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Increase sales calls?
What are three things a sales representative can do to increase his/her number of calls?
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3 Answers
This can be answered two ways - one is from a technical/systems standpoint and the other is from a labor process standpoint. There are numerous systems improvements that a company can make to increase productivity in number of calls per sales rep, but the rep does not have control over that so I will focus on what a sales rep can do individually to increase his/her number of calls.
1. Figure out your conversion of call to closed sale.
2. Figure out your commission goal for a quarter.
3. Then back out how many calls you would have to make to reach your commission goal for the quarter.
Setting a commission goal is what will drive a sales rep to make calls rather than just trying to reach a quota or not have any goal or metric at all to meet. If you are confident in your conversion number then you know that you have to make a certain amount of calls to reach your commission goal and that should drive you more than what your sales manager is telling you you should do.
From a straight labor perspective, especially as it relates to cold calling, I recommend a few things:
1. If you have the ability to run your CRM or contact management program in several instances or tabs in a web browser, do so. One of my most successful reps (in terms of call volume and performance) would search around for his next prospect while the current call was ringing through. If the call went to voice mail, he already had his next prospect queued up. Note: only recommend this process to the reps who have the strongest multi-tasking capabilities; it is easy to forget who you are currently calling if you don't pay close attention.
2. Set mini goals for call volume only. The ultimate goal of increasing call volume is to increase productivity but don't make increased productivity or closes (or whatever metric you are going for) as the goal for the rep. Set per hour call volume goals which accomplish the duel purpose of keeping a rep on pace to hit a daily number as well as give the manager the ability to monitor performance up and down times.
3. Reward call volume performance. Putting incentives on being the rep with the highest daily, weekly or monthly call volume is a last resort. Showing accomplishment via effort makes the standout rep feel great and shows the rest of the team that closes are not the only thing that matters.
I'm not sure if there's a magic formula for making reps pick-up the phone more, but in my experience most sales managers and sales reps focus on the total amount of cold calls per day. This is generally because they know how many calls it will take to make X amount of sales. This can get very tiring and a lot of reps get defeated when starting each day with such a big number of calls to make.
Instead of looking at total cold calls, try focusing on total prospects each day. A prospect is someone that can be closed (whether it be via call, visit to prospect or visit by prospect) in the next 30-60 days depending on your industry. This varies on each industry but typically it will take 100 calls to get 3-5 prospects.
So instead of 100 cold calls a day, a rep can focus on 4 prospects a day instead. This not only has a positive effect psychologically on the sales rep it also puts an emphasis on quality over quantity. Most likely a rep will make him or herself get better at each call so they don’t have to make 100. After using this practice for a few weeks, the reps ratio will probably get better and be 75 cold calls to get 4 prospects. After a few more weeks it may further reduce to 50 cold calls to get 4 prospects. It will level off at some point but the ratio of cold calls to prospects almost always gets better. This will either relieve the sales rep of stress or allow the rep to make more calls to be more successful.
Try focusing on prospects instead of gross number of cold calls daily and watch your sanity and success improve.
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