Follow The System: The Solution to Sales Success

Have you ever had to deal with one of those annoying PPI Cold Calls?  I did this week; three times in just one hour!

Now you might be saying, “Why on earth would I take three cold calls?” and the truth is I am always looking to learn and, if you ever come across a master cold caller, they are indeed a great source of learning. So too are poor cold callers; they teach me what must be avoided when any business is using the phone to generate leads.

Back to my three cold calls in an hour and what is to be learnt from the episode…

Call one, was an extremely nice, courteous, charming and engaging young lady, who had obviously studied and worked hard at mastering her craft. There was no hint at all that she may have been reading from a script and, in actual fact, it was a very pleasant conversation.

Call two was less than half an hour later from the same number, only this was a different operator all together. Definitely reading from a script, sounding just like a robot, before she had finished reading her opening statement, I interrupted to let her know I wasn’t interested.

Call three, and it was a case of ‘send in the heavy mob.’ An extremely pushy young man, who totally ignored anything I said until I put the phone down on him.

So, three totally different experiences from three cold calls from the same company. It was easy to figure out what was wrong with this approach (apart from poor target marketing; I’m not interested in PPI claims because I know I don’t have any). There was either no system in place or they were not following the system.

A system is a series of steps designed to produce an outcome. A well thought out and well executed sales system is the difference between consistently great sales results and the hit and miss results that a great deal of businesses achieve.

In fact, apart from having the wrong person in a sales positon, it is probably the biggest barrier to sales success.

Sales is a lot like the dating game, or 1^st base 2^nd base, 3^rd base, home run. As you all know, going for a home run on the first date is not a very well thought out strategy and normally ends up badly. A better approach…

1^st date, 2^nd date, 3^rd date and when you get to know and understand each other you have the opportunity to form a partnership that could last for ever.

So, a question for you; do you have a dating… sorry… sales system in your business?

Do you have a systemised, scripted method for moving people through each stage?

Does each stage have a clear outcome? Bear in mind, the outcome from the first stage will not be the same as the outcome of the third stage.

How effective are the scripts your team are using?

What system do you have in place for testing and measuring each stage of the system?

How often are you studying the results of your test and measure to ensure consistency across your sales team?

What are you doing with the information that the numbers are telling you?

If they are tracking the numbers, I would definitely like to ask the owner of the cold calling PPI Company what the numbers are telling them. My guess would be that operator one was getting the best results, whilst the other two callers were getting very limited results.  The lesson here would be that if they wanted to get a more consistent result, model the master, model operator one; discover how she does what she does build a system around her method and then train, train, train the rest of the team until they can do the same. If they can’t, get new people.

Whenever I meet a potential client, the above questions are a just some that I might ask. I am surprised at the number of businesses that have little or no sales system and that always leads to me asking the painful question “How much is that costing you?”