How We Increased Sales Appointments by 25% (Hint: It’s Something the ‘Gurus’ Were Dead Wrong About)

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Every marketing “guru” promotes a specific way to market and sell - and it’s typically whatever their product or service is focused on. Then, in order to promote their way of doing things, they’ll often disparage OTHER approaches.

As we all should know - the truth is… there is always more than one way to get leads and clients.?

Take cold calling for example - a lot of people say that it’s dead… that it doesn’t work and that people just don’t answer or that they don’t buy from this approach or that it takes too much time and effort.

These are valid concerns. Heck, I’d be lying if I said there hasn’t been times in the past where I thought the same way.?

Unfortunately, many people may not succeed with a call campaign for a number of reasons; maybe they’re just not persistent enough in their approach? Maybe they just really don’t like doing it so they find any excuse under the sun to say that it doesn’t work?

Or, maybe they just don’t have enough leads in their pipeline so that when they get a negative response on the phone (or zero response) they aren’t able to move on quickly to the next one.

Whatever the case, picking up the phone and calling your prospects is most definitely NOT dead. In fact, we’ve taken our own spin on it and I’d like to share it with you in today’s #MarketingandSalesEssentials post. Today’s post covers:

Why we cold call

• How we decided to add it to our marketing mix
• How you can avoid the myth and decide the best ways to market your business, without wasting money.
• And finally, be sure to stay tuned to the end of this post for details on an exclusive new sales workshop my team will be hosting later this month.

Why We Cold Call Our Prospects

Our business has grown in a pretty traditional way.

We’ve built up a good reputation with our clients leading to referrals, we’ve also been pretty effective at outbound appointment generation campaigns (through social media and email), and we’ve been successful building paid traffic campaigns to keep our sales team’s plates full.

As we’ve grown we have remained on the lookout for alternative ways to book more appointments with the leads or opt-ins that we’ve generated.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve adjusted our marketing funnels to incorporate live calls into our approach. No longer do we rely solely on emails and landing pages to book calls with our prospects.

We’ve hired several top-notch “SDR’s”, or Sales Development Reps to help us accomplish this. Their purpose is not to close the sale, but to help us move leads through the pipeline in addition to our regular lead nurturing process.?

It works like this:

Our marketing team provides the leads and the SDR’s make the calls and send the emails that get people who’ve shown interest to book an appointment and talk about our services with a member of our sales team.

The SDR’s also help qualify the leads, which has been a huge help to our sales team because now our sales guys (our closers) are able to focus all their attention on closing qualified leads instead of spending the time to prospect, qualify,?and?close.

Now, I realize that the calls the SDR’s are making might not be “cold calling” in the traditional sense because they call people who have already opted in to our content. However, I still consider this a type of cold calling because these are not “hot” leads per se. They are people who’ve opted-in who might know who we are, or they might not. They may be able to work with us, they might not.?

The SDR’s are actively helping us take our relationship to the next level and like I said, it’s working. Our sales team has a full calendar of quality leads and the people who get on the calls are interested, they’ve already spoken with someone, they know we’re real people, that we care, that we’re here to help, and they already have an idea of our approach. It makes closing the sale much easier.

In fact, in the past 6 weeks alone they are responsible for 25% of the sales appointments booked with our agency sales team. That’s 25% that wasn’t there before.

You could make the case that some of those appointments may have eventually come from our automated nurture campaigns, but in my opinion, it’s best to strike while the iron is hot and when possible, provide your prospects multiple opportunities to take the next step with your business.

It’s allowed us to shortcut much of our nurture process by directly engaging with our prospects, capitalizing on their interest earlier in the sales journey and more easily assigning them to the proper service line as a result.

Adding this to our sales strategy has produced surprising results - establishing this approach as a sound strategy for us and debunking any doubts we had about it.?

The question is, how did we decide to include this strategy in the first place, and how can you decide which of all the strategies out there are viable strategies for you to include?

How to Evaluate the Right Marketing Strategy for Your Business

When you sit down to decide when and how to expand your marketing mix, you need to look at several factors. Like we agreed earlier, there is no “one way” to market your business. However, you don’t want to waste money, time and effort on something that won’t work for you.?

So while many marketing agencies or gurus will often promote their strategy as THE option while disparaging others, entrepreneurs and business owners like you need to be able to start with what makes sense for your business at your particular stage of growth.

It takes me back to when I was just starting out. I didn't have the budget to spend thousands each week on advertising campaigns for my webinar and tv or radio ads certainly weren't the right option to reach my audience at the time. I realized that these strategies have a place but they may not be right for me at that time.?

So, I developed a way of analyzing the different methods of marketing, looking at each strategy I considered through the lens of these questions:

• 'Will it reach my audience?'?(Does my audience use the platform?)
• 'Is my business at the right place for this investment?’?(Note- this question considers investment in time, money, and/or staffing.)
• 'Does this help me reach my goals?'?(If it's not directly related to what keeps your business open or growing...then what's the point?)

We asked the same question when we added the SDR’s to our sales strategy:

• 'Will it reach my audience?'?(Yes, this is direct outreach to prospects who’ve opted in to our content.)
• 'Is my business at the right place for this investment?’?(Yes. Marketing has been able to provide enough leads and we have enough a sales team that can handle an increase in appointments.)
• 'Does this help me reach my goals?'?(The core driver of our growth is booking appointments with quality prospects. This process contributes directly to this goal.)

Your Turn

Don’t fall for the myth that some marketers push, that their way of marketing is the only way. Instead, use the same questions we rely on to help you make decisions as you continue to grow and add more tactics to your marketing and sales strategy.

What are some of the most effective strategies that make up your marketing mix?

Share this post with your network and then jump into the comments to let me know what’s working best in your marketing mix.