Why make life hard for your sales team?
"It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done" - Rocky Balboa
Ah, the famous Rocky Quote. Since it's screening in 2006, this quote has been used by inspirational speakers, sale's gurus and downright weirdos as a way of telling you to never give up.
If you ask me, I think this quote is a terrible way of encouraging people to never give up. Why? Because it focuses on the entirely wrong thing.
If this saying is anything to be believed, then the criteria of success is the suffering itself, not the success that can be achieved through a little hard work. I don't like it because it focuses on the suffering, as though that's the end goal.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it. But I think it's overuse on TV and media have finally gotten to me and brought me to the point where I want to say this:
Suffering isn't the end goal. Adversity is the vehicle through which you can learn, develop and overcome problems to achieve your goals.
Adversity is an opportunity to explore better ways of doing things. It's an opportunity to learn from mistakes and build a better way of working.
"I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job. Because the lazy person will find an easy way to do it." - Bill Gates
There is a debate about whether whether Bill Gates actually said this. The purpose of the quote is to showcase the focus on re-learning and constant innovation that any good organisation needs.
"Let's make the best use of our time. Let's work smart, not hard." - Owen Wood
These are 2 principles that are central to how Park Row Marketing work. The key to a good sales is about making best use of our time and resources.
Why we prefer not to cold call
We don't want to cold call for precisely this reason. Making cold calls isn't a very efficient way to find people who are interested in the product that you offer. Given the choice, we'd much rather only speak to people who are already interested.
To help to ensure that we're making best use of our time in this respect, we have a strong focus on how we're generating leads on all of our campaigns. By speaking to people who are interested, we:
- Maximise the number of sales-per-hour
- Have happier customers, as we're only speaking to people who want to talk to us
- Have happier clients, as we're finding them more customers!
- Have a happier sales team, because we're making it as easy as possible to hit their targets
In the absence of working smart, of course it's necessary to work hard. But for some companies, they choose to only work hard by cold calling. Quite often this is to the exclusion of working smart by using marketing to their sales team's advantage.
Cold calling is prevalent in particular with some of the more old-school sales guys, where they believe that making cold calls is the way to make loads of sales. 'Smashing the phones' still harks back to an age where the phone was the only way to talk to potential customers.
With so many ways to communicate with your customer these days, why make like hard for yourself?
Sales is hard enough, so make it as easy as possible for you & your sales team
The biggest favour that you could do for your sales team this week is reviewing the sources of leads that you give them.
We run lead generation campaigns for green and ethical companies, where we provide clients with qualified leads to help them grow their business.
We actually mainly run lead generation campaigns for our sales campaigns, to make life as easy as possible for our sales team when finding new customers. If you'd like to make life easy for your sales team as well, we'd love to talk.