Pump Up the Volume!
Doyle Slayton | Dec 22, 2008 | Comments 12
If I have to lean one way or the other, I lean toward volume!
Several weeks ago, I asked our readers to share opinions about Quality vs. Volume.
Poll Results:
I am in the minority on this one. Here are the reasons why.
When I read through the two examples (listed in the previous post), I choose the volume approach on both.
Lead Generation – As long as the leads are qualified, meaning… they have an interest and a need… I’ll start working those leads whether they are going to convert now, or a year from now.
Appointments – I want to get in front of as many prospects as possible. If they are willing to meet with me, then they most likely have some level of interest.
In both cases, I always have a chance to close more deals when talking to more people than not talking to them at all.
Success Principle 1: Train yourself to work at maximum volume. The bigger your pipeline, the bigger your results!
Sales people must have an ability to filter. That means working through a lot of potential business and prioritizing opportunities that will close now along with deals that will close in the future. A strong pipeline is going to payoff now and it pays again later.
Need Them Either Way – If a deal closes now or in the future, I need that deal either way. The advantage of having lots of prospects is that I don’t get desperate with the ones that legitimately need more time. I have plenty of other potential deals to push through now, and I am building a list of prospects who will buy in the future.
Sometimes They Come Back – When I’m working on volume, I will lose a lot of deals in the process. That’s ok… because sometimes they come back. We all have prospects that call out of the blue and unexpectedly say, “Can you please bring the paperwork… we are ready to sign!” The more people I have met with, the more potential surprise call backs.
New Products and Offers – There will be times during the year when your company comes up with a new product or offer. Sales reps who have the biggest pipeline have a strong foundation to start from. It is much better to call on prospects you already know and say, “Guess what… I have the solution you were looking for!”
Success Principle 2: The more prospects you face, the better you get!
Volume Develops Quality – In most cases, a sales person’s closing ratio is the same… whether you have 100 prospects or 50 prospects. If you are closing at 30 percent the difference is staggering. Think of it this way. If a sales person can’t get in front of prospects, that is a bad place to be. On the other hand, if a sales person can get in front of a lot of people, then we have a foundation to work from. I would much rather work on improving the quality of my work rather than figuring out how to build up quantity. The best way to improve on quality is to get more practice. The more prospects you face, the better you get!
Volume Builds Momentum – Find a sales team who has a lot of activity and you’ll find a team with the power to build tremendous momentum. This team has great confidence, high morale, and puts up huge numbers!
Work for maximum volume. Develop a filter to turn that volume into quality. The ultimate goal is to end up with both. I like to call it quality volume. There is nothing like volume when you are closing deals. There is nothing like quality when you are building life-long clients!
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Filed Under: Blog • Reader Questions • Sales • SalesTaxi
You can’t always get volume but you always can fix quality. The key is once you have it you make each deal at least better then the last.
Jim Brown
http://www.jimbrownmortgage.com
It’s not an either/or decision. You need a process in place that goes a long way toward ensuring the quality that has to be there or it won’t matter how many appointments you run.
Conversely, if your closing rate is 100% but you only see 1 appointment a month you’ll starve to death unless you’re in an industry selling a very large ticket item.
But that’s what I call a, “yeah, but”, and the “yeah, buts” aren’t the topic here.
You need to run as many qualified, quality appointments as you can. My sales management experience tells me that the reps who almost always lean on the “quality is better” argument are quite often the ones that aren’t producing very much, nor do they want to, in the way of appointment volume.
Phillip Crum
http://www.MarketingMeasure.com
I could not disagree with you more.
Fact: Good sales people do not get excited about a high volume of calls/appointments, they get excited about working with qualified sales opportunities that have a high probability of closing.
Fact: wasting time speaking with poorly qualified prospects is debilitating to sales people because it takes away time from them working on “real” sales opportunities.
Fact: if you are using an in-house team for “lead generation” or outsourcing it, it get’s expensive paying/funding on an activity model versus the ROI derived from a smaller but more qualified number of sales opportunities delivered from your business development team.
