Smart Calling: Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection from Cold Calling, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6

More Smart Ideas for Prior to Your Call

Let’s look at a few other important points to follow prior to picking up the phone, and answer some common questions as well.

Is There a Best Time to Call?

Over the past 30-plus years, I’ve seen my share of sales studies that claim to show the average number of calls it takes to set an appointment, to close a sale, how long calls should be, and more. And most of them don’t mean squat to you or me.

Are you kidding me? Common sense tells you that the guy setting appointments for highly specialized enterprise-level engineering software that is purchased once every 5 to 10 years isn’t going to have the same results as the person prospecting to sell subscriptions to the local business journal. I want to scream in frustration when I see these types of “average number of calls to make a sale” and other general stats because there really is no average.

I’m regularly contacted by reps and managers who are seeking my estimate on a metric for some aspect of sales, usually so that they can justify something to their boss. I always tell them there is no way I could offer a number or opinion unless I knew almost everything about their business and situation. The process of sales is not an exact science; there are too many variables involved. What you do relates very little to the guy selling a totally different product or service, to a different market, in a different way. And even if your situations might be somewhat similar, you need to factor ...