Making Sales Appointments
The Dynamic Manager’s Handbook On
How To Reach Prospects
by Dave Donelson
Donelson SDA, Inc.
Copyright 2011 Dave Donelson
ISBN: 9781458116109
Smashwords Edition
A note from the author
The Dynamic Manager Handbooks are for entrepreneurs, managers, and others who want to succeed in small business by learning more about management techniques, operations, and best practices. Each volume in the collection is devoted to a single topic. The material was extracted from the Dynamic Manager Guides, my series of books based on my experiences as a business journalist, consultant, and entrepreneur.
Chapter 1 Getting Your Foot In The Door
Chapter 2 Getting Past The Screeners
Chapter 3 Making A Cold Call Appointment
Chapter 5 The Brochure Brush-Off
Chapter 6 Opening Closed Doors
“There are many ways to skin a cat—or to get an appointment.”
You’ve researched your prospect’s needs, estimated his potential spending, and written a proposal that’s worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. It’s time to make the sale!
Right about here is where most new salespeople (and plenty of experienced ones, too), make a major mistake. They’re eager to get the process started, they’ve got a lot of things to do, and their sales manager has been bugging them about all the time they’ve been spending in the office working on proposals. So they rush out and drop in on the prospect, saying something like, “I was in your neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by and see if you wanted to buy something today.”
This is not a great way to impress the prospect with the careful thought that went into your proposal.
Or they try to make an appointment by calling ahead with a pitch like, “Hello, Mr. Big. I’d like to show you our newest line of widgets. When can you see me?” Then they wonder why Mr. Big is too busy to fit them in. And why they always seem to get his voice mail when they call back.
At least the second salesperson made an attempt to demonstrate some professionalism by making an appointment. The first one apparently didn’t place enough value on the prospect’s time to reserve some of it in advance.
When you just “drop in” on a prospect, you and your proposal are placed in the same category as the other salespeople who work without appointments. These include people like political pamphleteers going door-to-door, cute little girls selling cookies, and route sales operators who fill up vending machines. All of these people serve perfectly respected functions in the grand scheme of our economy, but do you really want your $120,000 idea considered along with the proposal for a new gum-ball machine in the employee’s lounge?
Making cold calls in this day of voice-mail-protected, work-over-loaded executives isn’t easy. It’s about as much fun as changing a flat tire on the New Jersey turnpike during rush hour in the snow. Done correctly, though, it doesn’t have to be a chore. It’s also helpful to remember there are many ways to skin a cat—or to get an appointment.
“There are people who like the bizarre and the strange, and those are the people you do bizarre and strange things for.” That’s one of the marketing tips from Stewart Intagliata, Director of Operations, and owner of St. Louis-based Unispot, Inc. Like many (if not most) HVAC salespeople, Intagliata has faced his share of difficulties getting appointments to see prospective customers. It’s the first hurdle in selling—the one popularized by the cartoon with the salesperson’s foot stuck in the prospect’s door. If you can’t see them, you can’t sell them.
Fortunately, not every prospect is stand-offish. Intagliata says there are big differences geographically. “If I’m in Mississippi, I can get in to see anybody I want. They might not do business with you, but they’ll sit there and talk to you for an hour.” New Yorkers tend to be more brusque; Californians less focused, in his opinion.
South of the border, though, there’s another factor at work. Intagliata says you have to establish a friendship before you can do business. “I remember flying down to Mexico, my first time, and walking off the plane and the guy kissed me on the cheek. That was his way. What are you going to do? You just sort of stand there and say, ‘I appreciate it.’”
Obstructions And Obstacles
Perversely, new “advances” in communications technology have made it harder than ever to make person-to-person contact. Bill Nowak, Vice President of Martin Walshin, Inc. in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, says, “You have layers of firewalls before you can reach somebody that can make a decision these days.”
Selby Seay, HVAC Division Sales Manager for Reliable Products in Geneva, AL, agrees, “Voice mail to me is a real headache,” he says. “With cold calls, they don’t call us back 90% of the time. We have to call them again. We also use the fax machine a lot.”
