So, why aren’t you making more sales calls?

Don’t be snooty about calling. I’m not talking about random numbers being dialled in the vague hope they’ll want your widget. I’m talking about calls to a decent list of people or companies that are likely to be interested. Or ‘qualified leads’, as we should be calling them.

For example, attendees from a recent business event you attended where you have an automatic link of interest; a list of schools that you might want to supply uniforms for; pet stores that might want to buy your new dog tutus. These are relevant calls, but you don’t yet know the name of the decision-maker or if you have a match between what you’re supplying and what they need.

So, the first stumbling block may be that you don’t have enough qualified leads in your database. This is a question for your marketing team, if you have one, or for yourself, if it’s just you. How can you reach more potential clients? We will leave this for a later day, for the moment we will assume that you have plenty of people on your database, new and old potential buyers.

If they’re ‘old’ leads or enquiries, have you contacted them recently? I mean, really contacted them, not just relied upon a newsletter or social media post. They may still be interested. They may have moved on and somebody else is in their role. They may have been let down by their last purchase/service and be looking for a new partner.

How are you going to find out if you don’t call?

Email campaigns?

Do you think that sending emails out, whether they’re personalised or generic, is a good way to gauge their interest? It’s a bit one-way. You may well get a good open rate, but then what do you do with the openERS? The last three companies I’ve been into do not, as standard, call those that opened their emails. So, whilst they may receive emails by return (realistically, how many..?), they are still missing out on a chunk of these prospects if they don’t call them.