Doing The Job For Free

Making the decision to use sales appointment setters isn’t really so hard. If you consider all of the facts, the choice is simple really. Separating sales appointment setting from the actual sales process is plain and simple, smart. It fills anemic pipelines, evens out revenue droughts, provides meaningful reporting, improves morale, greatly reduces oversight, helps you make more money and it can be done free.

The word free has lost its meaning over the years. Free means something with a lot of strings attached that may really cost more than if you would buy the item outright. To be fair, in the case of sales appointment setting, the better term might be zero net cost rather than free.

Imagine your company has a staff of three outside sales reps. (Good salespeople all but lacking the time or desire to prospect and cold call. It isn’t unusual. In fact, there is nary a company exec who doesn’t echo that very complaint on a daily basis.) You make the decision to employ a sales appointment setting firm to schedule sales meetings. The hook is, the sales reps will pay for the service—pay for their new appointments.

Management usually gasps at this suggestion saying the sales reps will refuse, complain profanely, quit and take their book of business to a competitor. Yes, they will complain loud and long. No, they won’t quit. As the program is explained, they will understand that this makes their job easier and in fact, helps them make more money—money that dwarfs what they will pay for an appointment setter.

The typical sales rep spends 80% of his day servicing, schmoozing, following up and involving himself in non-sales activities. It leaves precious little time to prospect and cold call to find new clients. Before long it cuts into his earnings and the company profits forcing him into frenetic activity to try to make quota and maintain the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. Frenetic sales activity is a poor substitute for the orderly sales process prospects demand.

The sales appointment setting firm, statistically, will improve selling activity by 30% on average. It provides a regular, steady stream of prospects on whom to call. Moreover the appointment-setter becomes an inside sales rep helping his outside counterpart sell more by providing, in addition to appointments, leads, requests for information and valuable insights about competitors. He becomes the keeper of the calendar, the follow-up man, and the cheerleader. Before long your sales rep is happier, much more productive and there is little need for sales management.

Free appointment setting or zero net cost appointment setting. You pick the term but know that it will change the face of your sales organization in the most positive way ever. You may even rethink your take on the word free.

Outsourcing some sales efforts can boost the bottom line

Hotel & Motel Management, by Howard Feiertag
Lots of outsourcing is going on these days in all areas of hotel operations, so why not take a look at what could be helpful in this area with regard to sales?

We all can offer suggestions on how salespeople can be more productive with their time. After all, the most important role of a salesperson is to make more sales, and that relates to bringing in more business, not making more sales calls.

But at many properties, we see job descriptions referring to the number of sales calls that need to be made. If it's not reflected in a job description, we know about managers telling salespeople to go out and make more calls. However, it is not the number of calls we make that creates profit for a business, but the dollar amount of business actually being collected.

In order to bring in more profitable business, we first need to know who to call. This is where we get to the term "prospecting," which means finding out who is in a position to provide business to a property. The most successful salespeople are those who concentrate only on calling qualified prospects. Sales personnel would be more productive if they spent their time making contact and building relationships with those who have been qualified to book business with them.

All too often, salespeople spend a good amount of time making "cold calls." This term refers to calls being made on just about anyone to determine if that contact could be considered a prospect. The cold calls are made to "qualify" if that contact would have any business for a property. These calls are made by phone or in person.

We need to consider if the amount of time spent by a salesperson making cold calls to find qualified prospects is as productive as that person spending the time making calls on only those already qualified. Most sales personnel already know the answer to that question. So, the next question is, if they do not do the cold calling to find qualified prospects, how will that get done so that the salesperson has only prospects to call?

This is where outsourcing comes into play. Companies that will do cold calling for a property--often at a much lower cost than having a salesperson do it--are becoming more prevalent.
In addition to prospecting (lead generation), some companies provide a variety of sales activity functions, such as database cleansing, sales missions, trade-show follow-up services, direct mail follow-up programs, customer satisfaction surveys, customer opinion polls, internal employee surveys and mystery shopping.

Howard Feiertag is on the faculty of the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, Va. He can be reached at howardf@vt.edu.