Five ways you can increase your income

by Pete | Mar 6, 2010 | outbound calling

In Stephan Schiffman book, Telesales, he talks about the five ways you can increase your income. In my last blog I said that you needed to measure your dials, discussions, presentations, and number of sales.

Let’s say you track your calls and you have the following ratios. You make 15 dials in an hour, you typically have six discussions which result in three presentations and the final outcome is one sale. So how can you increase your income?

In theory you could double your income if you made twice the number of calls. But is this possible? It may surprise you that there are call management telemarketing dialers like our Acarda Outbound Team and Acarda Outbound Solo tools that can double your productivity over manual dialling.

Speaking to more decision-makers will also increase your income. By intelligently focusing your call backs, the time of the day you call people back, and using voice mail messaging strategically you can have discussions with more decision-makers.

Finding a way to have more decision-markers allow you to do presentations will also increase your sales. You could hone in on the “hooks” that make decision makers interested in learning more about your product or service. What makes anyone allow you to present to them? What catches their interest?

Now if your current ratio is one sale for every six discussions then if you could increase that ratio to say one sale for every five discussions that will increase your income. While that may not be as easy as it sounds if you can learn to close the presentation better maybe you can do this?

Finally you can increase your income by increasing the value of what you sell. That might be learning to promote the benefits of the advance edition of a product rather than defaulting to the standard edition all the time. Or maybe you can sell an extra product, an extended warranty or some other complementary service.

You don’t have to improve all five areas to increase your income but if you start monitoring your ratios and thinking about each of them you may be able to find some ways of gaining small increases which overall can significantly increase your outcomes.

Ratios hour by hour

by Pete | Mar 1, 2010 | outbound calling

I stated in my last blog that telesales was a numbers game. But that isn’t really the whole story. In fact some experts would argue that selling is not a numbers game; it’s a ratios game. It’s about the ratio of dials you make to sales or appointments you set. The ratios tell you how productive you are and once you know your ratios you know how hard you need to work to achieve a desired result.

In Stephan Schiffman book, Telesales he talks about the five ways you can increase your income. We will look at these in the next blog but before you can do this you need to measure the following items: dials, discussions, presentations, and sales.

In this case a “dial” is the number of calls you make that get answered by someone. A “discussion” is when you have a conversation with someone who could actually buy the product or service from you. A “presentation” is what happens when you make a recommendation to a decision-maker and a “sale”, of course, is when someone buys your product or service.

It is a good idea to draw up columns with these headings on a piece of paper or in a notebook and then under the columns draw rows for each of the hours of your calling day. Now track your calls through the day with a tic mark in the appropriate column/hour. Do this for at least a few days if not a week or so. If you can, make it an on going habit to track these results.

One benefit of doing this is that you can see what hours during the day give you the best outcome. Do you see a recurring pattern? Are there certain times of the day where you have a higher number of presentations or sales? If so is it a reflection of the way you are working, or is it that the market you are calling has good and bad times to receive calls?

If you suspect you may not be performing so well at a certain time of the day think about ways to improve this. Perhaps recording your calls at different times of the day and then listening to them may give you some clues as to what needs changing.

Start tracking these statistics and in the next blog I will talk about how you can increase your income by knowing your ratios.

What are your ratios?

by Pete | Feb 14, 2010 | outbound calling

Telesales is a numbers game, the more calls you dial the more sales you will close. No disputing that. It’s the same with appointment setting. The more people you phone the more appointments you will set. It’s not rocket science is it? Yet who knows the number of calls they have to dial on average to close a sale or get an appointment?

How many calls do you dial in an hour? How many contacts do you make? How many voice mails do you reach? How many invalid numbers? Out of the people you speak to in an hour how many genuine conversations do you have that might lead to something? 

Do you know your numbers? What are your ratios? If you don’t know them then I encourage you to keep track of your calls during the next week and find out what they are.

To do this just take a piece of paper, draw some columns down it depending on what information you want to record then each time you finish up a call add a stroke under the appropriate column and keep a tally. For starters I would suggest the following columns:

By positive final outcomes I mean if you are making sales calls then the number of sales closed, if its appointment setting then appointments made, if it’s to send out further information then information packs sent out, if surveys then surveys taken, and so on.

You may also like to record tallies for non-positive final outcomes such as ‘Not interested’, ‘Already have one’, ‘Can’t afford one’.  Down track we’ll look at this type of response in more detail but the more information you have as to why people are not responding positively then the better you will be able to fine tune your script and perhaps if appropriate the product or service you offer. Oh and don’t forget to record the date and the start and stop times of each calling session.

Some of you will have been tracking this sort of information for years. If that’s you, what other comments on the topic can you make? What are you ratios like? On the other hand if this is new to you then please give us your feedback, what did you learn about your ratios when you took note of them? How many calls do you make to close a deal?