Accelerate prospecting & start coaching your sales team

Recently, we began using a platform called PhoneBurner. Essentially PhoneBurner is an innovative technology platform that allows you to load up a list of phone calls in their system that does much of the work for you in regard to the mundane tasks associated with prospecting. For example, here are some of the following features that seamlessly reduce tremendous time associated with prospecting:

1.  You pre-record voicemail specific to messages you want to leave. This allows you when calling customers or prospects to simply hit a button when the voicemail answers and your prerecorded message is immediately left and the next number on the list is immediately dialed.
2. You pre-write email messages specific to what you want to send the prospects. When the prospects voicemail or live person actually answers you simply click a button to send a pre-written email. Combining this in an automated fashion with voicemail messages is a powerful combination!
3. The system takes your list and literally does the dialing for you as well as much of the communication outside of actually having an actual conversation.
4. In today’s world about 80% of calling results in getting people’s voicemail. Leaving voicemail messages throughout the day can be extremely tiring and quite frankly can lack energy from one voicemail to the next.

Why am I bringing up a technology like PhoneBurner when we provide sales coaching? After using the platform for about 45 to 60 days we have marveled at how much time we have saved but how many people we have contacted in a short period of time. After speaking to one of my clients who provides his team sales coaching we quickly ran some numbers based on our own experience. We typically complete about 40 calls per hour. We will run through that list two more times for the people we have not yet contacted. After applying these numbers to my clients sales team we quickly realized he was paying for a sales team that could really be cut in half. In addition, with this platform it allows employees to invest their time saved by PhoneBurner into things like networking or meeting with customers are asking for referrals. These all lend themselves to great coaching opportunities for sales leaders.

 This presented my client with a tremendous opportunity to reduce expenses or to reinvest into the development of the staff. The reason this presented such a unique opportunity is PhoneBurner is not expensive at all. We began to map out a strategy of reducing staff but also reinvesting in local events such as networking events and actually visiting customers that have purchased from the organization. We never had this opportunity before because we were so tied to the inside sales model as our sole source of contacting prospects and customers.

Here’s the strategy step-by-step we came up with:

1. Secure Multi-seat license with PhoneBurner
2. Allocate half the sales people to other parts of the organization, thus cutting sales expense by 50%
3. Invest in more lists and research into contact list to accelerate the prospecting more than what the whole team was originally doing manually on their own.
4. Reinvest the difference in time to two major areas. First local networking events and after our networking events at local establishments. Next, we literally found an additional 5 to 8 hours weekly to practice and really work with the sales team. This gap of time presents a huge opportunity that when people do answer the phone and/or we get in front of them we are better prepared versus simply adhering to the volume of calls that we need to make manually.

The overall message and one I would encourage people to really realize is find technology that automates and secures time savings. Take the difference of time and run the numbers carefully but take the time savings and truly invest in other sales driving activities and sales coaching we hear all the time the people don’t have time when in actuality if we took the time to find platforms like phone burner we would have more time to invest in our people which would lead to greater retention of staff, more prospecting, and increasing sales on a consistent basis.

Check Out PhoneBurner: click here