Technology isn’t the only roadblock, either, according to Steve Hill, Sales and Marketing Manager of Blender Products, Inc., of Denver, CO. He says, there’s also “the business of engineers trying to run offices with minimal staff. As corporations have gotten bigger and marketing and sales strategies have become so much more elaborate, we find that engineers are just tired of having people in their face all the time.”
Jerry Moechnig, Sales Representative for Architectural Energy Corp. in Boulder, CO., points out, “In this economy, more businesses are having fewer people do more work. That’s just the reality that we have to live with.”
Be Persistent Over And Over Again
That’s why, according to Intagliata, you do what you have to do. “If a guy won’t return your calls, just keep calling him,” he advises. “Keep calling. Keep calling until you get him. Some guys are just that way.”
Moechnig quantifies the process, saying, “I try to be patient. It takes anywhere from five to eight calls and messages for somebody to return your call.”
Intagliata outlines some other methods he’s used. “I’ve stayed outside of places and waited an hour, hour and a half, for people to come out so I can talk to them,” he says. “Or you’ve got to know somebody. A wholesaler can get you in a lot of places you can’t get into just by cold calling.”
The machines may have made it more difficult, but they haven’t taken over completely, according to Hill. He says Blender Products works on “Maintaining direct relationships with end-users, with specifying engineers, while at the same time maintaining a sales force to echo our message. The importance in this industry of continuing to have that face-to-face relationship, which only a local person can build, still holds a lot of weight.”
Attention Can Be Bought
“Sometimes you have to put yourself outside of the box,” according to Moechnig. “So many people get so many calls everyday, and people just don’t have all the time they need to do all the work they have to do. Fresh baked cookies is probably the best door-opener that comes to mind.”
There’s general agreement that cookies—or other signs of appreciation—help establish customer relationships. Seay says, “What we like to do is attend customer appreciation days and give door prizes away to their customers.”
“You grease the wheels,” Intagliata says. “You send them a shirt, a handwritten note, news clippings. If it’s handwritten, they’ll open it. It’s the soft things. It’s the relationships.” But there are limits.
“We haven’t sent any hookers over to customers or anything like that,” says Nowak.
Moechnig, too, follows a straighter path to get the customer’s attention. In fact, he has a very systematic approach. “Typically, we’ll do a mailing, then an emailing. Then we make an effort to call those individuals with whom we had prior contact.” And what happens after numerous calls? Moechnig says he makes just one more. “When you reach that point when you’re finally ready to throw in the towel,” he says, “I find it very beneficial to leave one last message that reiterates what I’m trying to say, then tells them that this will be the last call I’ll make to them. That gets a response 15 to 20% of the time.”
It’s Still About People
Establishing relations with a new customer isn’t the only part of the sales game that can be problematic. Unfortunately, existing customers sometimes drift away and it can be even harder to get their attention than to get an appointment with someone that doesn’t know you. After all, they know (or at least think they know) what you have to sell. As Intagliata explains, “I was one of those people. I wouldn’t listen to anybody. How much can you tell me about a humidifier? You turn it on, you add water, and you’re ready to go.”
To get back on the past customer’s radar screen, Moechnig recommends trying something different. “We did a mailing campaign to previous customers to re-intrigue them,” he relates. “We went to an old record store and bought some cheap LP’s. We brought them back to the office and broke them with a hammer and stuck them in an envelope with a mailing that said ‘we hate to sound like a broken record….’”
It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling sheet metal, diagnostic software, or million-dollar multi-work-station cooling systems, you still have to get the customer’s attention first. The best way is on the human level, because, despite a wide-spread opinion to the contrary, customers are people, too. You need to understand their foibles. As Intagliata says, “They’re all crazy, but I like crazy people.”
“As long as you’re polite and conversational most people will give you a little information you can use.”
Press one to speak to sales…two for service…three to hear this message again…or press four if you just like to hear little beeping sounds in your ear. Welcome to the voice mail battleground.
That is where small and larger business owners and managers fight to communicate with their customers, vendors, and even their own employees. Voice mail irritates many of us, but those salespeople who have learned to infiltrate it can improve their personal efficiency and sales effectiveness. These skills are growing more important every day. In a recent informal test, we found that 68% of our calls were transferred to a voice mail box, 24% required a message left with a live operator, and only 8% went through to the person we were calling! What’s worse, less than a third of the message recipients returned the call!