Measuring lead generation based upon volume activity will not support the two most important measurements C level executives are looking for which is the potential value of the sales opportunities delivered to the sales team and secondly the quality of the opportunities which is measured by the percentage of opportunities placed on their forecast once a sales executive engages the opportunity.
A Thought about the Mortgage and Real Estate Crisis! New Topic…..
Why the Community Reinvestment Act or CRA is not responsible for the current financial crisis.
Why the Community Reinvestment Act or CRA is not responsible for the current financial crisis.
By Jim Brown a lender with 25 years of experience and member of Referrals4Success
An introduction to the CRA-The Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA, Pub Law 95-128, title VIII, 91 Stat 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901 et seq.) is a Federal Law written and voted into law for the purpose of allowing commercial banks and savings and loans to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low and moderate-income neighborhoods. The Act was intended to reduce discriminatory credit practices against such neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining.1
CRA is NOT responsible for this mortgage debacle; absolutely not. These programs required full documentation at the time of origination. This means borrowers had jobs also known as employment, credit which also means 5 pieces of proven payment and a down payment verified.
Why is everyone looking back to 1977? The answer is right in front of us. Blame can go back to as early as 2000. Banks started the demise by offering option arms, negative amortization and started loosening underwriting eliminating the need for a down payment of 20%, waiving job verification, and accepting credit scores above 620 (today that won’t get you any kind of loan).
And people thought “Hey, this Option ARM thing seems to be working,” and loans were coming in. People could afford to borrow more when they only had to pay at say 3% instead of a fully indexed 6.90%. And then what happened?
Things started getting really good. The homeowners were losing equity on the low payment which everyone thought was no big deal in a rising market. But several years later they are now losing the equity due to the changes in the Real Estate market.
No one was looking were they? In the mean time; the Wall Street companies came along and said we can enhance those old underwriting scenarios which now look like “tough underwriting requirements”. We will do loans to 100% as long as they have a credit score of 620. And if they don’t we can still give them a loan and just charge them higher fees to close.
Hey when your down you need a punch to keep you down.
This is exactly what a higher rate and more points did to those borrowers. You would also hear; we can do that loan self-employed too. Just get me a business license!!!!!
Now the client says…”I want that loan and I can pay for it.” “Ok, sure.” So it gets done. The client thinks “I will be able to refinance when I ‘earn’ 20% more equity by next year with the market going up.”
He asks the loan officer, “Think that can happen?” The common refrain, “Oh sure homes sold today at 300K should easily be worth 360K.”
How sad that one of these Wall Street guys went down in just 2 years. But did they m
I don’t think there should be any question that you need BOTH. In order to be successful, it is necessary to find the median where your peak quality meets your peak quantity.
When you lean towards one or the other, you risk more than necessary. For example if your close ratio is one for every ten calls when you spend time ensuring quality, it isn’t necessarily better to increase your volume because you risk letting your close ratio slip due to lack of quality. So you could essentially go from ten closes in every 100 to five and just double your work load for naught. Personally, if there could be no exact median, I would choose quality, but I think that is more of an industry specific choice.
Depends on the industry, product, sales process and many other. Volume allows you to pick and choose, but also to be distracted. Quality lets you focus but lose breadth.
I have seen so called Enterprise sales people engaging on volumes of poorly qualified sales, and I have also seen some engage on a handful of EXTREMELY well qualified deals and close all of them.
I would say you decide more scientifically:
1) Understand you differentiators, value, go to market and core factors that differentiate you from your competition
2) Understand the reasons for why people want to buy your stuff. I mean understand, which means don’t speak, but listen.
3) figure out what the realistic load factor is eg. number of deals being worked on EFFECTIVELY
3.5) That figure needs to make “sense” against your target and other indicators, otherwise your management needs to re-think (good sales management understands how to keep targets realistic for the benefit of the shareholders AND the employees)
4) Work out the volume of the pyramid of deals, some flagship – long term, high value, low volume, some mid-size on a half yearly cycle, and some smaller on a quarterly transactional cycle. This ensures the pipeline is diversified and spread out.
