Appointments, we love to have them, and we hate to have to prospect for them.
Wouldn’t it be grand to wake up every day and have four appointments scheduled for each day of the week that you didn’t have to spend the time prospecting for?
As a dealer principal, or VP of sales, would you rather have your reps spending most of their time on appointments or would you rather see them spending most of their time prospecting? That’s a no brainer, right?
Times are changing and the way we schedule appointments is changing. No longer do we just set appointments with a phone call or a stop in. Today, we have the ability to schedule appointments via LinkedIn (in mail), e-mail, Twitter, and texting. Yes, I’ve scheduled a few appointments via texting and it was awesome!
Because times are changing with the different tools that we set appointments with (e-mail, in-mail, texting), then why do most dealerships still grade their sales people on the amount of phone calls that they dial each week or each month? If I were King, I wouldn’t care how my reps got the appointments as long as they were getting them. Once they stop getting them, then that raises the flag to try and help them.
Recently, I posed a series of questions to some of my existing clients. These questions were:
- With an existing vendor and salesperson, would you rather have follow ups via phone call or e-mail?
- If your vendor offered a once a month tech update/business trends bulletin, would you opt in for that e-mail?
- Currently, how do you keep up to date with new technology and business trends?
So far, I’ve only sent these questions to three existing clients, all three provided answers. What I can tell you is that the answers were quite enlightening. I then posed this to our P4P’ers (Print4Pay Hotel Members) to crowd source these questions to their clients. As of now, there’s been no input (I get it, we’re all busy), but I feel that the more responses that we can get from existing clients can help us in our disruptive marketing efforts. You can view that thread here.
OK, I’m getting to the end of this. I would like to hear from other sales people as to how you are getting your appointments. We’ve created the survey here. Please take the time to take the survey.
We’ll check back in 30 days and report the findings, and for those of you that do take the survey, I think you’ll find the current findings pretty interesting.
Good selling!
