understands how important it is to keep in touch with clients, he will not hesitate to name the number of letters sent and even the number of responses received.

It’s also useful to look into the seller’s email to assess the spam ratio (when the manager has found the contacts potential client on the Internet and sent him a commercial offer) and warm contacts (when the commercial offer is sent to the decision maker by prior agreement). For every 25 warm contacts, there should be no more than 10 letters sent “to grandfather in the village.” Then, from the number of warm letters, you need to subtract those that the client wrote first: in these cases, the employee was not actively searching, but was only processing the received application. If the bottom line is only three or four letters a week, it means the manager did a poor job.

2. Find out how the manager’s meetings with clients go. Find out the number of meetings, their location, and the final result.

The number of meetings should be compared with the norm in your industry.

The location of the meetings (on the customer’s premises or in your company’s office) often determines the result: the more often the manager invites the client to his office for negotiations, the lower his sales. Mainly due to the fact that not all clients make it, and some meetings are canceled. The normal ratio of meetings on the client’s territory and on the manager’s territory is 50 to 50.

In order to control sales managers, so that you can always correctly evaluate the result, ask them to keep a spreadsheet indicating the main parameters of the meeting: with whom, when, where, for what reason, agreements reached. The best thing is for the manager to provide you with a short report after each meeting.

3. Pay attention to the quantity and quality of the manager’s calls. A manager should have no problem answering the question of how many calls he makes daily. Depending on the specifics of the business, you can pay more or less attention to either warm or cold calls. But even if cold calls are not so important in your business, the seller must make them from time to time so as not to lose his skills. A good manager must constantly analyze how the market situation is changing, be able to break through secretaries and reach the right people, etc.

I once conducted an audit in the sales department of a company. When I asked a manager with three years of experience how many calls he makes a day, he rolled his eyes and replied that “about 100-120.” At that very moment it became clear to me that the man had no idea what he was talking about. Because even with the most efficient work, which begins from the moment the computer is turned on in the morning and ends with the arrival of the security guard who locks the office in the evening, the manager can make no more than 50 quality calls per day.

On average, an employee must make 20–50 cold calls daily, of which 15–40 become warm calls (the manager is asked to send a commercial proposal, is connected to the decision maker, and an appointment is made). And only 5-10% of the total number of calls on the other end of the line may hang up or immediately answer “no”.

4. Arrange a surprise check in the middle of the working day. Check whether all sales managers have a work plan for the day. This should be a detailed list of tasks prepared in advance: who to contact, when, on what issue and what to offer. Simple recording in the diary, for example, “call Vasily Ivanovich” does not count. A manager who does not draw up a work plan on paper is unlikely to learn to act effectively.

5. Find out whether the manager maintains off-duty contacts with clients. Nothing is superfluous when working with customer loyalty; a good manager knows this, so he always personally congratulates his customers on their birthdays, New Year, February 23, March 8.

Recently I was figuring out why two branches of a large company miserably failed the annual sales plan, and I noticed that it was in these branches that managers paid the least attention to such “little things” as sending greeting cards clients.

6. Conduct a quick survey among managers. Walk into the sales department unannounced and ask the employees five simple questions:

• What is your largest transaction (by order amount)?
• When did it take place?
• What is your average transaction bill?
• What is your average trade length?
• What categories do you divide your clients into?

The last point is especially interesting: a good manager will definitely segment his client base, since he understands that working with all clients according to the same scheme is unproductive.

If a manager cannot answer these questions, it means that he does not analyze his work and is not interested in improving performance. Of course, you must know all the answers in advance in order to be able to compare real indicators with those that the manager will announce to you.

Evgeniy Kotov, Founder and General Director of Practicum Group, Moscow

For reference: VC "InfoSoft" is engaged in building sales departments, as well as implementingsystems for managing customer relationships and monitoring managers based on 1C:CRM products

The main number that needs to be monitored in the cold sales department is number of cold calls per person per day. This is the main rule of a manager and the main indicator of the effectiveness of a lead search manager.

Let's decide how many calls one specialist should make. It depends on the:

1. what is the specificity of the product or service: the more complex the product, the longer it will take to talk;
2. b2b or b2c: do you need to bypass the secretary, use complex techniques, or can you just ask “would you like to order water?”;
3. how high-quality is the database: it’s hard to call 300 contacts a day if half of them don’t answer the phone (however, we can help you here, read below!);
4. manager's goals: for example, making one meeting with a client takes longer than searching for leads - identifying a need for a potential buyer, setting a task and transferring the contact to a qualified salesperson for sale.

In general, you can usually just find out the average conversation length in your workflow (measure real conversations and take the average length). If the time is up to 1.5 minutes, take the maximum number from our calculations below. If up to 2.5 minutes is something average, well, if 4 minutes each, then the minimum figure from the calculations is lower. If you have a conversation longer than 4 minutes, then it seems that you are not really cold calling.

But that’s not all, a lot depends on the instrument. Imagine that you ask your employee to dig up a garden and give him a fork. It’s stupid for him to set a big plan, like in the neighboring garden where there is a shovel. It’s even stupider to set up a plan like on a farm with walk-behind tractors and robots.

Let's look at tools for active sales, we indicate the employee’s result for 1 day of intensive work

• Phone + excel. From 30 to 50 calls per day.
• CRM + telephony. From 40 to 80.
• Professional instrument (Skorozvon). From 120 to 200.
• Dialer mode in Skorozvon. From 180 to 350 per 1 working day.

Don’t forget that you only need to take into account conversations lasting 10-15 seconds, otherwise it will be easy to “overwhelm” the limit with incorrect calls.

If your managers make significantly less than the norm, do not immediately set them a high rate of cold calls per day. Proceed like this:

1. analyze what tools you use, the quality of the database and the length of the conversation, determine ideal indicators; if necessary - or change the base;
2. calculate the current indicators: how many calls your guys are making now;
3. if you have never set a daily call plan, in the first week just set the average current result of the manager;
4. calculate the difference between the ideal and current result, divide it by 3 (if the difference is large, then by 5 or 6), this will be a weekly increase to the plan;
5. Increase your target every week until you reach good numbers.

Don't forget that you can't demand incredible results from your employees without the right motivation, good tools and workplace. Remember about bonuses, incentives, good attitude, strictness to indicators.

Webinars and events:

Free course “Head of Cold Sales Department”

Take an online course on cold calling from the Skorozvon service and receive a personalized certificate.

Webinar “10 Skorozvon tricks that will help you stay on trend”

On February 13, Alexander Lishchenko will tell you what new functions have appeared in Skorozvon and teach you how to use them.

• Invisible changes
• New features
• Prompting as a gift