EDITORIAL FEATURE
Your Next Step
How to Take the CHILL Out of Cold Calls (Part 5)
By Jack Warkenthien, CEO of NextStep Solutions
Selling is NOT Prospecting & Prospecting is NOT Selling
L
ess than 20 percent of the average sales professional’s week
actually involves selling something! Said another way,
a sales representative is being paid for one of five days a
week and working free the other four. This low percentage
may seem surprising since sales compensation plans pay for
sales results not hours spent prospecting or a myriad of other
administrative activities. As we continue our journey of taking
the CHILL out of Cold Calls, you have two challenges to address: Increasing the amount of time invested in sales efforts
and increasing the effectiveness of each selling hour.
Your Sales Funnel - TOF, MOF, & BOF
An ageless iconic symbol for a sales
pipeline is the Sales Funnel. The
beauty of a Sales Funnel is its simplicity and ability to tell a story in
one picture. There are three distinct
sections: TOF (Top of the Funnel),
MOF (Middle of the Funnel), and
BOF (Bottom of the Funnel). Allow
me to explain and describe each
component.
tivities needed to generate sales results. Now, if one hundred
contacts were added to your TOF, you’ll gain one new customer/client from your BOF. To describe your MOF, for every 100
prospecting leads, you will have 15 qualified candidates. Of
the 15 candidates, you’ll confirm 10 appointments. For every
10 appointments, you’ll generate 6 proposals. Finally, on average, one customer/client will be gained.
BOF: This is payday! You are compensated for your sales, not
for your time spent in the TOF and the MOF, but for your time
invested in the BOF. Sales are a numbers game and I challenge
you to know your sales equation. In fact, if you can’t answer the
question, I kindly suggest you run
not walk to your company history
Your mission, should you decide
and figure out your answer: How
many contacts must be dumped
to accept (channeling my favorite TV show,
into your TOF to be processed in
Mission Impossible, from the seventies), is
your respective MOF to finally fall
to review and evaluate your current sales
out of your BOF?
“
leads generation system and ensure
you’re focusing on warm, hot, or even
smoking hot leads instead of the
cold/cool ones generated
from cold calling. This is the only way
you can increase the effectiveness of
each minute
invested in sales related activities.
TOF: Remember the statistics from
the opening paragraph? In essence,
80 percent of time spent is working to fill the top of the funnel with
leads sourced from phone prospecting, referrals, networking, marketing efforts, web inquiries, and other
sources. The sales efforts needed here are dedicated to turning
contacts (leads where no relationship yet exists) into candidates (qualified contacts with buying potential). Over time,
you’ll need to figure out how much TOF it takes to ultimately
deliver BOF results - customers and clients that fall out of the
bottom of the aforementioned funnel.
MOF: As each lead descends into your funnel, there are defined stages they pass through and each stage becomes a key
metric or KPI (Key Performance Indicator). For example, let’s
say that you are enjoying a record number of sales over the
past few months because you finally quantified your sales ac20 SMALL BUSINESS TODAY MAGAZINE [ APRIL 2015 ]
Your mission, should you decide
to accept (channeling my favorite
TV show, Mission Impossible, from
the seventies), is to review and evaluate your current sales leads generation system and ensure you’re
focusing on warm, hot, or even
smoking hot leads instead of the
cold/cool ones generated from cold
calling. This is the only way [