5)I always plan for 300% of target in small deals, 300% in mid sized deals and 300% of target in flagships. For the flagships I go for volume in lead terms and the focus is in qualification, while at the transaction end, I look for quality as I have less time to qualify against a bigger volume. Lead gen tends to rely on resources with less experience in sales, eg. Marketing, telemarketing, inside sales etc. so they will have an easier time creating demand programs or working at the lower – I found this to be better suited.
6) I ALWAYS use a VERY strict definition for a lead and an opportunity. A lead is information of someone that has an active interest int he sector my product delivers value in. Good lead gen saves me time (and my company money…) by turning this into an opportunity, where the general interest is framed by a compelling event, identified a sponsor with the basics of what makes them one, and a loose expectation of where the budget would be coming from. I spend a lot of time training my telemarketers and don’t see them as an excuse not to do the work myself, but as a way to have a wider funnel of better qualified opportunity to ensure minimal time and operational budget wasted in the initial qualification process.
We need to resist falling into the CRM manager’s trap – “activity is everything…” In sales, one is not paid to be busy, but to close deals. I chose to be and have my people be busy on business, not “tail chasing” with “happy ears”.
So I use lead gen to target and focus my people, reduce costs and risks and have a productive sales force.
I have put a comp plan and forecasting model together to tie sales and telemarketing on the basis of quality – and it works! – Marco@bussadori.com
As one of my favorite sales managers said,”When they say No, it’s not forever, just for today.” Things change all the time, you need to keep customers in your pipeline abd stay un contact. Every lead is a potential customer.
Marketing vs. Sales should be considered here. ‘Good’ marketing impels the sales effort further by making the product more familiar to customer before the sales call. But marketing may have a more dramatic effect on the cold call than on the network call.
Through our field sales management tool i-snapshot, we have collected input and outcome data on 2.5 million field sales visits across USA and Europe. We have correlated the results of the outcomes against 6 variables and the most certain way to increase sales is volume of calls. There is a straight correlation the more your team sees the more your team will sell.
We have also addressed the quality v quantity question, again based on data rather than subjectivity, if quality is defined as a positive outcome, then the team members with highest customer face to face contact rates have, on average, the highest ratio for positive outcomes ie. the more sales calls you do, the better at them you get….
Based entirely on data the evidence proves that if you are a sales manager then Customer Calls are the surest way of driving sales, and contrary to the myth, it is not quantity or quality but they go hand in hand.
I will go for less number of products with quality than many products (quantity) with low quality.
Hi Doyle
a little late but, I agree it is quantity and I can prove it, though quality is also linked to quantity.
Starting with quality, one of the big issues I find is getting people to define ‘quality’ in a form that can be measured and hence reproduced! When asked I was getting comments like ‘a good call’, ‘positive meeting’ what ever these are, in my analysis I define quality as measurable progress to the next point of a sales process, this can include: a follow up meeting, an order, an RFQ etc.
Through http://www.i-snapshot.com, we have now collected input and outcome data on >2.75 million field sales visits. You are absolutely correct, there is a straight correlation between activity and Sales Revenues, and this correlates more than any other variable.
If one accepts my definition of quality then, there is also a correlation between quantity and positive outcome ie. the sales people who had the highest customer contact rates also had the highest ratio of positive outcome.
So it is not quantity or quality, the 2 are very linked, this should not be surprising,as Arnold Palmer is supposed of observed, the more I practice the luckier I get…. and why should sales staff be different?
Alan Timothy
I believe you should work on both quality and quantity in sales. I also firmly believe that a strong sales pipleline will save your butt more than once in sales and this is where blue birds come from. Sales people can learn to do both when they have a good qualification process (knowing who is a prospect). By qualifying your prospects more effectively, you can add better prospects to a sales pipeline you follow-up on. Qualifying makes a real difference in the end result.
Here is where you can see my sales map for a great sales pipeline http://www.sellingmagic.com/salesmap