You can make those things happen with a combination of the telephone, teamwork and technology. Here’s how.
Make the phone your primary live-contact medium. Go in person when it is necessary, warranted or desirable.
Business-to-business phone-based reps can conduct as many as 20 substantive conversations per day, 100 per week, about 5,000 per year. Among my clients, the median cost per call is $35. Yearly total, $175,000.
If your field reps are conducting four in-person visits a day, that’s 20 per week, perhaps 1,000 per year. Cahners Research reports the average B2B sales visit costs $329. Yearly total, $329,000.
Net: The phone offers five times the market and account coverage at about half the cost.
Strive for both breadth and depth in your mid-size and major accounts. Single-contact selling is yesterday’s news. Because most business purchases are the result of multiparty considerations and decision making, one sales person seldom can handle everything. It gets even more complicated in large, multitiered and geographically dispersed accounts. That’s why it is best to assign the field reps to make executive level contacts, presentations to committees, and to attend quarterly account reviews. Assign the outbound and inbound phone staffs to opportunity identification, qualification, routine selling and customer care.
Integrate phone plus Internet plus direct marketing to boost promotional response and results. If your typical response to a B2B mailing is 0.5–1.5 percent, you can boost it to 3–7 percent by mailing and then following up by phoning. If you phone first, then fulfill with custom-targeted email or printed materials, then call again and conduct a live Website tour while on the phone with your prospect or customer, the response rate can top 12 percent!
Leverage your Website to reduce or eliminate cold calling. Instead, call with personal invitations for prospects to tour your Website. After they visit the site, you have an entrée to call them and discuss what they found most relevant and interesting. This makes for much better conversations than undifferentiated cold calls, which most business people detest and try to avoid.
Make sure that prospects and customers can always communicate with your company person-to-person. Even with advanced communications technology and ebusiness capabilities, continue to promote your 800 and other direct phone numbers vigorously, and encourage prospects and customers to get in touch with a live, friendly, smart person who wears your company’s logo.
The bottom line: Telephone plus teamwork plus technology equals increased market coverage and more sales. Controlling cost-of-sales is the welcome bonus.
Michael A. Brown is the Business To Business By Phone® expert. Ask for a FREE issue of his enewsletter by emailing him at mabrow2@attglobal.net or by calling 1-800-373-3966.
