First Steps to Generate More Sales Opportunities Today

I experienced a number of firsts this week!

I saw school buses for the first time since early March and with the buses, came traffic congestion!

Some of the television networks began announcing that new episodes will return in January.  I don’t know how much longer I can wait to learn what happened after all of those season finales.  Come to think of it, I don’t even remember the season finales.  Whatever, finally something new to watch!

My office phone rang for the first time all year. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration but it is the first time it rang since I returned to the office in mid-August.  Not only did it ring, it was a cold call!  I ran a complicated set of analyses on all the pertinent data, and with some comprehensive deductive reasoning, I concluded that it was the first cold call received since mid-August.

According to Objective Management Group (OMG), only 3% of all salespeople prefer to prospect by phone, so it’s no surprise that this call was an aberration.  More about that in a moment.

Unfortunately, there were several things I experienced this week that were not firsts.

On LinkedIn, 13 more of the people who asked me to join their networks immediately attempted to schedule calls to sell me something.  In Microsoft Outlook, my email inbox received 17 fairly awful unsolicited emails, 16 from companies who do various forms of lead generation promising more customers and sales.  Why would anyone hire a lead-generation company that demonstrates how poorly they will actually perform this service for you, while lying about which mediums *plural* they will use?  None of them ever reach out by phone!

Using the above data, if you have 17 competitors sending completely delete-worthy emails from the workflows in their email marketing applications, 13 more reaching out with equally woeful LinkedIn messages, with almost nobody reaching out by phone, why in the world would you prospect using anything other than the phone, unless wasting your time sending delete-worthy emails is less painful than using the phone?

In 2015 I wrote this article about the power of the phone. 

This article has a boatload of prospecting tips.

This article has suggestions on how to improve your emails.

This 2014 article has great tips for both phone and email.

Luckily for you, this is the end of today’s article, but if you want to watch a 2-minute video rant from yesterday, you can find my rant about the problem with Value Propositions and Elevator pitches here.

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